Solved cryptogram
A blood pressure reading has two numbers because the heart pushes and then relaxes each beat.
Biology Facts, sourced to NCBI Bookshelf.
What it means
The upper figure is the pressure while the heart contracts, and the lower one is the resting pressure between beats, which never falls to zero because the arteries are elastic and keep squeezing the blood along. That elastic recoil is what turns a series of pulses into something close to steady flow by the time blood reaches the small vessels.
The claim comes from NCBI Bookshelf, and the page it comes from was read on 2026-08-27 to confirm it still says this.
This is not the kind of claim that goes out of date, which is why it was set as a puzzle rather than a fact with a shelf life.
Solve it yourself
This fact is a cryptogram here: 77 letters over 19 different ones, graded medium.
- SourceNCBI Bookshelf
- CollectionBiology Facts
- Difficultymedium
- Length77 letters, 19 of them different
Nearby in the collection
The facts either side of this one.
- PLOS Biologymedium, 75 letters
- NIAMShard, 76 letters
- MedlinePlusmedium, 69 letters
- MedlinePlusmedium, 68 letters
About as hard as this one
Scored closest to it by the model behind our guide to solving cryptograms.
- NIGMSmedium, 76 letters
- Royal Society of Chemistrymedium, 78 letters
- National Human Genome Research Institutemedium, 74 letters
- NIDCDmedium, 68 letters