Sample: Bones 3

We use carbon nano-fibers to make some tennis rackets, baseball bats and bike frames.

Carbon nano-fibers also can be woven into clothes to provide a steady heat supply for the person wearing them.

There is a big effort to learn ways to keep the carbon nanofibers different thicknesses and to have them grow sideways to each other.

The 300 nm x 1.5 nm collagen molecule is astonishing! It’s 50-100 times as strong as steel.

Collagen proteins are parallel in parts of bone.

Collagen molecules are found throughout the clear cornea of the eye.

The reason that you can see through the clear cornea is because the collagen molecules are criss-crossing each other.

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

The blood “pipes” shown below feed the liver 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. (See diagram and info in article. This is tricky.)

Elastin protein helps make skin and tendons elastic.

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 70% of their energy in their tendons, compared to running humans, who can store and reuse only about 20%.

Kangaroo tendons have no nano-crystals like bones do.

Kangaroos can jump 50 feet!

Shark cartilage has more stronger-than-steel collagen molecules 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 near the front.

The hydroxyapatite crystal in bone is very, very small. (3 nm)

To keep the bone hydroxyapatite crystals from growing larger, a chemical (citrate) covers five-sixths of each crystal’s surface and stops the crystal from growing bigger.

Collagen fibrils have a gap between collagen molecules. (40 nm)

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

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

The “bone castle” that the picture below represents 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 glucose molecule.

Your stomach HCl and your Pancreatic enzymes leave collagen that we eat undigested.

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

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

Bone healing nano-patches can help a great deal in healing bones.

Osteoclast cells lay down new bone.

With bones, it is better to ”wax off” first, then “wax on”. By this we mean that 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) are smaller than you can see with your unaided eyes.

There are “cow nipple-like ruffles” on the bottom of the osteoclast. These absorb bone that they dissolve.

Laying an egg makes a chicken feel good because it takes unwanted calcium atoms out of the chicken’s blood.

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

How does your skull grow larger? Part of the process is the osteoblasts laying new bone on the “top side” of the skull.

The skull is made of trabecular bone with compact bone on both sides of it.

The osteoblast creates a complete seal with the bone until there is a firm pocket underneath it where the bone dissolving takes place.

The osteoblasts have precise molecular receptors on the outside of their cell membrane.

Molecules are sent to the osteocyte bone cells from the parathyroid gland which is on the neck.

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

The center hole in this picture below is the Haversian Canal.

There are often over 5000 fluid-filled caves connecting each bone-imprisoned living osteocyte to other osteocytes.

The buried osteocyte cells detect stresses from the nose as it bends.

One neuron can receive messages from up to 100,000 other nerves!

“Ax-axon” helps to remember that the long part of the nerve below is an axon because the fat-wrap myelin sheaths have breaks between them. “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 125 years!

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