What is a cell? Good question! Mon Dieu, a cell is a complex thing, unfathomable to the human mind, in fact unfathomable to the ten trillion cells that makes up the human body. What makes them all the more impossible to grasp is that they are not all the same, no far from it, there are hundreds of different types of cell. They vary rather massively in size, massively that is in their world, none of them measure any bigger than two hundredths of a millimetre, but yet at the moment of conception the egg is a startlingly 85,000 bigger than the brave sperm, how small does that make the little critter? As small as they may be, cells are still more than capable of holding millions and millions of molecules. Millions! Interestingly, they derived the name cell from Robert Hooke who so called them as they reminded him of monks' cells. All living matter is cellular, yet the cell is nothing like us, that is it does not adhere to our rules. For one thing there is no gravity in the cell and it hums with the constant activity of electrical activity. All cells have an outer membrane, in which dwells a nucleus containing all the bodies genetic information and a hectic space between the two which is known as a cytoplasm. Inside the cell, bedlam reigns, DNA suffers untold damage within the cell, being attacked over ten thousand times a day while proteins clash with one another billions of times per second!! And get this - these proteins are busy fixing up damaged molecules, marking those that are irreparable, which are then brought to a sector called a proteasome where they are stripped down and their components are used to build new proteins! Like a minute factory and there are trillions of them frantically beavering away inside of you as you read this! Pretty freaky eh? It becomes even more staggering when you consider that there are a minimum of one hundred million protein molecules in each cell! To keep all these cells oxygenated, your heart must pump almost three hundred and fifty litres of blood an hour!! The oxygen is required by the cell's mitochrondia which are like power stations for the cell, each having around one thousand. All food and oxygen that we consume are processed and then passed onto the mitochrondia where they are converted into a molecule named adenosine triphospahte or ATP. ATP molecules are little bundles of energy which move through the cell providing energy for all the cell's activities. Once again the numbers are truly mind-boggling, with a billion working feverishly within each of your ten trillion cells! And they move! A billion passing through each cell every two minutes. What workers they are! And then when they decide to retire, they do so without fanfare, they just simply deconstruct themselves and die, billions of them shuffle away quietly every day!
Russell Shortt is a travel consultant with Exploring Ireland, the leading specialists in customised, private escorted tours, escorted coach tours and independent self drive tours of Ireland. Article source Russell Shortt, http://www.exploringireland.net/self-drive-page.html http://www.visitscotlandtours.com/tours/self-drive-tours.html
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