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Friday 14 December 2012

Blood

HUMAN BLOOD

Aztecs believed that the sun died every night and needed human blood to give it strength to rise the next day.

The term blueblood used in Britain since the 19th century to refer to the aristocracy, originated in Spain. Families from Castile were keen to stress the difference between their skin and the marauding Moors from Africa. To prove their breeding, they claimed their veins were a purer blue and their ‘blue blood’ was visible because of their fair skin.

At the turn of the 20th century, a research assistant at the Vienna Pathological Institute, Karl Landsteiner, proved that there are different types of blood that people can have. He identified four major human blood groups, which he labelled A, O, B, and AB. Landsteiner showed that when transfusing blood from one person to another the blood serum from one patient would often cause the red blood cells of the other to clot. This explains the hazardous nature of blood transfusions. Landsteiner's classification system enabled the safe transfusions of blood making it possible to ensure the transferred blood is compatible with a patient's own.

There are four main Blood types: A, B, AB and O and each Blood type is either Rh positive or negative. The most common blood type in the world is O+. The rarest type is AB-.

Golden Blood or Rh-null, is the rarest of the other blood types, with only about 43 people having been reported to have it worldwide. Its properties make it attractive in numerous medical applications and make it very valuable.

There are 62,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body. Laid end to end, they'd stretch around the world more than twice.

In 24 hours, the blood in the body travels a total of 12,000 miles - that's four times the width of North America.

Each square inch of human skin consists of twenty feet of blood vessels.

Members of the Nazi SS had their blood type tattooed on their armpits.

Japanese games tell you characters' blood types because they believe that the blood group determines someone's personality.

Your body is creating and killing 15 million red blood cells per second.

The average life span of a single red blood cell is 120 days.

Blood cells Pixibay

The average human adult has between 4.7 and 5.0 litres of blood in their body. Our blood accounts for about seven per cent of our total body weight.

An individual blood cell takes about 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body.

Every day, our kidneys filter about 50 gallons of blood through their 140 miles of tubes.

Our total blood supply is filtered by the kidneys about once every five minutes.

Blood enters the heart through its atriums and leaves through the ventricles. “Atrium” is Latin for “entrance hall” and “ventriculus” means “little belly”.

Every additional kilo you weigh requires your body to produce 650 km of blood vessels.

The amount of blood in a pregnant woman’s system will have increased by 50 per cent by the twentieth week of pregnancy.

ANIMAL BLOOD

Blood from horseshoe crabs is harvested every year and is the single best way to test for bacterial toxins in the manufacture of any medical substance or device put into the human body. This has led to a massive effort by scientists to try to conserve this invaluable resource.


Chicken liver can be used to change A type blood to O type blood.

The blood of mammals is red and the blood of insects is usually colorless or pale yellow. The reason for this difference lies in the composition of the blood and the respiratory system of insects. Unlike mammals, insects do not have red blood cells or a specialized oxygen-carrying molecule like hemoglobin. Instead, their hemolymph primarily consists of a fluid called plasma, which transports nutrients, hormones, and waste products.

Spiders and snails have blue blood owing to the presence of haemocyanin which contains copper.

A lobster's blood is colorless but when exposed to oxygen it turns blue.

The skink species known as Prasinohaema are commonly referred to as the green-blooded skinks. These skinks have bright green blood due to high levels of a green bile pigment called biliverdin.

While there are animals on Earth with blue, green, and colorless blood, there are no creatures with black blood.
FUN BLOOD FACTS

Blood is six times thicker than water.


In seventy-five years the human heart pumps 3,122,000,000 gallons of blood, enough to fill in oil tanker over 46 times.

There is no red light 30 feet underwater, so blood appears green.

The blue blood in your veins is an illusion- it is actually red. Your veins just look blue because of the way they reflect light.

Werner Forssmann, a physician, risked his own life to show that cardiac catheterization could work. He cut a hole in his arm and inserted a catheter into a vein, not knowing if the catheter might pierce a vein. He was later awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

Due to their similar protein composition, blood can be used as an egg substitute in baking and making ice cream.

Chocolate syrup was used for blood in the famous 45-second shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo movie.

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