We can’t recommend a recent episode of the Radiolab podcast—Man Against Horse—highly enough. It includes: · Pigs on a treadmill · Humans racing horses—on foot. · A discussion about the role of the human butt. · And a colorful discussion on a longstanding debate at the heart of human evolution. If you know Radiolab (one of the best podcasts around), you know they find a way to make complex stories interesting and engaging. This episode is a classic. It starts with a discussion

Stop and think of all the joints in the human body. For that matter, any mammal. One place to study form and function is in how one bone works with and/or interacts with the next. Check this brief, interesting video clip below from Jon Zahourek looking at the comparisons between horse and human tibiotalar joints. You can practically feel the strength and power in the horse as Jon demonstrates the “tremendous mortising” and “tremendous design” of the horse’s tibiotalar joint.

Who doesn’t love the title of this book? The Body—A Guide for Occupants. Of course, we do. It fits right in with what Jon Zahourek has been saying for years. Ahem, decades. We should all know how we’re put together on the inside, yes? Why wouldn’t we want to know as much as we possibly can about the human organism that carries us through life? And who better to engage us than the narrative voice of Bill Bryson, whose nearly twenty books have taken us to Africa (Bill Bryson’s

Chances are you don’t come to the Anatomy in Clay® Learning System blog looking for book reviews, but here’s one. We are here to recommend A Pocket History of Human Evolution: How We Became Sapiens (The Experiment, 2019) by Silvana Condemi and Francois Savatier. It’s bright, tight, easy-to-follow and full of colorful illustrations—all in a brisk 144 pages start to finish. And it catches us up on some recent discoveries by all those hard-working scientists out there who are wo

The adjective ‘self-conscious’ gets a bad rap. The first definition in Merriam-Webster is “conscious of one’s own acts or states as belonging to or originating in oneself: aware of oneself as an individual.” The second definition is more concerning: “intensely aware of oneself.” The third definition is “uncomfortably conscious of oneself as an object of the observation of others. Ill at ease.” The website PsychAlive says being in a state of self-consciousness often drags us d

Here at Anatomy in Clay, not much makes us happier than the sight of students teaching other students about our favorite topic Of course, human anatomy. So what happened recently in a Northglenn High School classroom was especially moving because of the unique twist—high school students sharing what they had learned about the digestive system with younger students from Morgridge Academy. This particular day of instruction was part of an ongoing relationship between Northglenn

When Cindy Le Coq ran away from her hometown of Poland in the rustbelt of Ohio in the early 1970’s, at the ripe age of 20, she had no idea she’d develop a life-long fascination with human anatomy. A gripping moment in the emergency room at Denver General Hospital (today it’s called Denver Health) changed everything. At the time, Cindy was a student at the Community College of Denver (CCD). She was studying with the goal of becoming an X-Ray technologist. She was on her second