GD: Bones 3

Using carbon nano-fibers to make tennis rackets, baseball bats and bike frames is a relatively new way of building things. The highly-organized structure of the fibers has led to strong and durable sports equipment.

Carbon nanofibers can stimulate the production of cartilage in damaged joints and can be used to make lithium ion battery electrodes that have four times the storage capacity of current lithium ion batteries. They also can be woven into clothes to provide a steady heat supply for the wearer.

There is a big push to learn ways to keep the carbon nanofibers at a uniform diameter and parallel to each other. This is a real headache! One way that scientists discovered to do this is to have nanofibers grow from nano-dendrites.

The 300 nm x 1.5 nm collagen molecule is astonishing! It’s the rebar of the body. It’s 50-100 times as strong as steel and can endure tremendous tensile strains up to 50%.

Collagen proteins are parallel in parts of bone.

Collagen molecules are found throughout the clear cornea and the white sclera of the eye. This is what makes these parts of the eye electrically conductive.

The reason that you can see through the clear cornea is because the collagen molecules are parallel to one another and at the right distance apart to let light in.

Without collagen “steel-cables” in blood arteries, one pump of the heart would blow out the blood piping in a billion places.

The blood “pipes” shown here feed the heart cells.

The red fibers below are collagen fibers that make the skin springy. The yellow fibers in the skin here are elastin which make the skin tough.

Elastin protein helps make skin and tendons elastic. Collagen has a little elasticity, but nothing compared to elastin.

The placement of collagen molecular-cables in skin is like having steel threads that are really, really tiny woven here and there throughout super-soft skin.

Did the doctor in the skin care article say that the collagen and the elastin molecules in skin care products are far too large to penetrate the skin?

As you get older, the number of collagen and elastin proteins in the skin grow. This causes the skin to bunch up and wrinkle.

Jumping kangaroos store 80% of their energy in their tendons, compared to running humans, who can store and reuse only about 50%.

Kangaroo tendons have no nano-crystals like Clydesdale horses’ bones do.

Kangaroos can jump 50 feet!

Shark cartilage has more collagen than our ear cartilage does.

This picture below shows that shark vertebrae have very tall spinous processes (Refer back to Bones DD-2 if you forgot what they are).

In the picture above, the dorsal fin is on the top of the shark and the pectoral fins are on the bottom off to each side.

The hydroxyapatite crystal in bone is stronger than hydroxyapatite made in the lab because the hydroxyapatite nano-crystal in bones is very small–13nm across.

To keep the crystals from growing larger, citrate covers one-sixth of each hydroxyapatite crystal’s surface and stops the crystal from growing bigger than it should.

Collagen fibrils have a 40-millimeter gap between collagen molecules.

Jello is often made from collagen from the skin, tendons and cartilage of animals.

Hydrolyzed collagen is collagen that has been broken apart. This is what makes up jello.

The “bone castle” below is subject to enormous pressures in the body of an Olympian.

A collagen-protein molecule is 1.5 nm wide–about the same width as a water molecule.

Your stomach HCl and your Pancreatic enzymes leave collagen that we eat undigested so we don’t have to make many of these molecules.

Collagen in our bones is not as precisely configured as our modern technology makes carbon nano-fibers.

Older people who are bent-over badly have probably been hit pretty hard with a breakdown in their complex bone chemistry.

Bone healing nano-patches can help much more than conventional healing methods. This is because the patch resembles the collagen matrix in bones.

Osteoclast cells “clasp” bone–they lay it down.

With bones, it is better to “wax off” first, then “wax on”. By this we mean that the bone material is first removed by the osteoclasts, then replaced by osteoblasts.

“Ossified” means to convert weak cartilage into strong cartilage.

The bone cells that break down bone and absorb it (the osteoclasts) and the bone cells that build up bone by adding new bone material (osteoblasts) are smaller than you can see with your unaided eyes.

There are “cow nipple-like ruffles” on the bottom of the osteoclast because they increase the surface area of the osteoclast so it can absorb more of the broken-down bone. There are “eggs” in the osteoclast because this bone cell has more than one nucleus which may make collagenase more quickly to break down the collagen in the bone.

Laying an egg should kill a chicken because it takes so much calcium out of the chicken’s blood. But, osteoclasts and a couple other groups of cells peel the calcium off the bones to make Miss Chicken’s shells. Egg shells are bone-parts. Miss Chicken is safe for another day!

How thick was your skull when you were born and how thick is it now?

How does the body shrink the inside layer of the skull and thicken the skull at the same time? It does this by having millions of osteocytes dissolve and “vacuum up” the underside of the skull–the part next to your brain and having osteoblasts lay new one on the “top side” of the skull.

The skull is actually thinner than most people think. And if you look closely, you can see it is made of trabecular bone with compact bone on both sides of it.

The osteoblast creates a complete seal until there is a firm pocket underneath it where the bone dissolving takes place. If it wasn’t sealed, the molecules that break down the bone would float away in the interstitial liquid all around the outside of the osteoclast. It’d be like releasing a bunch of helium balloons.

The osteoblasts have precise molecular receptors on the outside of their cell membranes that “dock” molecules coming from other cells and either bring them into the nucleus or bring in other molecules that are made in response to the “docking”.

Molecules are sent out to the osteocytes from the thyroid gland which resides on the neck.

Food and oxygen come to the imprisoned osteocyte through cave-tubes called…

The center hole in this picture is the Haversian Canal. This picture shows how skin cells grow around the Haversian Canals.

With often over 50 interstitial fluid-filled caves connecting each bone-imprisoned living osteocyte to other osteocytes, each osteocyte receives sufficient oxygen and food for itself. Without this supply Tiger’s bones would all eventually break.

The buried osteocytes detect stresses from the bone as it bends because they read the electrical fields that the bone gives off and also the fluid pressures in the canaliculi as the bone is stressed.

One neuron can receive input through its branching dendrites from up to 1,000,000 other nerves!

“Ax-axon” helps to remember that this is part of a nerve cell is an axon because of the breaks in the fat-wrap myelin sheaths. “The myelin sheaths (the white, insulating ‘fat wraps’) have “breaks” in them that “Ax man” put there.

Osteocytes that are trapped in bone can live for 25 years! The osteocytes are in a “prison” where they can’t even move.

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