hypertrophy

all year i have been hearing the word "hypertrophy" being thrown around but never really understood what it meant. myocardial hypertrophy in simple terms is an enlarged heart. renal hypertrophy is an enlarged kidney. hypertrophy is when cells grow in size in response to a stressor. for example, when someone has uncontrolled high blood pressure for a long period of time, the heart muscle responds by enlarging. this enlargement happens because each cell grows bigger, not because more cells are present. similarly, when we work out, our skeletal muscles enlarge. we can feel a bulging calf on a runner not because they have developed more muscle cells but because each of their cells (and the organelles within the cells) have swelled so that they can work more efficiently. another example of this is when a person donates a kidney to someone in need of a transplant. their one remaining kidney hypertrophies to accommodate filtering all of the blood on its own. smart cells we have!

biceps hypertrophy in response to lifting weight

Food Art

ok, after posting all those magnified images of the body, i cannot help sharing these images of food that i just stumbled across:

http://www.treehugger.com/galleries/2011/03/stunning-food-magnification-photos-reveal-your-meal-in-microscopic-detail.php?page=1

Body Art

i have always loved examining things close up. when i was a little kid i carried around a book titled "Patterns in Nature" and spent hours paging through images of tree bark, pebbles, veins of leaves, and sea shells. i was fascinated by the idea that, when looked at from different angles or magnifications, vastly different things could look so similar to one another. and that ordinary things could be so beautiful. these thoughts were re-stimulated in my histology class, looking at magnified images of different body parts, comparing their cellular structures. here is a smattering of what i have been studying. the slices of tissue have been stained with the different colors so that the cells can be seen more clearly.

esophagus

tendon

fat

hair follicle

heart muscle

bone

bone (closer up)

liver

lung

fallopian tube

nerve cell bodies

nerve cell axons

skeletal muscle 

skin

small intestine

cartilage