FAVORITE IMAGES OF THE WEEK - 4

NASA/Clouds AO/SEArch

Home Sweet Icy Martian Home

Long-term exposure to radiation is one of the biggest threats to human health in space. But these cute, cozy-looking ice domes could help. The hydrogen found in ice is an excellent shield against the radiation that exists outside of Earth's protective atmosphere. These domes are inflatable, with an outer layer that gets filled with water and freezes, providing a welcoming, radiation-free living space. So if we ever do make it to the red planet, the Mars Ice Homes, as they are called, could be real life savers.

NASA/JSC

A Farming Community Seen From Space

This image, taken aboard the International Space Station, displays one of the most remote areas of Africa: a farming region in Eastern Libya. The cluster of houses and roads in the upper right show a town called Al Jawf, which is about 900 miles from the nearest city. The different geometric configurations each represent a different irrigation method that's been tried. The honeycombs came first, followed by the large circles, which are center-pivot irrigation systems implemented to conserve water. Al Jawf gets its water from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer, the largest fossil water aquifer on Earth.

Cincinnati Children's

Digestion In A Petri Dish

This is no ordinary stomach. This piece of tissue, blown up under a microscope, didn't come from someone's gut. A group of scientists from Cincinnati Children's Hospital grew it, cell by cell, in a lab. With a working mini-stomach at their disposal, scientists can test new drugs, better understand current ones, and figure out how to grow bits of stomach and intestines for people who need them.

NASA/CXC/Penn State/B.Luo et al.

How Many Black Holes Do You See?

Nearly 70 percent of the tiny dots in this image are supermassive black holes—areas of intense gravity that pull in all matter around them. NASA scientists created this image by piecing together 7 million seconds of footage from the Chandra X-ray Observatory. By observing black holes in this way, scientists can figure out how they formed. They think that supermassive black holes that developed in the early days of the Universe came about in quick bursts, as opposed to forming steadily overtime.

BMW

Comfy Future Cars

The future of car travel is looking pretty darn cozy. This week, at the Consumer Electronics Showcase (CES) in Las Vegas, BMW demonstrated what they think the inside of cars will look like in 5 years. Their concept features comfortable seating and lots of storage for books and electronics in every seat of the car, including the driver's seat—features that highlight the fact that cars will one day drive us, and not the other way around.

H/T The Verge

Alan Place/University of Limerick

New Year, New Organ

Your mesentery—sections of connective tissue that keep your gastrointestinal organs in place—has been somewhat neglected in the medical community. Despite its important work, doctors and researchers never considered the structure to be its own organ, because it wasn't thought to be one continuous, multilayer structure. But a group of scientists are the University of Limerick took a second look and found that this vital structure does indeed pass these requirements. This reclassification could help scientists better understand its potential role in chronic, hard-to-treat gastrointestinal diseases, like Crohn's and irritable bowel syndrome.

The Human Body Has Another Organ: The Mesentery

(Credit: J Calvin Coffey/D Peter O’Leary/Henry Vandyke Carter)

By Nathaniel Scharping

To the 78 organs that make up the human body, we can add one more: the mesentery.

Located in our abdominal cavity, the mesentery is a belt of tissue that holds our intestines in place. While anatomists knew it was there, it was always thought to be composed of several different segments, as opposed to being one single structure. This knocked it out of contention for organ status, as our bodily organs must be continuous, as well as provide some vital function to our anatomy.

A new study from researchers at the University Hospital Limerick reveals that the mesentery is actually one single band of tissue, beginning at the pancreas and continuing down through the small intestine and colon, wrapping around these vital organs to hold them tight and help them maintain their structure. It is made of a folded-over ribbon of peritoneum, a type of tissue usually found lining the abdominal cavity.

“Without it you can’t live,” says J. Calvin Coffey, a Limerick University Hospital researcher and colorectal surgeon. “There are no reported instances of a Homo sapien living without a mesentery.”

It was by peeling away the peritoneum and repeated observations that Coffey built his case for the mesentery. In 2012, Coffey’s team determined the mesentery was indeed a single, connected structure. In this most recent study, published in The Lancet, Coffey’s team outlines evidence collected over four years that affirms the mesentery’s organ status. The mesentery is highly integrated with the intestine, he says, and is located in an area of the human body that has not been fully explored — we still, apparently, contain new frontiers.

And, according to The Independent, the seminal medical textbook Gray’s Anatomy was updated in 2015 to include the new definition of the mesentery. However, Coffey isn’t exactly sure when an organ is officially an organ.

“That’s a fascinating question. I actually don’t know who the final arbiter of that is,” says Coffey.

In apes and other creatures that walk on all fours, he says that the structure of the mesentery, and the organs it supports, is slightly different, which affects the layout of their guts. Understanding how and why our digestive system is arranged the way it is could be crucial to our understanding of diseases like Crohn’s and irritable bowel syndrome.

“There are a lot of disease that we are stalled on, and we need to refresh our approach to these diseases,” Coffey says. “Now that we’ve clarified its structure, we can systematically examine it. We’re at a very exciting place right now.”

The era of mesenteric science has begun.