GD First Timers: Bones 1 (ALL)

DNA’s minimalism refers to the fact that DNA engineers the bone structures of animals and humans so they are the minimal size and minimal amount needed for that creature. The fact that birds like a hummingbird can fly, or a dolphin jump can jump 22 feet, or an Olympian perform gymnastics without breaking their bones shows that DNA engineered bones are engineered correctly for each stage of life for living things. (This is tricky. You have to deduce things and look carefully at every detail. It will be this way in many of the questions all through these gold digs.)

To send one pound of supplies to the orbiting ISS costs about:

Algorithms code for increasing size of every bone as the animal or person grows. The DNA also provides for increasing sizes of different areas of each bone as more stresses are encountered!

The vertebrae bones of your spine has a curve in it that reduces stress on it when you walk, run or jump. It acts a little like a spring. Some of these 33 vertebrae in your spine are called lumbar vertebrae. The thick lumbar vertebrae are critical for your neck’s support when you jump!

You can see clumps of DNA with a light microscope but you cannot see the individual rungs of DNA. One of the things this DNA engineers is the hole in the center of each vertebra called a vertebral foramen, (Think!)

How many nerves are in your spiral cord? (These nerves are protected inside the bone of the vertebrae because they run through the bone through a hole which is one example of a foramen.)

The body of the vertebrae is the round, solid part of the vertebrae. These “bodies” provides a cushion for each vertebrae disc as well as give extra strength for your backbone. (See pictures below of the vertebrae discs if you cannot figure this out).

What animal has a skull that looks like the skull below?

The pores in the skull below make it lighter so the animal doesn’t have such a heavy skull. These are called sinus processes.

The skeleton below with the large keel in the sternum area of the chest is from:

These wide, flat “boxes” are solar panels for the Apollo Moon Lander.

One of the blue-throated hummingbird’s migrations includes an astonishing 500-mile trek across the Gulf of Mexico. Its bones and the fat on its body are precisely weighed to the hundredth of a gram.

A real problem with being in Space for any extended period of time is that your bones begin to diminish in width and mass because of the lack of stress on them. Because of this, astronauts visiting the ISS exercise almost every day. (Different bears don’t have this problem. They can hibernate for 5 months at a time and not lose any bone density at all. )

We have 7 neck vertebrae. Giraffes have long necks but surprisingly only have twice as many thoracic vertebrae as we do.

These bones with spinous processes on the back side are the cervical vertebrae of the neck. (You cannot see the spinous processes in this illustration.)

The round “body” of each cervical vertebrae in your neck faces inward toward your chest. The round “body” of vertebrae is on the opposite side of the vertebrae as the “body” is. (Look further down the page if you need help on this.)

How many bones are in an adult person’s body?

The bony part of the vertebrae which stick out toward the back are called spinous processes.

These woven white bands are called discs. They cushion the pounding of each vertebrae against its neighbors.

Your backbone, your spine, has 25 discs.

The Nucleus Pulposus (below) is filled with different types of protein. Some are the highly negatively charged proteins, aggrecan. This helps the Nucleus Pulposus’ “bag” to swell with water like an airbag in a car fills with air. This helps the discs to cushion the shock of day-by-day pounding of your vertebrae on each other.

Individual vertebrae curve inward on the sides to give them extra strength. The “curved wall” increases their resistance to being compressed and broken as you jump and land. The side of the “body” is like a sideways arch!

Back injuries are caused because the human backbone is poorly designed.

You can re-injure your back as you sleep because your brain often flips you over as you sleep if you sleep on your side. This is because you cut off full circulation on the side you are laying on.

Exercising daily helps you feel better because it releases endorphins, brings clear thinking, far better health, and pleasant fitness.

What is this?

The hole in each of these vertebrae is for the blood supply going to the whale’s head.

A whale’s spinal cord may have as many as 100 billion nerves.

The whale’s ribs are called floating ribs because they do not connect to a bone on the underside.

The pink parts of this diagram are cartilage that connect the ribs to the clavicle.

We have 4 floating ribs.

This (below) is the carpiece of the turtle.

The spinal cord of the turtle is fused to its carapace just as ours is.

Owl eyes are so big that they can’t move in their skull! This is why their vertebrae are engineered for a 250º turn of the neck! They can’t turn their eyes, but they can really turn their heads!

Look carefully at the eye bones of the creature above. Each one is made of several bones that have grown together.

Eye bones are called orbital bones.

Owls can turn their necks a whopping 7/8ths of the way around.

The nerves to the brain of people go from the neck on the outside of the skull. They then tunnel into the skull in the top of the brain area.

Owls have a way of pooling their blood that is going to their brain. They also have extra-wide bone-holes that the blood vessels going to their skull go through. Both of these “devices” make it so an owl doesn’t kill itself when it turns its head around.

In humans, the vertebral artery really hugs the hollow cavities in the neck. But this is not the case in owls.

We have two general types of bones: compact bone (cortical bone) and trabecular bone (springy bone). The bone below is compact bone. (Read further on if you have trouble with this question.)

Blood is made in the spaces between the trabecular bone network.

This is the feemore bone of a sauropod. (Do you think that the bone in this picture is real? Why or why not?)

Fingernails and hair are completely dead. There is nothing at all living in them. Bone is different. Much of it is lifeless proteins and minerals, but tucked inside the protein and mineral matrix are living cells.

The head of the femur bone of the leg is trabecular bone. The head of the femur bone goes into the pelvis hip ball socket at 90º.

You make a whopping 500 billion red blood cells (RBC) a day in your bone marrow! It’d take you 17,000 years for you to count the RBC’s your body makes in ONE day!

The bones around the human ear are cortical compact bone.

The cochlea of the ear is shaped like 3 bent tubes in the shape of upside-down U’s. This cochlea of the ear is enclosed in a bone cavern.

The orbital bone around the eye has some compact bone on its edges.

The orbital bone of the human eye fits around the eye very tightly.