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Teacher goes above and beyond for a biology lesson by wearing an anatomically correct suit

That's one way to keep students engaged!

@mikemoratinos/X

Veronica Duque wearing her famous anatomy suit

Being an educator in the American public school system is one of the hardest jobs in our nation. Not only is the work itself challenging, but with constant battles for educational funding and a student body increasingly tethered to their electronic devices, most teachers in America and around the world are navigating uncharted territory when it comes to finding ways to keep their students engaged in their studies.

And that's why when Verónica Duque came across a form-fitting, anatomical bodysuit while doing some online shopping, she thought it would be perfect visual aid to convey vital information (pun intended) to her students in Spain, in a way they'd actually remember.

Turns out, the entire internet would remember it too.

Duque's husband tweeted a collage of images from the classroom lesson, which quickly went viral, with nearly 70,000 likes. Loosely translated, the tweet from her husband Michael reads: "Very proud of this volcano of ideas that I am lucky to have as a wife. Today she explained the human body to her students in a very original way. Great Veronica !!!"

In an interview with Bored Panda, Duque explained the thought process that led her to presenting her third-grade-class with a unique approach to learning.

"I was surfing the internet when an ad of an AliExpress swimsuit popped up," she said. "Knowing how hard it is for kids this young to visualize the disposition of internal organs, I thought it was worth giving it a try."

anatomy, anatomical suit, teachers, science, cool teachers, science class, amazonThis is a teacher who cares. assets.rebelmouse.io

Online retailers like Amazon have a number of similar anatomical bodysuits for sale. While most people apparently purchase them for Halloween costumes or as gag gifts, it's now likely that Duque's viral moment will inspire some other educators around the world to take a similar approach to teaching the body basics to their students.

anatomy, anatomical suit, teachers, science, cool teachers, science class, amazonHalloween costume, check. Amazon

While some on Twitter were critical of the suit, the vast majority have praised Duque for her innovative approach to teaching. And the anatomical bodysuit is reportedly far from her first creative endeavor in the classroom.

"I decided long ago to use disguises for history lessons," she told Bored Panda. "I'm also using cardboard crowns for my students to learn grammatical categories such as nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Different grammar kingdoms, so to say."

And when it comes to the inevitable, made-up controversy that tends to latch itself onto virtually anyone that goes viral, Duque said she says there's another far more controversial stereotype she hopes her brief moment of fame will help address.

"I'd like society to stop considering teachers to be lazy bureaucratic public servants," she said. "We're certainly not." Get this teacher a raise!

What really works about Duque's presentation is that it engages students in a sensorial experiences, which helps lessons stick (and let's face it, anything that engages he sense nowadays is a godsend). But there are other methods teachers/parents can try that don't involve wearing a suit with guts on 'em.

Here are some suggestions for hands-on "DIY experiments", courtesy of the Little Medical School website:

1. Building the respiratory system by creating a model lung with straws, balloons, bottles, and duct tape

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

2. Sculpting Body parts with Play Doh

(Grab free printable mats on 123Homeschool4Me)

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

3. Build a functioning heart model

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

Of course, these lessons are a little more geared towards younger students, but at the same time, it could provide some inspiration for how to get students more involved in their own learning, just like Duque did.

This article originally appeared six years ago.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson posted a gym selfie in a muscle shirt and people  are loving it

"A physicist thirst trap is the pleasant surprise I didn't know I needed."

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Neil deGrasse Tyson in a visit to NASA

For most of us, National Pi Day (March 14th, of course) came and went without much fanfare. Maybe a few show-offs recited the famous 3.14 number to as many decimals as they could remember, or someone whipped up a blueberry pie in a punny homage. But if you happened to open Facebook and follow astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, you were in for a unique surprise.

First, some might ask: what is pi? In the piece, "What is Pi, and How Did it Originate" by Steven Bogart for Scientific American, he explains, "Succinctly, pi—which is written as the Greek letter for p, or π—is the ratio of the circumference of any circle to the diameter of that circle. Regardless of the circle's size, this ratio will always equal pi. In decimal form, the value of pi is approximately 3.14."


