Human Body..?

I have a question, that I have always been dying to know... Well if I were to be cut open in a room with no oxygen would my blood be red or blue? I know it might not be the best question, but I am curious to see what you will have to say! Thanks

Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.

I don't really know the answer but I'll give it a shot. I guess red.I think that blood turns blue after you body uses up or takes the oxygen out of it. I think red is the default state. You'd have to remove the oxygen from all your blood to have it all be blue. I think you'd still have red blood in you in the O2-less room and simply being in an O2-free environment would not turn the blood blue.

Red. You being in an oxygen free room means no oxygen external to your body. But your blood would be oxygenated by the breathing apparatus you would be wearing (otherwise you would die).Now the doctors (wearing breathing appartus too) cut you open. Your oxygenated blood (red) would spill out. It wouldn't stay red forever but red it would spill outIncidently, pre-packed fresh beef comes in containers which are flushed with oxygen to displace air (containing mostly nitrogen). This keeps the red meat red (and fresh) looking. When the pack gets a little older and the oxygen is used up (in maintaining the red colour) then the meat goes brown

Red initially, then slowly turns blue. The color of your blood is deternimed by the oxidative state (the number of outer shell electrons) of the iron ion in each of the hemoglobin molecules in each of the red blood cells in your blood. Note that iron rust is red because its iron ions are in the same oxidative state as your hemoglobin. Before you are cut open, your hemoglobin's iron is fully oxidized (at least that of the red blood cells in your arteries, not in your veins) and red. This does not change at the moment you are cut open, but the blood's iron is now not in equilibrium with its environment and will very slowly lose oxigen to that environment, turning blue.I am curious as to what your ad in a newspapers singles column might look like.

Is there such a thing as "blue blood" at all?Wikipedia says:

quote:

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Venous blood is often depicted as blue in color in medical diagrams, and veins sometimes look blue when seen through the skin. However, venous blood is actually a dark red color, while arterial blood is bright red. The appearance of veins as dark blue is a wavelength phenomenon of light, having to do with the reflection of blue light away from the outside of venous tissue if the vein is @ 0.02in deep or more. This is due to the difference in color between deoxyhemoglobin and oxyhemoglobin; the red color ultimately originates from the iron atom in heme. If blood is drawn for a medical test, the dark red color can be seen; however, if it is exposed to oxygen in the air, it will turn bright red like arterial blood.

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I think the only animal that has truly "blue" blood is the horseshoe crab. Then again I've seen some squashed blue crabs on the side of the road that look like they have a bluish-green color of blood.

I stand corrected. The blueness of the veins is due, as I understand it, to the color of the vein wall. This site:
Green Blod | Mark O'Shea Official Website
describes some Papua, New Guinea skinks with green blood. I have also read about some insects that have blood based on copper ions rather than iron and have green (patina colored) blood but am too lazy right now to get a reference.

Anybody know the chemistry of the horseshoe crabs blood?

Have the posts to this point satisfied your curiousity? Is your avatar an accurate depiction of you? If so, does your hair change to a blue color in an oxygen free environment? Please get back to us on that one.

As others have already mentioned, your blood would be some shade of red. The color of your blood does indeed vary with O2 levels, but the color is will always some shade of red (scarlet or bright red = highy oxygenated while deep, dark red = poorly oxygenated). Blue is not really an option. Keep in mind that a typical red blood cell can carry close to a billion molecules of oxygen (4 per heme group and each RBC can have 250 million or so hemoglobin molecules), so it would take a while to completely deplete all of your RBCs of their oxygen. But even so, your blood will not turn blue. The blue color you see when you look at the vessles in your arm (for example) is a result of blue light being reflected while the red wavelengh penetrate more deeply and is absorbed (i.e. not reflected back to your eye).

Well, if I remember my basic zoology correctly, the blue color of the thier blood is a result of having a hemocyanin (copper)oxygen carrier as opposed to our hemoglobin (iron) oxygen carrier. But that was quite a while ago, so I could be mistaken.

Found a decent article on horshoecrabs and the coloration of blood."Blood gets its color from oxygen-carrying respiratory pigments, and there are a number of different types. The iron-containing pigments found in blood include haemoglobins (red), myoglobins (red), chlorocruorins (green) and haemerythrins (violet). Haemocyanin (blue), which is found in horseshoe crabs and other organisms, contains copper not iron."

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Yeah it's me, why are you making fun of my hair? There's no point... but if it intrests you I am satisfied with the posts ^_^... and my hair has been every color in the rainbow including blue!o_O

ew...indigo?

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