the.com/glomerulus
a microscopic blood-filtering knot doing more plumbing per second than your entire apartment.
means A glomerulus is a tiny tangled ball of capillaries in the kidney where blood is first filtered to begin making urine.
from From Latin 'glomus,' meaning a ball or clew of yarn — the same root that gives us 'conglomerate,' things wadded together. 'Glomerulus' is its diminutive, a 'little ball,' a fitting name for these microscopic wound-up knots of vessels, christened by anatomists who saw in them exactly what the word says: a tiny skein of thread.
- daily output
- filters about 180 liters of blood plasma daily
- tiny multitude
- each kidney packs roughly a million of them
- pressure trick
- high pressure forces fluid through like a sieve
- name origin
- latin for little ball of yarn
- second job
- the nose has its own scent-sorting glomeruli
for instance
bowman's capsule filtration — filters ~180 liters of blood daily in human kidneys to produce urine
glomerulonephritis — inflammation of glomeruli in kidney disease, affecting millions worldwide