All photo credits go to http://www.thevlm.org/Bodies_Revealed.aspx.
Dear part-time athletes / full-time desk jockeys,
If you live in the 757 (aka Hampton Roads or Eastern Virginia), there's an incredible exhibit going on at the Virginia Living Museum. BODIES REVEALED runs from May 25 until September 2, 2013. The Virginia Living Museum is located in Newport News, VA. Read through to the end of this article for the link....
The BODIES REVEALED exhibit is actually made up of real human's bodies and body parts that were donated to science. These bodies were preserved so well, it's hard to tell if they are actually real or if they were pieces of art constructed by artists from scratch.
There were a ton of different displays to check out. The most interesting to me overall was one that showed all of the blood vessels that were in the arm of a person. In order to preserve the blood vessels, all of them were injected with a colored dye that turned into a hard polymer. The rest of the body parts in the arm were chemically removed so that all of the blood vessels could simply hang in a display, positioned as if they were still inside a human arm. There must have been dozens of them, maybe hundreds. They were very, very thin and bright red (due to the color of the dye used). I wanted to take a picture of it, but unfortunately no photography was allowed in the exhibit.
The BODIES REVEALED exhibit gave (even) me a much more realistic perspective on how repetitive strain injuries take a toll on the human body over the course of a lifetime. Some parts of the body are obviously more tendinous than others. Tendons attach muscle to bone. It's interesting to see how muscle deteriorates, gets tighter, smaller, and more compressed over time. The tendons are then forced to stretch, fail, or tear as the muscles attached to them get tighter and smaller. This leads to major joint issues caused by repetitive strain injuries. BODIES REVEALED shows all of this first-hand.
One display showed 2 pairs of human lungs next to each other. One of them was from a non-smoker, which clearly looked like lungs. The other pair of lungs was from a life-long smoker. Those were blackish grey in color, smaller, and clearly appeared to be much more worn and damaged. If the display didn't tell me they were lungs, I wouldn't have known what they were.
The displays go on and on, even showing cancerous tumors in some body parts. One display showed how the musculature moved when a man was throwing a baseball. Another showed the posture of a man riding a mountain bike.
The tickets cost about $30 per person after tax and everything. It was definitely worth the price of admission. I may even check it out again before it is over in September. There's a ton of interesting info to be learned there, whether from the displays themselves, or the informative descriptions typed under each display. We took about an hour to walk through it. I'd highly recommend it!
For more info or to purchase tickets, go to http://www.thevlm.org/Bodies_Revealed.aspx.
Tags: bodies revealed exhibit, bodies revealed vlm, repetitive strain injuries
There were a ton of different displays to check out. The most interesting to me overall was one that showed all of the blood vessels that were in the arm of a person. In order to preserve the blood vessels, all of them were injected with a colored dye that turned into a hard polymer. The rest of the body parts in the arm were chemically removed so that all of the blood vessels could simply hang in a display, positioned as if they were still inside a human arm. There must have been dozens of them, maybe hundreds. They were very, very thin and bright red (due to the color of the dye used). I wanted to take a picture of it, but unfortunately no photography was allowed in the exhibit.
The BODIES REVEALED exhibit gave (even) me a much more realistic perspective on how repetitive strain injuries take a toll on the human body over the course of a lifetime. Some parts of the body are obviously more tendinous than others. Tendons attach muscle to bone. It's interesting to see how muscle deteriorates, gets tighter, smaller, and more compressed over time. The tendons are then forced to stretch, fail, or tear as the muscles attached to them get tighter and smaller. This leads to major joint issues caused by repetitive strain injuries. BODIES REVEALED shows all of this first-hand.
One display showed 2 pairs of human lungs next to each other. One of them was from a non-smoker, which clearly looked like lungs. The other pair of lungs was from a life-long smoker. Those were blackish grey in color, smaller, and clearly appeared to be much more worn and damaged. If the display didn't tell me they were lungs, I wouldn't have known what they were.
The displays go on and on, even showing cancerous tumors in some body parts. One display showed how the musculature moved when a man was throwing a baseball. Another showed the posture of a man riding a mountain bike.
The tickets cost about $30 per person after tax and everything. It was definitely worth the price of admission. I may even check it out again before it is over in September. There's a ton of interesting info to be learned there, whether from the displays themselves, or the informative descriptions typed under each display. We took about an hour to walk through it. I'd highly recommend it!
For more info or to purchase tickets, go to http://www.thevlm.org/Bodies_Revealed.aspx.
Tags: bodies revealed exhibit, bodies revealed vlm, repetitive strain injuries