Prosthetic Limbs and Expanding their Availability

What is 20 Time: The basis behind this project is that I am able to use 20% of the class time in Anatomy to work on a certain project that I truly believe in and am interested in.

My Project:

The essential question that my project addresses relates to prosthetic limbs and how we can make them more available to the public. Currently artificial limbs can cost $30-50,000 and many people cannot afford these. My project addresses the solution of what new technologies can be implemented in prosthetics to make them more affordable as well as able to use. The major new technology I am exploring is 3D printing and how this can be used to make artificial limbs cheaper.

I chose this project based on my experience working in a veterans hospital. I saw many veterans who had lost limbs due to their experiences in war however, many of them did not have prosthetics. It is unfair how these people sacrifice so much for our country however, they still have to live a life in complete discomfort and inability to use their limbs. Making artificial limbs cheaper and more affordable will help solve this problem.

My goal is essentially to bring awareness and research the current solutions to this problem. I want to explore what 3d printed prosthetic designs already exist and maybe even design and build my own prosthetic hand using a 3d printer.

I will measure my progress through how much of the prosthetic I complete on a weekly basis. I will also measure my progress through the amount of research I am able to collect.

My plan moving forward is to continue researching this problem as well as finish up my design for the artificial hand that I plan to print. I will hopefully finish designing and putting together this project by next week.

Owl Pellet Dissection

Summary: During this lab we first researched about the different types of organisms owls consume and found out basically how to go about recognizing these organisms from their pellets. We then proceeded to dissect the pellet using tweezers a knife. Carefully we then sorted the different bones, and fur that we found in the pellet. Finally we analyzed these bones to find out the animal the owl had consumed and tried to recreate the animals skeleton from them.

Claim: The organism that our owl ate was a mole

Evidence: The first piece of evidence that the animal is a mole is because it has white teeth. The second major feature is that there is no gab between the teeth in the jaw. Finally the animal has a cheekbone.

Reasoning: Because the organism had teeth we can rule out any birdlike creatures. Finally because the animal had white teeth and no jaw we could eliminate the animal down to three organisms including the mole. Finally only the mole had a cheekbone out of these three organisms, confirming our claim that the animal was a mole.





Similarities
1. The first major similarity is in the bones of the limbs. These look extremely similar to those of human anatomy, specifically I noticed similarities in the tibia and fibula.

2. The second similarity is in the ribs. The ribs look exactly alike to those of the human skeleton.

3. The final similarity is in the teeth. The teeth of this animal mirror molars in the human body.

Differences
1. The jaw is completely different from a human jaw. It is sharper and curved more at the front ends.

2. The skull is definitely smaller and more elongated that a human skeleton.

3. The vertebra that we discovered looked slightly different than that of a human.