Bone Growth & Fractures

fractured fibula

Think about how your skeleton has changed during your life.  Did you ever have a growth spurt where you got much taller over a relatively short time period?  Are you still growing now?  On the other hand, have you ever experienced damage to your bones in the form of fractures?  If so, what caused those fractures and what happened to your bones afterward?  This week we will explore those topics.

This Week's Goals

This week's activities will build directly on your last couple weeks of Scientist Spotlights and online module work.  You will encounter some familiar cells, chemicals, and processes, but will hopefully get to explore that prior knowledge in relation to some new physiological phenomena.

Given all of the above, we will seek to...

Explain to a hypothetical friend why they are unlikely to grow taller late in life.

Make an argument for rigidly immobilizing broken bones based on the physiological steps in fracture healing.

Some Advice!

This week's content includes a decent amount of vocabulary and terminology that can look and sound a bit complicated.  There are some tongue twisters in there!  The strange thing is, most of the ideas and processes the terms describe are not so complicated.  So don't let the funny names cause you anxiety!  The processes aren't too tricky to figure out!