The average red blood cell, known as an erythrocyte, rushes round your circulation for an average of 120 days. Over this time it gradually gets damaged, some of this is due to external shear forces from squeezing through capillaries or being blasted along arteries. Most of it is actually internal; carrying oxygen is a hazardous […]
As is well known to all fans of salad dressing, oil and water don’t like to mix. This creates a problem for the body when it needs to transport fats and oils (collectively called lipids) and the many hormones and vitamins that are fat-soluble. They need to be wrapped up with specialised proteins to create […]
Definitions of platelets often describe them as ‘fragments’ of cells and in figures they are often small blobs with little indication of what they actually do. At the turn of the 20th century they were even dismissed as ‘the dust of the blood’. This implication that platelets are passive bits of cytoplasm floating through the […]
