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.  

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)

Anatomical Distortion

(via reddit)

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) 

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. 

At the Dentist's Office

(via reddit)

Free Eye

(via Bad Newspaper)

Knee Brace

Gravity and time- the enemies of the knee. This Strange Planet comic is from Nathan Pyle. 

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)

Was This Necessary?

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(via Bad Newspaper)

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) 

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)

Big Feet

The comedian is Matthew Broussard. (Thanks, Marco McClean!)

Boobs

(via Bits and Pieces)

Wow

(via Bad Newspaper)

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.  

Suspicious Bulge

What could it be? (via Bad Newspaper)

Coffin Birth

Warning: this video may not be appropriate for sensitive souls, and is not recommended for pregnant women. It's about postmortem fetal expulsion or extrusion (PFE), or coffin birth. That's when a pregnant woman dies, and her body still manages to expel the fetus. In the modern era, if a woman dies during labor or in the final stages of pregnancy, the baby will be delivered by cesarian section and may survive. If the fetus dies along with the mother, is inevitable when the pregnancy is not far enough along, modern embalming procedures will prevent coffin birth. The only time it happens these days is when a deceased pregnant woman's body is not discovered for some time. Before modern medicine, it was a rare but gruesome event we only know about because of some documented accounts from morticians and some ancient exhumed graves with evidence. So all in all, it's not something you should be worried about happening, but a grim reality from the past.

Historic Body Parts You Can Oddly Visit Today

You may leave instructions for the disposal of your remains after death, but you really can't control what happens after you die. That goes double if you're famous. It's one thing to bequeath your body to science for the good of mankind and quite another to end up with your body, or a part of it, on display at some museum for people to visit. Weird History goes through a list of 21 people (if I counted right) who ended up in that predicament. I had an immediate reaction to the story about Rasputin (spoiler ahead) because "the organ actually belonged to a cow" doesn't make any sense, because cows are female. Try a bull.

Animals and Their Pupil Shapes

The pupils in our eyes adjust in size to let in more or less light to maximize our vision. That's a pretty handy ability to have, and it's automatic. Most animals species have eyes with adjustable pupils, too, but they vary an awful lot. House cats have vertical slits for pupils, while big cats like lions have round pupils. It's not just a matter of size, though, since bobcats have vertical slits and a Pallas's cat has round pupils, and they are about the same size. The animal kingdom has developed a bunch of different pupil shapes, from the goat's horizontal boxes to the cuttlefish's "W" shaped pupils. All these shapes are there for a reason that has to do with the lifestyle of the animal. Except praying mantises. Their pupils are there just to freak us out. (via the Awesomer)