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When blood is exposed to air, it clots. Heparin allows the blood to come in direct contact with air without clotting.
When Gabriel Fahrenheit invented the first mercury thermometer, he called "zero degrees" the lowest temperature he was able to attain with a mixture of ice and salt. For the upper point of his scale, he used 96°, which he measured as normal human body temperature (we know it to be 98.6° today because of more accurate thermometers).
On average, someone in the United States has a stroke about every 40 seconds. This is about 795,000 people per year.
Addicts to opiates often avoid treatment because they are afraid of withdrawal. Though unpleasant, with proper management, withdrawal is rarely fatal and passes relatively quickly.
The human body produces and destroys 15 million blood cells every second.