Finally -- Done with the Pig Dissection!

This week, we finished our pig dissections.  Some of the students were interested doing the final step of sewing up the Y incisions we made, like what is done for autopsies.  The organs that have been removed and examined are placed back in the body, arranged to restore the natural shape of the body.  We did this with our pigs and used suture to sew them up.

Before that, we had our quizshow about the kidneys, and the students who didn't want to sew up the pigs watched a series of educational videos related to anatomy (from a YouTube playlist I made).  At the end of the playlist were some Schoolhouse Rock videos, which I remember from my childhood.  I decided to play two additional YouTube videos that illustrate the organism classification system.

This one is from 1989, and is the first video putting the system to a rap beat.  Just to remind you, here are the groupings, from most general to most specific:
Kingdom
Phylum
Class
Order
Family
Genus
Species

Most organisms that you can find on Wikipedia have their groupings listed with their entry.
Here's the second classification rap video we watched:

We have common names for organisms, such as fruit fly, and we have their scientific name, which is their Genus (capitalized) and species (lowercase).  Fruit flies' scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster.

Next week, we will be making slides of our tissues and staining them to look at under the microscope.

LHK

Why is the liver so important it filters stuff out of your blood like alcohol

how does the heart pump blood   electrical impulses sent down by "nodes" thru conducting pathways towards the atria and ventricles.

what does the kidney do it produces and generates urine

Quiz

1:Why is the liver so important?
2:How does the hart pump blood?
3:Why does the kidney do?

Kidneys -- They're not just cool beans!

This week's focus was the kidney, an important organ whose main role is to filter the blood to generate urine.  We can live without one kidney, but not without two.  They are located in the abdominal cavity near the organs of the digestive tract, but they are part of the urinary system, not the digestive system.

This is the machine for dialysis

The process of breaking down food to get the nutrients leads to waste products, including urea.  If these waste products are not cleaned out of the blood, we will die.  When someone's kidneys are not functioning well, he or she must go on dialysis to survive.  Dialysis involves being hooked up to a machine that takes out some of your blood, cleans and filters it, then puts back the filtered blood.  It is not as good as your kidneys, but if you go for dialysis often enough (typically at least 3 times a week for several hours), you can survive for a long time without functioning kidneys.

Kidneys make sure that sugar does not get into the urine, and a sign of kidney infection is when a test shows sugar in the urine.  However, more commonly when sugar is in the urine, there is a problem with blood sugar regulation, such as diabetes.

The structures inside kidneys that filter the blood are called nephrons, and people have about a million tiny nephrons in their bodies.  Inside the nephrons are glomeruli, little bundles that pass the blood through tiny tubes to get waste products such as urea out of it.  The urine created by adding the waste products to water then drips down into the bladder.

Blood goes to the kidneys from the renal artery, and all our blood passes through the kidneys twelve times per hour on average.  Filtered blood goes back to the heart through the renal vein.  Waste products build up in the blood very quickly when the kidneys are not working, and this can be detected through tests.

More Important Than I Thought..........

• The Average adult liver weighs about 3 pounds.
• Its color is reddish brown.
• It is normally protected by the rib cage.
• Secretes bile
• Is  important and super cool!

the liver

                                         the liver!

1. the liver can regenerate.
2. the liver manufactures proteins to help maintain blood purity and proper flow.
3.  the liver can filters waste products from your blood.
4. the liver can breaks down hormones, detoxifies water and removes drugs, alcohol and environmental toxins.
5. It makes and secretes bile to help your body absorb fats and fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E and K).

Pancreas

it uses hormones to regulate blood gluccos levels.
trypsin and chymotrypsin.
and last but not least, lipas digests polysaccharides lipids

Aarons Liver Post!

This organ is Awesome! because of two things 1:its stores Iron and vitamins. 2:Destroys old body cells! (this pic looks surge coated)

duno

The Pharynx technically called the nasopharynx is the large cavity behind the nose and above the larynx. It amplifies the vibrations of the vocal cords, generating high frequency sounds that create a clear ringing tone. This powerful resonator can triple or even quintuple vocal volume when properly focused.

we cant survive with out it 

large intestine

Your large intestine gets the water out of your food. Can you live without your large intestine? Yes you can. "If you have a large intestine problem that can’t be treated with medications, you might need an ileostomy." An ileostomy is a hole in your abdomen with a plastic bag attached.                                                                              

LIVER yeah!!!!!!!!!

                                 liver

the liver is part of the digestive systems it produses bile and it breaks down toxins,fat,alcohol and other things.The bile also colors your poop I dont know why but it does though. I happen to find a cool photo of bile below. (its the pink stuff)

The Small Intestine, Wow!

