Every Cell is a Universe

They are all around you, everywhere you look, touch, sit or stand. There are trillions of them inside you and they are the building blocks of your physical body. We are talking about your body's cells, of course! But what exactly is a cell, you may wonder?

Though each cell is extremely complex, not all are the same. In fact, there are hundreds of different types of cells just in your body! They vary widely in size, with not one measuring bigger than two hundredths of a millimeter. It is may be difficult to believe, but at the moment of conception, an egg is 85,000 times bigger than the sperm cell! How small does that make the little guy?

As small as cells may be, cells are still able to hold millions upon millions of molecules! The term "cell" was actually coined by Robert Hooke, who named them so because they reminded him of monks' cells.

All of living matter is made up of cells, yet cells do not function like us, or follow the same rules. There is no gravity that the cell must adhere to, and they hum with constant electrical energy.

All cells have an outer membrane, a nucleus within that holds all of its genetic information, and a hectic space in between known as the cytoplasm. Inside the cell, DNA suffers untold damage from being attacked over ten thousand times a day, while proteins fight one another billions of times per second! These same proteins are busy fixing damaged molecules and marking those that are irreparable, and sending them to the figurative cell scrap yard. These damaged cells are brought to the proteasome where they are stripped down and their components are used to build new proteins! This whirl of activity is all taking place in your body right now, at this very second.

It becomes staggering when you think about the minimum of one hundred million protein molecules in each cell. In order to keep all of these cells oxygenated, your heart must pump 350 liters (92 gallons) of blood per hour! Oxygen is required by the cell's mitochondria, which act as power stations for the cells. Each cell has around one thousand mitochondria.

All of the food and oxygen that we consume must be processed and then passed onto the mitochondria where they are converted into the molecule name adenosine triphosphate or ATP. ATP molecules move through the cell providing energy for all the cell's activities. The number of ATP molecules is even greater than the amount of cells, as there are a billion ATP molecules working within each of your ten trillion cells! And ATP is constantly moving too: a billion ATP pass through each cell every two minutes.

Cells are lifelong workers who, when they decide to retire, do so without a fuss and simply deconstruct and die, and billions of them do so every day! That's perfectly okay, as science has revealed that the human body regenerates billions of cells every day as well.

While we can barely fathom the enormous numbers and complex functions of cells, and even more of such at the atomic and subatomic levels, the information we do have about cells can empower us to promote the optimal health of our cells, and in turn our overall health, today.

Live a healthy lifestyle, which means eating fresh whole foods, drinking pure water, removing toxins and managing stress, enjoying movement and all life has to offer, and thinking positive, creative thoughts, and your cells will thank you!

Source:

http://www.articlesbase.com/science-articles/your-body-is-made-up-of-ten-trillion-of-them-so-what-exactly-is-a-cell-951428.html