Functions
Blood performs many important functions within the body including:
- Supply of oxygen to tissues (bound to hemoglobin, which is carried in red cells)
- Supply of nutrients such as glucose, amino acids, and fatty acids (dissolved in the blood or bound to plasma proteins (e.g., blood lipids))
- Removal of waste such as carbon dioxide, urea, and lactic acid
- Immunological functions, including circulation of white blood cells, and detection of foreign material by antibodies
- Coagulation, which is one part of the body's self-repair mechanism (blood clotting after an open wound in order to stop bleeding)
- Messenger functions, including the transport of hormones and the signaling of tissue damage
- Regulation of body pH
- Regulation of core body temperature
- Hydraulic functions
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Famous quotes containing the word functions:
“Let us stop being afraid. Of our own thoughts, our own minds. Of madness, our own or others’. Stop being afraid of the mind itself, its astonishing functions and fandangos, its complications and simplifications, the wonderful operation of its machinery—more wonderful because it is not machinery at all or predictable.”
—Kate Millett (b. 1934)
“Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and, by the very knowledge of functions and processes, to bereave the student of the manly contemplation of the whole.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)