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Sunday 16 February 2014

Cell

HISTORY

The cell was discovered by Robert Hooke in 1665, who named the biological unit for its resemblance to cells inhabited by Christian monks in a monastery.

Henrietta Lacks was an African-American woman from Baltimore, who died on October 4, 1951 from a rare form of cancer. Her tumors and cells continued to live and grow after she passed away and the subsequent research resulted in the remarkably durable HeLa cell line, named for her first and last initials.

Henrietta Lscks Wikipedia Commons

HUMAN CELLS

There are more than 10 trillion living cells in the human body. Our cells are the basic building blocks of our bodies. They are responsible for carrying out all of the essential functions that keep us alive, such as respiration, digestion, and reproduction.

There are over 200 different types of cells in the human body, each with its own unique structure and function. 

The largest cell in the human body is the female ovum, or egg cell, which measures up to 160 microns (0.16 mm).

The smallest cell in the human body is the male sperm at 3 microns (0.003mm) (see below). It takes about 175,000 sperm cells to weigh as much as a single egg cell.


90% of the cells that make us up of aren't human but mostly fungi and bacteria.

Bacterial cells are so prolific in our bodies that they outnumber our human cells 10 to 1.

Every human spent about half an hour as a single cell.

The only cells that survive from the time you are born until death are in your eyes.

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

It takes about 20 seconds for a red blood cell to circle the whole body.

25,000,000 of your cells died while you were reading this sentence.

We die because our cells die. Though they replace themselves over and over again for some 70-odd years, they can't do so forever.

A single human brain cell can generate more electrical impulses in one day than all the phones in the world. This is because the brain is constantly sending and receiving signals, even when we are asleep.

CELLS IN OTHER ORGANISMS

A shrimp has more than a hundred pair of chromosomes in each cell nucleus.

The biggest single cell in the world is the seagrass Caulerpa taxifolia, which can grow to be up to 6 feet long. Other large single cells include the alga Valonia ventricosa, which can reach 4 inches in diameter, and the bacterium Thiomargarita namibiensis, which can reach 0.75 millimeters in diameter.

A bean has more DNA per cell than a human cell.

There's enough water pressure in one onion cell to cause a steam engine to explode.

Source Greatfacts.com

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