BCP 201 GD: Bones M-P (Second Timers)

The strongest and longest bone in your body is the femur. Its angled head is filled with compact bone.

The two bones of your forearm arm are the ulna and radius. The two bones of your calf are your tibia and fibula. The bone of your upper arm is the humerus. Where the femur meets the calf’s tibia bone, it widens greatly. It makes a “fat-2 bottom seat.” This is to increase the surface area and strengthen the knee joint.

The wide bone of your pelvis that some of your femur muscles attach to is the:

Bone fibers are organized in specific directions to make the bones stronger. Bone trabeculae are also to make the bone stronger. The trabeculae are also a major site for red blood cell production.

Trabeculae are oriented in directions to strengthen your bones to handle stresses better. “Trab” comes from the Greek word which means ‘beam” or “timber”.

The skull has spongy trabecular bone sandwiched between compact bone. It also has sutures where the skull plates join together. (Research if you need to.)

Plane wings have “ribs” that have different bracing designs built into them. These “ribs“ are nearly always solid plates of steel.

The head of a bird bone may have dense trabeculae in it and a thin layer of compact bone around it. The very same bone may have fewer trabeculae in the length of the bone and a thicker layer of compact bone around it.

The woodpecker has dense, strong rod-shaped trabeculae in its skull like a hawk has in its wings. These help the bird survive the 1200 head-slams a day that it gives its head!

The picture below is a good example of “trabs in trabs” (trabecular-type bracing in trabecular-type bracing).

Many cross members in bridges, cranes, gates, roofs of buildings and even the Eiffel Tower are often arranged in a “trabecular design”.

Built in 1989 for the World’s Fair in Paris, the 1063-foot Eiffel tower, is a stunning example of using crossmembers and bracing of all kinds to keep a structure standing.

There are pictures in this article of bracing in Taiwan that combined the arches of the Greeks with modern “trabecular steel bracing design” (as we call it).

Some Roman aqueducts were built with no mortar at all yet are still standing after 2000 years!

Taiwan, Japan, and the Philippines are all islands more than 1000 miles off the coast of China.

House roof trusses use nailing plates–ghosting plates–to hold them together. These plates hold the trusses together considerably better than nails do.

The keel of a bird is in the center of its chest. The flight muscles of the wings grow into it.

Which has the larger keel in relation to its body size?

Sailboats have large keels because it helps them negotiate tight turns.

The flat sternum that we have is easier to attach muscles strongly to than a “cliff-like” keel that many birds have.

Your pectoral muscles are connected to your sternum. A bird’s flight muscles are attached to its keel.

“Bone Cliffs” provide more surface area for muscle to attach. A taller, longer keel has more area to attach the huge flight muscles of some birds than a shorter keel.

The clavicle’s “bone cliff” of our shoulder blade gives the shoulder muscle greater surface area to attach to. The sternum of our chest has a “cliff” like the clavicle to attach the pectoral muscle to.

The pectoral muscle attaches to the clavicle in a wide band.

The supracoracoideus pulls the wing up with an interesting pulley system. It is the muscle which is on the outside of the pectoralis (pec) muscle of the bird.

The pectoralis muscle (pec muscle) attaches to the keel. It pulls the wing down with a powerful stroke. In the pictures of it in this article, this muscle is larger than the supracoracoideus muscle.

Flying birds have a sternum that is sometimes nearly equal in width and height. Ostriches don’t have a keeled sternum. Swimming birds like the penguin have a thin sternum. Walking birds have a long sternum.

Osteoporosis is a malfunction of the osteoclasts and the osteoblasts. It tends to affect more men than women.

Osteoporosis affects the wrist, the hip and the vertebrae most dramatically.

Osteoporosis affects the wrist, the hip and the vertebrae mostly. This because these areas are high in the amount of trabecular bone.

Trabecular bone can form nearly square shapes. Osteoporosis affects trabecular bone greatly. It makes each of these “struts” thinner and more porous.

The image below shows that osteoporosis can happen in the lumbar vertebrae and the head of the tibia.

All the ribs connect in the same ways to the sternum (same angle and same spacing).

The sternum (the flat bone in the middle of your chest) only runs partly down the front of your chest because you need room for your intestine to expand.

Piezoelectricity is a type of static electricity generated by rubbing an electrically conductive object.

It was thought that the osteocytes read the fluid pressures in the canaliculi. However, now it is believed that the buried osteocytes are able to read both the canaliculi pressure and the piezoelectricity generated by the collagen fibers as the bones are stressed

Up to about how many canaliculi caves connect to each buried osteocyte?

Peter Curie, the brother of Mary Curie, worked on uranium experiments in the early 1700’s. He and his sister experimented with the static electricity generated by squeezing wet boards.

The twisting motion of a tennis serve causes unique stresses on the tennis player’s serving arm. This causes the osteocytes to signal the osteoblasts and osteoclasts to begin working on bone to make it stronger for the task of serving.

Have bone designs ever been compared with the structure of the Eiffel Tower?

The 3-15 inch mantis shrimp hits so fast that it causes a spark of light because of the cavitation that is caused.

The mantis punch creates cavitation where a low pressure bubble is formed that crashes inward. This causes a double punch; if the punch doesn’t hit the prey, the second cavitation collapse punch is strong enough to kill the prey!

The mantis shrimp’s claw is uniquely designed on the nano-level so it doesn’t destroy itself with its incredible force. This same sort of molecular construction is also present in insect exoskeletons. If it wasn’t, when an insect like an ant “bit” something with its mandible, its mandible would break under the great pressure of the squeeze!

An ant’s exoskeleton is made of re-formed sugar. The sugar-collagen is skillfully woven in the exoskeleton so it is both lightweight and strong!

The parathyroid glands are rice-sized glands located on the back side of the thyroid. These indispensable glands monitor the sodium levels of the blood. If the levels get too low, they will send out PTH hormones so the bone cells will remedy the problem.

The latest research with maintaining calcium balances in the body is that when the parathyroid glands in the neck detect low levels, PTH molecules are released. The imprisoned osteocyte cells all over the body respond to these messages. How? This surprised everyone. They secrete acids and enzymes to begin to eat away the inner surface of the lacuna they are trapped in. They are “growing” the cave they are locked in!

The thyroid gland–and the rice-sized parathyroid glands on the back side of the thyroid–are actually located around your windpipe, just below your vocal cord larynx. The calcium that the parathyroid regulates has a great affect on the contraction of muscles. If your parathyroids were removed in the 1800’s, even though they are rice-sized, you would die because of severe tetany (All your muscles would contract)

Richard Owen loved studying bones. He named the dinosaurs. He is seen in the picture here with a skeleton of a king-sized 500-pound Moa bird!

Sir Richard Owen named the dinosaurs. He is the first person to identify the parathyroid glands. He found large ones on deceased Rhinos. He described the glands as, “A small compact yellow glandular bodies attached to the thyroid at the point where the veins emerged.”

Thew diameter of the moon is about 2000 miles. The diameter of the sun is about 860,000 miles.

List 5 summaries of the devotional parts in this article and give a different personal application to each.