http://arshh.com Mon, 30 Jun 2008 11:33:37 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en If your blood temperature drop a 10th of a degree on a cold day, and I cause the adrenal glands and the pituitary to make sure the liver releases more blood sugar as fuel for muscles, which are the main furnaces of the body. I get you to start shivering ... http://arshh.com/hypothalamus-my-job-part-3 If your blood heats up as little as a 10th of a degree on a warm day, I go to work. I send messages to the pituitary gland and through the sympathetic nervous system to dilate surface blood vessels and open tens of thousands of sweat glands. The sweat cools ... http://arshh.com/hypothalamus-my-job-part-2 I can trace my ancestry back 100 million years and I do many of the same jobs for you today that I have done since the earliest primitive creatures began to appear on earth. Take the matter of temperature control. Thanks to me, you can survive in Siberia when the ... http://arshh.com/hypothalamus-my-job-part-1 I am quite unimpressive in appearance. I lie near the underside of the brain, just about in the centre of your head. I am pink and grey in colour and approximately the size of a small prune - a mere 1/300 of the mass of the brain. Yet I have ... http://arshh.com/hypothalamus-my-appearance You never heard of me but I am the single most important group of cells in your body - on duty 24 hours a day even though most of the time you are not aware of what I am doing. My chief responsibility is maintaining equilibrium inside you. I inform ... http://arshh.com/hypothalamus-who-am-i Our great enemies are the viruses. These pesky little parasites have no mitochondria - they are unable to produce their own power for living. From time to time, our membrane guardians fall down on the job and a virus penetrates a cell. With power now available, these terrors start reproducing. ... http://arshh.com/our-enemies Hormones are also part of the communications system, acting as chemical messengers. For example : your blood sugar starts rising. Your pancreas steps up production of insulin, the hormone that says, "Speed up burning of sugar". The bloodstream carries this work order around and the cells respond. Or, you may ... http://arshh.com/role-of-hormones My membrane has a sophisticated recognition system. Each of us carries an identification tag, recognized by other cell membranes. Any foreigner or intruder is simply chased away from our individual colonies. Imagine what would happen if we tolerated strangers. A hair cell might wander into my area and hair would ... http://arshh.com/cell-role-of-my-membrane Just as remarkable as our internal structure is our external wall. My membrane is a bare .0000001 millimetre thick. Until very recently, scientists thought of this gossamer covering as little more than a kind of tight cellophane bag. Thanks to the electron microscope, they now realize that it is one ... http://arshh.com/our-internal-structure We cells manufacture upward of 600 enzymes - most remarkable - substances. On order from RNA, these master chemists instantly and effortlessly synthesize proteins - taking protein from a piece of fish, breaking it down into its components and rearranging the amino acids to make the human protein needed for, ... http://arshh.com/role-of-enzymes