News Author Ann Constantino
Tour of the Organ Body, Part 4: The Kidneys
Photo by Robina Weermeijer on Unsplash Published in the Humboldt Independent on November 9, 2021 A couple of fist-sized, bean-shaped organs tucked behind the stomach just beneath the lower back ribs, the kidneys were considered during biblical times to be…
Tour of the Organ Body, Part 3: Pancreas
Photo by cottonbro from Pexels Posted in the Humboldt Independent on October 26, 2021 When famous ancient Greek physician Galen of Pergamon declared the pancreas nothing more than spongy protective padding separating the stomach from some large blood vessels, no one challenged the…
Tour of the Organ Body, Part 2: The Stomach
Photo by Sander Dalhuisen from Unsplash Published in the Humboldt Independent on October 12, 2021. Platypuses and seahorses don’t have one, and if absolutely necessary you could live without one, but mostly it is a good thing to have a stomach, that repository…
Tour of the Organ Body, Part 1: The Liver
Photo by v2osk from Unsplash Published in the Humboldt Independent on September 28, 2021. About the size of a football and weighing roughly 3 pounds, your liver has up to 500 vital functions, earning it a dual identity as an organ and a…
Growing a Spine
Photo by Mark Tulin from Unsplash Published in the Humboldt Independent on September 14, 2021. Seen from the side, the human spine is a graceful series of curves that evolved when we became bipedal and which enable us to stand buoyantly upright, a…
Be Still My Heart
Photo by hopefilmphoto from Unsplash Published in the Humboldt Independent on August 17, 2021. Dating back to 1733, not long after the invention of the “Physician’s Pulse Watch”, a time device that had a second hand that could be stopped, it has…
Standing up to Peripheral Neuropathy
Photo by Anupam Mahapatra on Unsplash Published in the Humboldt Independent on August 3, 2021 As many as 20 million Americans suffer from some form of peripheral neuropathy. This condition, which can give rise to numbness, tingling, and/or mild to…
You Can’t Touch This
Photo by Yoann Boyer on Unsplash Published in the Humboldt Independent on July 20, 2021 We arrive finally at the last of the five human senses: touch. Last in our series, but likely the first sense to develop in human…
A Matter of Taste
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels Published in the Humboldt Independent on June 29, 2021 We have previously covered sight, hearing, and smell, and now arrive at taste on our odyssey through the suite of human senses. To most of us, taste is…
The Nose Knows
Photo by Casey Murphy on Unsplash Published in the Humboldt Independent on June 15 Moving on in our tour of the senses, we sniff out the human nose, a sense organ that gets a bad rap compared to your basset hound’s…