News Author Ann Constantino
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…
Lend Me Your Ears
Photo by Hayes Potter on Unsplash Published in the Humboldt Independent on June 1, 2021 Whether it’s Mozart or Led Zeppelin, birdsong or an elephant’s trumpet, your ears process sound the same way. Then your brain makes up your mind…
The Eyes Have It
Photo by Nonsap Visuals on Unsplash Published in the Humboldt Independent on May 18, 2021 “I want all my senses engaged. Let me absorb the world’s variety and uniqueness.” — Maya Angelou This is the first in a series of…
What’s That You Say?
Photo by Edward Jenner from Pexels Published in the Humboldt Independent on May 4, 2021 Beginning about 20 years ago a large international group of academic researchers conducted a series of informally linked studies on literacy in industrialized nations. The questions being asked…