The Small Intestine is part of the 

gastrointestinal (wow that's a huge word!) tract. The Small Intestine is where most of digestion and absorption of the food takes place.  The primary function of the small intestine is the absorption of nutrients and minerals found in food. Click Here if anyone wants to learn more about the Small Intestine
And yes, you can live with your small intestine.

THE LIVER!

The liver is the organ that produces bile. you cant live without your liver. if half your liver is cut off it can regenerate.

The stomach

In our pigs the stomach was a empty sack. You could live without your stomach.
The stomach was easy to find in my pig.



 

Jordan's blog entry

My piece of anatomy is the gallbladder. The gallbladder holds and concentrates bile. At the right time in the digestive process, it puts the bile in to help dissolve the food.

The Digestive System -- A Little Gross

This week's topic was the digestive system and how it works.  We focused mostly on the organs we could find in the dissection: esophagus, stomach, liver, gall bladder, pancreas, small intestine, and large intestine.  

• The esophagus is the tube that runs down from the mouth to the stomach, transporting food.  It runs along the trachea, which is the windpipe that carries air down to the lungs.  The trachea is rigid, to ensure that you can always breathe, but the esophagus is soft and can flatten easily.  Muscles squeeze food downward, so that you can swallow food even if you are lying down or even upside down.  This process is called peristalsis.

• The stomach is basically a sack that contains acid, enzymes, and bacteria that all work together to digest food.  The mucus lining protects the walls of the stomach from the dangerous acids.  If the acid in the stomach burns a hole in the stomach wall, it is called an ulcer.  Acid reflux is when acid from the stomach comes up the esophagus to the back of the throat.  Usually, the valve between the esophagus and the stomach prevent this from happening, but sometimes that valve is faulty or doesn't work.  The sensation from acid reflux is a burning in the back of the throat.

• The liver is the largest internal organ, and the pig has five lobes (humans have four lobes).  It performs many important functions in the body, including production of bile, which helps us digest fats.  Medicines, toxins, and alcohol (which some people might call a toxin, some might call a medicine) are all broken down in the liver to keep us safe.  Alcoholics generally consume so much alcohol at a time that it overwhelms the liver, and repeated cycles of alcohol abuse can lead to permanent liver damage.    Some vitamins and iron are stored in the liver, but bile is actually stored in the gall bladder.  You can live without your gall bladder but because you can't add bile to your food while it is being digested, you won't be able to eat much fat (such as donuts!).
• We had trouble finding the pancreas in the dissection, but it is a whitish organ tucked near the stomach.  It is a multi-tasking organ, because it does two different things at once.  Beta cells in the pancreas produce and secrete insulin to help regulate blood sugar.  

• When your body cannot regulate blood sugar, it is called diabetes, and Type 1 diabetes is due to the beta cells actually being missing or dead, which can happen from an auto-immune process.  That is when your immune system attacks itself -- for some reason, the immune system treats the beta cells like foreign invaders to the body and kills them.  The rate of Type 1 diabetes has been increasing gradually over the last 50 years, and we don't know why.  Type 2 diabetes is when the beta cells are not being killed but for some reason are not working very well to regulate blood sugar.  Mostly this is due to eating too much sugar, being overweight, and not getting enough exercise.  Getting in shape can help for Type 2 diabetes, and for either type of diabetes it is very important to manage your sugar to avoid lots of negative health effects from too much or too little sugar in your blood.

• The small intestine is the really long tube the the broken down food flows through after the stomach, so that the nutrients can be absorbed by the body.  90% of digestion occurs in the small intestine, and it has 3 parts: the duodenum, the jejunem, and the ileum.  We tried to dissect them to see how long they were, and one seemed to be about 6 feet long!  In general, the small intestine is about 3 times the length of the animal.

• The large intestine is the wider, shorter tube that the digestive material flows through after the small intestine.  Here, the water gets reabsorbed so that what is left can be formed into bowel movements and then excreted.  To flow through the small intestine, the material needs to be watery, but if it flows too quickly through the large intestine, not enough water will be removed and it will be diarrhea.  Yuk! The color of the poop is because of the bile that got added earlier to digest the fats.

• Spleen and kidney:  The spleen and kidney were part of this dissection because of their location within the structures we were dissecting, but they are not part of the digestive system.  The spleen is a lymph organ and is part of the immune system.  Cells inside learn to produce antibodies to germs that we encounter, and the body can kill off the germ much faster next time.  It gets enlarged when you have mono, because it is producing a lot of immune cells, and you can live without your spleen but will have trouble fighting off certain infections.  Kidneys are part of the urogenital system, which we will discuss next week.