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.
As if we hadn’t already guessed that soft drinks are lousy for your organs, a new study links soda drinking to pancreatic cancer, pretty much one of the worst cancers you can get. According to the University of Minnesota study, it’s all about the sugar. Researchers followed 60,524 folks in Singapore over 14 years, and found that those who drank more than two sodas a day increased their risk for pancreatic cancer by 87%. Scientists not involved with the study warn that cigarette smoking may also have something to do with it (Singaporeans are big puffers). Considering what diet soda does to your kidneys, it’s safe to say that sticking to less than two soft drinks a day is better for ya. {via US News and World Report}
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}
We liked this visualization of what it’s like to be diabetic and have to monitor your glucose all the time, from Moments of Being Me on Flickr. This guy is pretty high tech, too, with the cool iPhone app that monitors blood sugar and insulin doses, glucose meter and insulin pen. And of course we hope that happy little pancreas helps through the blood sugar highs and lows.
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.
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?
We’ve got a couple of sparkly new tees coming in today, both with fabulous metallic inks, we hope you’ll like ‘em. The first, barely in time for Valentine’s Day, is a Heart of Gold tee, for ladies only. Quite possibly even more exciting is our new guts and glands shirt, which includes all the guts and glands characters — even testicles! For those of you really wanting to wear your prostate on your sleeve, this is the shirt for you. They are sorta arrayed where they are supposed to go, offering a mini-anatomy refresher when you need it.
I am powerless to resist the charms of this adorable gutsy tee by escapism on Threadless.
Love the button found on Sandra Martin’s bulletin board — this photo is part of a series of interviews with people battling pancreatic cancer on New York Times online.
That poor spleen, always venting. Fabulous comic by SophieLynette, as seen on Days of Our Liver, part of 24 hour comics day. I love the way the organs are floating around in the body — that’s bladder talking to the liver (the one with the luggage — he’s a transplant, don’t ya know). Keep clicking “next” to read the whole thing!
