Monday, October 05, 2026
Thursday, September 10, 2026
Tuesday, September 01, 2026
The Brain Song
A new song from Weird Al Yankovic! It's not a parody, but it might help you in your Anatomy and Physiology class. It's not exactly a new song, but a piece of lost media from 2009. Yankovic made an exhibit about the brain as an educational exhibit for the Orange County Fair in 2009, and this song is part of it. You can see the creepy introduction at YouTube, and the whole eleven-minute presentation in this video. Use your brain!
Sunday, May 24, 2026
Why Are Babies So Useless?
Almost all animal babies emerge from their mother or from an egg able to do the things that its species is expected to do. Mammals feed their young for a time, but even kittens and puppies can walk around on their own at about two weeks of age. Then there are humans, who are spectacularly helpless for a very long time. They can't walk, talk, eat, or control elimination for a couple of years, and even then they need guidance and protection. Why do we have such an extended infancy?
In one version of the story, Eve ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and was cursed to bear big-brained babies in pain. That's not far from the science version, because humans have enormous brains for their body size, and we had to offload a lot of that brain growing to after birth. Not all of it, of course, as anyone who has given birth will yell you. Human mothers wouldn't survive much more baby brain size. That equates to humans being born relatively premature compared to other animals. Getting a child to maturity is quite a chore, but it also has its upsides, as this video from The Thought Vortex explains.
Wednesday, April 15, 2026
This Is What Your Tongue Looks Like When You Talk
Speaking seems like a pretty straightforward and natural activity to those of us who do it, but have you ever wondered what it looks like from the inside? It can be unsettling to watch. That tongue that we use and misuse every minute of the day looks totally foreign when we see the muscle at work in an MRI video.
The European Patent Office nominated physicist and MRI pioneer Jens Frahm at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry as one of the three finalists for its European Inventor award, in the field of research. In the mid-1980’s, over a decade after the MRI was developed, Frahm invented FLASH MRI, a faster way to view what’s going on inside our bodies. In 2010, he and his team developed FLASH2, speeding the imaging up to real-time.
To celebrate their recognition, the institute released a handful of real-time MRI films of people speaking and singing. You can see the lips, tongue, soft palate, and larynx moving together to form words, all in German. It’s weird!(via Digg)
Monday, March 16, 2026
Sunday, March 15, 2026
How Your Hair Grows
The hair follicles on your body come in different types with different programming, and those on your head are the most productive, up to a point. Believe it or not, these follicles can be transplanted to a different body part! But everyone's follicles are different. Some women never cut their hair, and they still have different lengths because their hair follicles are programmed differently. This TED-Ed lesson explains what's going on inside those follicles to give you the hair you have. (via Damn Interesting)
Thursday, March 12, 2026
How a Broken Bone Heals
How much do you know about the skeleton inside of you? We know bones are hard, but they take a lot of punishment, too, so about half of us break a bone at some time in our lives. But they can heal, and how they do it is much more complicated than just getting a cast and not putting weight on it for however long the doctor tells you . There's a lot going on inside that we can't see.
I have a friend currently recovering from a knee replacement, and this video helped me understand why she has so much inflammation and yet no infection. It's part of the healing process. I've also seen what a crushed hip can do to an older person, and that's why I take my calcium supplements and walk around the neighborhood every day. Take it from Dr. Skeleton.
Tuesday, September 16, 2025
Sunday, September 14, 2025
Monday, June 30, 2025
Monday, April 14, 2025
World Record Big Mouth
You can't tell that Marie Pearl Zellmer Robinson has a big mouth just by looking at her- until she opens it was wide as she can. The woman from Ketchikan, Alaska, has been named the world record holder for the biggest mouth gape (female), meaning the distance from top to bottom when her mouth is all the way open. The official measurement is 2.98 inches (7.59 centimeters). That doesn't tell you much, but look at all the things she can put in her mouth! A whole orange. A ten-patty burger. A metal can. (via Boing Boing)
Monday, April 07, 2025
Friday, March 21, 2025
Your Brain Creates Your Reality
Perception is the way we experience the world. It's made up of the signals that come into our bodies through our eyes, ears, and other sensory organs, but is also made up of our brain's interpretation of those signals. We know that the way light comes into our eyes should be upside-down, but our brains unscramble those signals to match the world around us. That's just the beginning of the ways our brains change the incoming signals to be useful instead of confusing and overwhelming. The brain uses present signals to predict the future, so quickly that we never notice what we are doing. Kurzgesagt explains some of the chores your brain does at the microsecond scale, which is a lot, and it makes us wonder how we ever have time and brain power left over to just think (as we think of it) and make conscious decisions. This video is about 9:40- the rest is promotional. (via Geeks Are Sexy)
Monday, February 17, 2025
Patrick Stewart’s Ridiculous Circumcision Story
Sir Patrick Stewart and Hugh Jackman were on The Graham Norton Show when the subject of Stewart's anatomy came up. The man had gone 70 years thinking he was circumcised. Which just goes to show that not every man automatically takes the opportunity to compare his with other men's. (via Uproxx)
Wednesday, December 18, 2024
Tuesday, December 10, 2024
Saturday, October 12, 2024
Wednesday, September 18, 2024
Beneficial Viruses
We were once afraid of bacteria, but then we found out that there are beneficial bacteria that battle harmful bacteria. In fact, we carry around plenty of bacteria that help our digestive systems work, which we call the human biome. And when we developed antibiotics, we no longer had to be so afraid of even harmful bacteria. But viruses are different, and we have no medicines to kill them, just vaccines to prevent their diseases. A lot of science later, we know there are tons of viruses that won't harm us, because they specialize in harming bacteria. Now we know that human bodies are teeming with viruses all the time, which is called the human virome. Like the biome, these colonies of viruses are crucial to our survival. Kurzgesagt explains how your virome works.








