Jonathan Simmonds, an MD in Boston, MA, created these Map Anatomy illustrations that represent a detailed, functional diagram of the human head's anatomy in the style of a London tubemap; you can buy downloads and posters from his Etsy store, but act quickly, because Transport for London are notorious, humourless assholes about this kind of thing! (via Reddit) Read the rest
The Syndaver is a super-realistic robotic human corpse simulator with replaceable viscera that med students can dissect again and again, freeing them to use the donated bodies of people who willed their remains to science for med school pranks, like sneaking them into the alumni dinner in a tuxedo. Read the rest
Keiko Otsuhata created a set of three "anatomical fish zip-bags" for Colossal, in kinme, saury, and sea bream. They're $18 each. Read the rest
The $45.28 Learning Resources Anatomy Models Bundle Set is a well-reviewed set of anatomical models: a 5" heart, a 3.75" brain, a 4.5" body and a 9.2" skeleton, all of which disassemble into anatomically correct sub-components that you assemble into the finished pieces. (via Fun Finds) Read the rest
Vintage Confections' $19 Creature Eyeball lollipop assortments come in an assortment of six flavors ("Blackberry, Marshmallow, Cotton candy, Green apple, Strawberry, Guava") and an assortment of creepy eyeball designs. (via Crazy Abalone) Read the rest
Ali Harrison creates lacy, delicate paper cutouts of human organs, like this reproductive system. She then recreates those as laser-cut wood and T-shirts, like this one benefiting Planned Parenthood: Read the rest
The demonstration shows how kneecaps provide leverage. I'm happy the Flying Spaghetti Monster built us this way. Read the rest
The Guardian's released the first of "The Vagina Dispatches," four short documentaries about women's genitals. This episode is about vulvas, labiaplasty, anatomy, and sex, and is a fascinating 15 minutes. NSFW, if you work somewhere where images of vulvas are frowned upon. (Thanks, Mae!) Read the rest
The amazing internal anatomy of the clitoris is a mystery that has surfaced and vanished in history, coming into focus in 2005 (!), when Royal Melbourne Hospital urologist Helen O'Connell published her groundbreaking MRI studies. Read the rest
Y Nakajima's "Skull Walker 2.0" used the skull off an older sculpture and a HEXBUG Strand Beast Toy Figure (inspired by Theo Jansen's Strandbeest walkers) to create this brilliant piece of nightmare fuel. (via Laughing Squid) Read the rest
When the zombie apocalypse breaks out, the Harvard Brain Bank will resemble the scene at a cheap casino buffet's peel-and-eat shrimp table.
Russel Cameron's grotesque, beautiful sculptures "possess human characteristics such as skin texture and some form of anatomical structure," fashioned into blobby, nightmarish, sexual forms. Read the rest
Researchers at UC Riverside and Centro de Investigación Científica y de Educación Superior de Ensenada have published a paper describing their ongoing success in setting a "transparent nanocrystalline yttria-stabilized-zirconia" into patients' skulls, which reveal the patients' brains so that the patients' brains can be zapped with therapeutic lasers. Read the rest
Teghan Lucas, a comparative anatomy researcher at the University of Adelaide, was fascinated with the idea of doppelgängers, that every person has a look-alike out there in the world. So Teghan analyzed thousands of photos of people, for example measuring the distance between features, to determine the probability that two people would have matching faces. According to Teghan, there's only a one in a trillion chance that you share even eight measurements with someone else. Of course, people can still look very similar even if their eyes and ears aren't separated by precisely the same distance. From the BBC:
Read the rest"It depends whether we mean ‘lookalike to a human’ or ‘lookalike to facial recognition software’,” says David Aldous, a statistician at U.C. Berkeley...
When you bump into a friend on the street, the brain immediately sets to work recognising their features – such as hairline and skin tone – individually, like recognising Italy by its shape alone. But what if they’ve just had a haircut? Or they’re wearing makeup?
To ensure they can be recognised in any context, the brain employs an area known as the fusiform gyrus to tie all the pieces together. If you compare it to finding a country on a map, this is like checking it has a border with France and a coast. This holistic ‘sum of the parts’ perception is thought to make recognising friends a lot more accurate than it would be if their features were assessed in isolation. Crucially, it also fudges the importance of some of the subtler details.
Fancy's $100 neon desktop skull lamp is 15.5" x 10", with a one-year warrant and a 6' cord; the picture makes it look more decorative than functional, which is a pity, because it would great to replace a desk-light with this for close-up work, as a kind of contemporary memento mori. (via Crazy Abalone) Read the rest
Among the many revelations in John Oliver's definitive takedown of Donald Drumpf was the fact that the thin-skinned billionaire had been so wounded by being called a "short-fingered vulgarian" by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter that he's spent a quarter-century sending Carter letters decorated with tracings of his hand-geometry to prove the length of his fingers. Read the rest
Dimitri Tsykalov, a Russian-born sculptor living in Paris, sculpted a series of gorgeous, haunting skulls out of fruits and vegetables in the mid-2000s (previously), documenting his work with photographic prints. Read the rest
