Many of you have written in to suggest making some sort of graphic showing where all the guts and glands live in the body, and I’ve finally gotten around to creating one. It’s even got rollovers so you can learn more about, say, your pineal gland, should you have time to squander. For the purposes of simplicity, we’ve made the body a hermaphrodite — she’s got a uterus to go with her prostate and testes! We’ll call her/him Hermie.
Gorgeous veggie body poster by the International Vegetarian Union. Love them cauliflower lungs! Reminds us of illustrator Kyle Bean’s work, in the same vein of bodily vegetables, or Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Created by JWT Kuwait. {via Boing Boing. Thanks, Russ!}
Your mom always tiold you not to swallow gum, and here’s another good reason to leave the sticky stuff out of your stomach — you can make fantastic art with it. Kevin Van Aelst has fashioned his chewed-up Bubble Yum and Trident into a wonderfully tiny digestive system, stuck it under a table, and took a photo. Take the time to check out his chromosomes fashioned from Gummi Worms and heart made from a pile of laundry. {via Boing Boing}
Yes, you can have your liver and eat it too with these anatomically correct chocolates from Visual Anatomy. They don’t stop at organs, though, the collection includes knee joints and even a chocolate pelvis. Generously packaged with four chocolate kidneys to a box! As they say on the website, Bone Appetite!
German artist and self-proclaimed nut Christoph Brach serves up his commentary on human anatomy with help from a little bit of rubber and a whole lot of oxygen. What an impressive set of guts!
Considering the fact that I look at internal organs all day long for a living, my score on the name all the internal organs in four minutes quiz is shamefully bad. I only got 15 out of 24 total organs, isn’t that pathetic? Granted, it was mainly because I didn’t really read the directions and forgot to pluralize things like parathyroids and ovaries (and jeez, who knew the esophagus would be included, but skin wouldn’t? And they rejected spelling gallbladder as one word. I say, look it up in the dictionary, bitches). Anyway, learn from my mistakes, pluralize, and take the quiz. The clock does start ticking right away, so be ready to go when you click on the link and don’t dawdle like I did.
Why, oh why, don’t they make these for adults? I think that fabulous brain headband is set to sweep those lame metallic headbands worn by the likes of Paris Hilton aside in the world of fashion trendmaking. You heard it here first. Thanks to Julie W. for tipping me off to this fabulous gutsy apron by Lakeshore.
Among the many good things at Wondercon 2009 in San Francisco last weekend was a seeing Guts, a large, glossy book of icky photos from the Tim Palen pop-horror genre (the Saw series, etc.) published by Baby Tattoo Books. Obviously, this one ain’t for kiddies, filled as it is with slasher-horror gut-spilling gore. Props to the packaging designer, who packed it up in a foam meat tray. We had a great time at the I Heart Guts booth, meeting nice people and sending some of them away with guts. Someone told me Carrie Fisher took a peek at our booth, but sadly I was helping another customer so I missed her. Oh well. Toycyte did a nice write-up on the guts, so thanks, Jeremy, it was nice to meet you!
Not many folks know what the parathyroid is or does until — as with pretty much everything within our bodies — something goes wrong. Parathyroid hormones regulate calcium in the blood, which affects bone growth among other things. Folks with elevated amounts of the hormone have trouble with, according to Popular Science magazine, “stones (kidney stones), bones (fractures), moans (psychiatric problems) and groans (constipation).” A surprising new way to deal with parathyroid imbalance involves autotransplantation — instead of getting someone else’s parathyroid (rejection is always a problem), they take yours out, then put it back. Sometimes they even put it back in your arm rather than in your neck, where it belongs. Isn’t that amazing?
Our guts need to make friends with