When you think about lungs, you think about breathing. That’s not wrong, but that’s definitely not the whole story. Scientists discovered in March 2017 that lungs also play a huge role in — surprise! — making blood.

A Playground for Platelets

Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco made a startling discovery about lungs and published their findings in Nature: The organ plays an important role in blood production. In studies, scientists saw the lungs of mice making a whole lot of blood platelets — about 10 million per hour. Platelets are the cells that circulate within our blood and bind together to clot and stop bleeding when we have a cut.

That 10-million-per-hour number means the lungs make the majority of the platelets in circulation in mice. This shatters our decades-long belief that bone marrow makes all of our blood components. “What we’ve observed here in mice strongly suggests the lung may play a key role in blood formation in humans as well,” says one of the researchers, Mark R. Looney.

How Did We Miss This ?

You would think we would’ve figured this out by now, right? Well, this discovery was made possible by a new type of technology based on “two-photon intravital imaging.” (That same tech was also recently used to discover an unidentified function of the cerebellum.) Plus, there are still plenty of scientific anomalies that occur in our bodies — specifically in the brain. Next up, scientists will begin looking at how the lungs and bone marrow work together as a blood factory. All of this new information could be hugely beneficial for the way we treat blood diseases.

We’ve all lived through a rough winter or two (or 30, if you’re this Chicagoan). But the residents of Oymyakon probably think we’re all wimps. That’s because their average winter temperature is less than 50 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (46 degrees below zero Celsius). Ok, we’ll stop complaining.

The Coldest Cold

Oymyakon is located deep in the heart of Siberia, and it’s not a place you visit on a whim. We’ve already mentioned the temperature in the winter, but there’s a difference between seeing the numbers and learning the effects. So here are some quick facts:

Your eyelashes freeze over. Your saliva turns into icicles in your mouth. You have to run your car 24 hours a day or the battery will die. It’s pretty much impossible to dig into the ground at all, so you don’t have plumbing either. If you ever do have to dig a hole in the ground, say, to perform a funeral, you have to first light a giant bonfire to soften the first few inches of soil, dig it away, then light another one, and so on. It’s not for the faint of heart.

And Oymyakonians are anything but faint of heart. That’s right, people actually live here all year-round. The city has a population of about 500, and they’ve adapted to their surroundings in some pretty unusual ways. For one thing, there’s the diet. There’s no such thing as fresh veggies in Oymyakon because you sure can’t grow anything. Almost every meal consists only of meat, and a lot of times, that meat is uncooked and frozen. Frozen cubes of horse or reindeer blood are considered a delicacy, as is stroganina, a type of frozen fish cut into long, thin slices. But that’s just for a special treat — everyday dinners consist of meat stew, emphasis on the meat.

Dark Days, Dark Past

As if the temperature wasn’t enough, the seasonal sunlight is also extreme. The city gets only about three hours of sunlight per day during the winter, and 21 in the summer. Honestly, we’re not sure which one is worse. Its residents are doing okay, but you’d be forgiven for thinking that it sounds like a pretty miserable place to live — you certainly wouldn’t be the first to think so. Although Oymyakon was originally a waystation for traveling reindeer herders, the region grew in notoriety in the mid-20th century when it became known as “Stalin’s Death Ring.”

If you’re going to be a totalitarian dictator, it’s handy to have a massive region of your country that can kill you in under a minute. Under Stalin’s regime, political dissidents were exiled to the Death Ring, which also includes fellow coldest-place contender Verkhoyansk. It must have been pretty terrible. After all, back then, they didn’t even have Instagram.

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You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

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