#ligament

Ligament - Demo MMXXIV

Achilles Heal

Perhaps if this research had come just a few millennia earlier, Achilles’ heel wouldn’t have been such a vulnerability. Researchers working to improve recovery for people with tendon and ligament injuries are increasingly interested in synthetic hydrogels – injectable material that can encourage regrowth. There have also been recent strides in techniques that use microparticles to deliver dissolvable factors to the right spot. Now a study has combined these approaches to create a hydrogel system with fibres (pink) and microgels (green) carrying dissolvable factors. Starter cells for regrowth (blue/yellow) were recruited along the fibres, their development helped by both the physical landscape and the delivery of soluble cues in a lab model (pictured) and in ruptured mouse Achilles tendons. If the injection of a hydrogel including fibres and microparticles can boost the body’s ability to repair, recovery time after all too common tendon and ligament injuries could be greatly reduced.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Image from work by Robert N. Kent III and colleagues

Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial – NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Published in Advanced Functional Materials, September 2022

Major Ligaments of the Knee Joint

It’s not a thing. She’s sure of it. It’s just when she sees the full reach of him—the extension from the tops of his fingers to the leg he’s thrown out for balance—she goes to the library and finds three books on anatomy and one on geometry. It can’t be just because it’s him, surely. There’s got to be some inherent magic in the shape or line of that extension, in the way she heard something pop in the silence (ankle or hip, she isn’t sure), in the perfect balance of it. If it was just him she could admit it and move on, surely. She’s had a crush on him on and off for so long that it doesn’t even feel strange anymore.

But that’s not it.

Because her breath doesn’t catch over simple crushes any more and she’s had the image of him, fingers fully extended, leg stretched behind his body, and his head bowed almost in reverence in her head for days.

Posting a couple of my concept works from Patreon about the internal workings of orekroarks here.  

A generalized final and preliminary sketches exploring how the changes in the orekroark flight and torso anatomy work and look.  this gives a bit of an idea the kind of movement I'm looking for within this skeleton, and and extension on the direct structure of some bones.

These sketches are some of the concept and reconstruction of orekroark flight anatomy.  As an alien creature that walks both bipedally, and quadrupedally... and has the capability of flight, it has been a bit of a struggle to develope a system that allows it to retain maximum flexibility and the ability to fly.

The skeleton has been redeveloped from a very bone heavy structure to a skeleton that has a shortened ribcage with a sternal spoon, and enlargened 3 pronged processes on vertebra that accomodates both the front limbs and the wings in different connective space.  I'm still shifting around the shape and sizes of the scapulas, and other parts of the spine and pelvis.

One thing that I tried to add to this design was a lateral semi-rigid, pliable connective ligament net that anchored to the wing's scapula, pseudo ribs and the pelvis, with a ridge along the entire ligament that acts as an alternate space for flight muscles to connect to all the way towards the pelvis.  The idea was to maximize the flexibility of the creature (To that similar of a cat) while this net and the muscles connected to it were relaxed without the muscles getting too much in the way of the movements like they would if they were connected to a larger rib system with a stiff sternum.  During flight, the net would tighten, which would keep the body stiff and stable for flight, and allow the msucles connected to it to use it like a bone.

Not all of the flight muscles are connected to this ligament net.  I've still maintaned some of the connections to the main sternum and the 'flight spoon', which the scapula is also anchored to.

They always need work, but at least they are always advancing.

More things like this, among others on my Patreon.  concider support so I can keep working on the bigger projects.  Any funds go into paying rent, and purchasing supplies, so anything helps! https://www.patreon.com/ScarletHarlequin