The body world!

Hey, this is Elly, and I'm here to tell you about my life in Taiwan!

This blog is owned by two girls, Jesse and I. :)

And, this is my first post, which means it may be bored. :/

Please bear with me.

So, today we went to the National Taiwan Science Education Center to see an exhibition, "Body worlds and the Cycle of Life". I think we spent at least 4hrs there. The exhibition is quite interesting and beneficial. Everything that we saw from the exhibition is real. They need about a year to become a specimen. Those specimens are made through the process called Plastination invented by Dr. von Hagens in 1977. I know it would be weird if i said this exhibition is awesome, but it really is. (Maybe to someone who likes bology?)

Anyway, in this exhibition, many organs are shown. There are five area in total, and let's talk from the beginning of the exhibition. The first area is about pregnancy. They showed us the foetus from the 3rd week to the 28th week. Do you know that the foetus in the 3rd week is so small that it's not even bigger than my little finger's finger nail. It's just so TINY!!! And gradually, it grows. I didn't know that the toenails are grown first then the fingernails until today I saw this exhibition. Haha. It's not important, but just an interesting fact that surprised me.

The second area is about the bones. Nothing much to talk about. But I spent some time in sketching the thighbone. It looks exactly like the bone that the dogs use to grind their teeth. Oh yeah, the introduction says that every human has 27 bones in one hand, but when I counted my hand, I've got only 19! Where are the others? = =' Then it shows some specimens about the disease Osteoporosis.

The third area is about the brain. Various kind of brains are shown. The normal ones, the water on the brain ones. And then we saw the skulls, the whole one and the separated one which is made of 22 individual bones. Then we saw the skin area, the nerves area, and many systems area. What makes me shock is that they are able to obtain our blood vessels, it's like we really have many many tiny little vessels around our body. When we only dye the vessels of our organs, all we can see is lines as thin as threads forming the organs.

The forth section is about diseases, like fatty liver, kidneys that have cancer, the black lungs, the empty lungs, etc. I have to say, those who smokes, your lungs are black! No jokes, it's really black! The fifth section is mixed with the other four, it shows people in many movements, when playing rugby, when playing high jump, when driving the boat, when jumping across the fence, and many many. Muscles are clearly seen, bones and nerves and some organs like stomach, reproductive systems, anything you could think of. How they're joint, the sizes of any organs, can be seen. I find it (a little bit) disgusting after seeing so much human bodies with only muscles and bones, sometime blood vessels. Hahaha. Anyway, at the exist of the exhibition, there's a touching section! I didn't dare to touch it. =.= But Jesse did. And she told me that the lungs are hard. I expected to be soft, but it's specimen, what can I expect?

[All the specimens don't look real to me at all,

and I hate it so much that we're not allowed to take picture there! :( ]

Jesse is touching the lungs.