this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
385 points (96.8% liked)
Asklemmy
43950 readers
863 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Your bones are made of calcium, which is also a metal. You've got a metal frame inside your body.
Hate to burst your bubble, but the calcium inside your bones is not in a metallic form but as calciumphosphate. So no metal frame but one made of a salt I guess.
The thing that started this conversation is hemoglobin, which is also not metallic but a protein. I don't think anyone was confused and thought that there's actually shiney silvery elemental metallic calcium in our body.
Your bones are not dead rocks! They are living organs that happen to have a lot of sturdy calcium structures in them. They do a lot of other stuff besides hold your body up. They store minerals for all the other stuff your body needs minerals for; that's why osteoporosis is even a possible failure mode. Your bone marrow produces white blood cells for your immune system, too.
The fact that calcium is a metal is the reason why bones can be detected in X-rays.
(I'm pulling this out of my ass and I'm too lazy to look it up to see if it's actually true.)
It's true!
Source: my ass too!