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Moving on...to tadpoles

5/29/2015

My old fish illo from the last post is a good way (well, in my opinion) to segue into tadpoles!

Tadpoles start out as water breathers before becoming air breathers. Fish use gills to breathe by essentially "washing" the water containing oxygen over a system of blood vessels in order to extract the oxygen. But because a tadpole has both lungs AND gills, it has a little "cap" (the glottis) that functions to block water from reaching the lungs, while allowing oxygen a way in.
This is the same way our "cap" functions between our mouth, with which we use to breathe AND eat (called the epiglottis in humans). So, the mouth connects to the lungs and the stomach through two separate pipes, one in front of the other: the trachea and the esophagus. The "cap" closes the airway so that food/liquid can't go in there.

As a result, we hiccup because our bodies are trying to prevent us from breathing in solids and liquids. Once our brain senses that something is going down a pipe where it's not supposed to, it sends a message to that "cap" to shut quickly! Hence, our HIC! in hiccup.

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The end of the road

5/22/2015

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My final indulgence down memory lane....my "pen and ink" fish, done on vellum.

We actually used these rapido graph markers, very finely gauged markers that came in a set of incremental thicknesses. Although a marker cannot make a thin-thick-thin line like as a traditional pen and ink nib can (which can be done by simply applying more pressure on the pen as you draw, thereby increasing the thickness of the resulting line, and then lightening the pressure to thin the line out at the end), you can change from one marker thickness to another to vary thickness. And you can stipple more easily (make shaded areas with a density of dots)!

We actually had specimens of these fish which we measured and drew from. They were placed in a clear, shallow dish with water enough to cover the fish. We used plastic rulers to measure length, width and depth, and a magnifying glass to observe the detail. I actually felt like a true scientist....

In any case, thanks so much for letting me share these old pieces with you. It's great to remember what fun it all was!

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First web site

5/20/2015

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I'm still walking down memory lane with my very first website about the Inflammatory response, for a school project. This was a short course taught during the spring semester of my graduating year. I really tested my teacher on this project, as with a short course, it only lasted 4-6 weeks, and so deadlines came (and went) practically every week. My teacher would gently remind me of each passing deadline, and as I was immersed in trying to graduate that year, I put these deadlines off. When I finally got to building this website, I had a TON of fun.

Each page has an animated GIF; on the homepage, a firetruck rolls out and sprays water to hose down the word "Inflammatory" after it had burst into flames. I can't believe that since it was created in some ancient version of Adobe Pagemill, that it actually still works (although not perfectly) on the web when I load the page!

I must admit this was one of my favorite projects. I love making science fun for kids, because frankly it's fun for me!

The inflammatory response, increased capillary permeability, mast cells, swelling to increase blood flow to an infected site, macrophages, increased body temperature

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More firsts

5/15/2015

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Here is my food web from 2nd year graduate school. My professor practically failed me on my mid-term sketch, but, she sat me down and tried to re-sketch out some of the parts to show me what was wrong with my perspective etc. In short, she was a true teacher to me. Because of that, this illustration is one of my faves.

So, the fauna and flora were drawn on vellum, which is like a heavier, slick tracing paper. You can draw on the front (I used color pencils) which has a tooth to it, and paint the slick surface on the back (gouache) so that it's no longer semi-transparent. The objects in the circles have this "back painting" and thus really pop out because they are 100% opaque. The whole piece is placed on a piece of sage green paper, which gives the rest of the semi-transparent scene a green undertone.

I've got to mention how the labels were done "back in the day." Once complete, I scanned the art to digitize the file, and placed it in Quark Xpress. Using the image as a guide, I typed in labeling/arrows on a layer on top of the image; the quality of which was a blurry, pixelated version, as Quark and computers weren't robust enough to generate a clear image without crashing the program. Then that label file went to a local printer to print on clear acetate. I had to re-do it since one of the arrows didn't line up the first time, and each printing cost $40.00! It's safe to say I skipped many a meal that week.

Mean time, can anyone spot the type-o? It's the black-capped chickadee, not the "chicakdee." An old high school friend spotted it YEARS after I finished grad school!

Food web of a cove forest in the Southern Appalachian Mountains

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In the line of FIRSTS

5/13/2015

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Since we've started down the memory lane path...

5/8/2015

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Right-side of the surface anatomy of the large and small intestine

I am going to continue my stroll down memory lane by showing another "first" illustration from school. This is also the first traditional airbrush I ever did! There was an actual physical illustration board, actual bottles of water-based paints, actual stencils I cut out with an exacto knife from a wax-like sheet (think contact paper)...and an actual gas mask to keep me from breathing in the aspirated paints from the airbrush!

I would learn just how difficult airbrush was when I had to use multiple paint colors in one illustration, for as you see this one is monochromatic. For my second airbrushed piece, I had to blend a rose color with a yellow to make a skin tone. What I ended up with was a red and yellow striped baby....!

Thank goodness for the invention of Photoshop, and my incredibly talented medical illustrator friend John Harvey, who basically taught me how to use it! Though mishaps were still in my horizon, there were no more yellow and rose-striped babies to come!

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More about bones

5/6/2015

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Hormone control of bone building and breakdown, osteoclasts, osteoblasts

One of the amazing things about having a career that has spanned over decades is being able to go back and see how your work has changed. It is inevitable that over this long course of time, that I would have drawn the same parts of anatomy and cellular subject matter over and again. In talking about this seemingly antagonistic pair of cells, I bring back this piece because not only was it my first time drawing osteoblasts and osteoclasts, but it was my VERY first Photoshop illo from 1996 when I was a student.

This image shows how the thyroid and parathyroid glands (upper left cropped off inset with yellow/orange background. Thyroid is a salmon pink butterfly, parathyroids are the embedded tiny yellow beans) signal the osteoclasts and osteoblasts to control the level of calcium in the blood (lower right, purple swiss-cheesed deep purple vessel). If levels are low, osteoclasts break down bone which releases calcium as a result. If levels are high, osteoblasts absorb excess calcium, trapping it in the bone matrix.

In our previous image, we saw how bisphosphonate can influence the activities of such cells. Calcium is yet another chemical that cells use to understand the environment and what it calls for to be in a normal state. What we ultimately want to take away is that cells depend on signals which determine their course of action, much like how we depend on a growling stomach to let us know we are hungry and should find something to eat.

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Enough about DNA...for now.

5/1/2015

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Bisphosphonate signals osteoclasts and osteoblasts,

Switching gears, someone asked about me bones, having recently broken one of hers. We don't think of bones as being dynamic, we think of them as the key to our stability, holding up all our muscles. But bones are constantly being broken down by cells called osteoclasts (red cells in pic), and new layers are laid down by osteoblasts (green cells). In younger, healthy adults and children, this process takes place efficiently and on its own, so when you break a bone, the only thing to do is to minimize the movement of the bone such that it will set in alignment (think about putting a broken vase back together), and then let the osteoclasts and osteoblasts do their thing.

In older adults, bisphosphonate, a common medication to treat osteoporosis, works on the bone cells. I have retro-fitted this old pic of mine to begin discussion. Essentially, bisphosphonate signals the osteoclasts to slow down what they do, while it signals the osteoblasts to increase their activity. Can anyone guess as to what the result of all this signalling leads to?

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