Pie Pi Day GIF by PusheenGiphy

Here's Neil on TikTok with a cute video in anticipation of Pi Day. In its description, he writes, "We're just a few days away from #PiDay. Here's a friendly reminder to share with your friends along with a few jokes to use this year:

Why should you never start talking to pi at a party? Because it just goes on forever. What did pi say to its sweetheart? You look radian today. What was Sir Isaac Newton’s favorite dessert? Apple pi."

@neildegrassetyson

We're just a few days away from #PiDay 🤓 Here's a friendly reminder to share with your friends along with a few jokes to use this year: 🥧 Why should you never start talking to pi at a party? Because it just goes on forever. What did pi say to its sweetheart? You look radian today. What was Sir Isaac Newton’s favorite dessert? Apple pi.


Over on Facebook on March 13th, he shared a photo of the moon, and in a separate post, a little more information and some fun recommendations about Pi. "Pi Day (3.14) Pi has a few more digits than that. But 3.14 can get you far. Wanna get your geek on? Celebrate at 1:59:26. That gets you 3.14 1:59:26, the first seven decimal places of Pi."

The next morning, around dawn Pacific Standard Time, Neil changed his profile picture to one in which he's wearing a sleeveless muscle shirt, standing in front of a mirror at what appears to be a gym. Yes, Neil gave us a gym selfie, and why wouldn’t he?

selfie gym GIFGiphy

His followers seemed delighted, with the comments reflecting a balanced mix of good humor and earnest compliments. In one of the top comments, someone wrote, "A physicist thirst trap is the pleasant surprise I didn’t know I needed. You’re in fine form, sir." Yet another seemed (jokingly) threatened: "Damn bro, save some science for the rest of us."

This person disagreed that Neil was seeking validation: "I don't know why, but I just cannot make myself see this as a thirst trap. I know you weren't even meaning it in a bad way, but he is just so humble that anything like this just somehow makes him more human and accessible. Like he's having a confident day and wants to commemorate it."

A few people really honed in on how toned his muscles are. "Neil DeGuns Tyson," one person exclaimed, while another wrote, "Don't forget, he was a high school wrestler. The muscle never completely goes away."

Neil Degrasse Tyson Whatever GIFGiphy

This commenter was perhaps referring to Neil's propensity to debate: "Feelin' cute. May agitate some astrologers later. Idk."

And lastly, this person was hopeful that the photo is the start of a training montage: "Please tell us you're training for Cosmos Season 3.... we need this!"

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7 mindblowing medical breakthroughs that could occur in our lifetime

One day soon, you might be able to grow new teeth. Seriously.

Canva Photos

My family has a history of Parkinson's Disease, so I always see the headlines that promise some major scientific breakthrough in regards to the disease based on small, lab-based experiments or trials run on animals. They give us a glimmer of hope but, far too often, these treatments never see the light of day. The road from promising idea to having a real treatment available for patients is extremely long and arduous. Most potential new medications and therapies don't survive.

But... things do sometimes happen! There are massive medical breakthroughs being achieved all the time. Sometimes it's a new discovery, sometimes it's a successful clinical trial, and sometimes it's the fruit of all that labor finally becoming publicly available to people who need it the most. For example, an RSV vaccine just became available in 2023 for the first time. A powerful non-opioid pain killer was approved in 2024. A new drug came out to treat schizophrenia that was completely different than anything that had come before. Progress is being made every single year.

In our lifetime, say the next five to 20 years, we could see unbelievable advancements in treating certain medical conditions. Here are a few pretty amazing potential developments that are on the horizon.

Scientist working in a laboratory setting. Photo by Adam Bezer on Unsplash

1. Growing new teeth

Unlike sharks, humans are known to grow only two sets of teeth, our baby teeth and permanent adult teeth. If one gets knocked out or lost due to decay or infection, you're out of luck!

But researchers say growth buds exist in our gums for a third set, and scientists in Japan have had success in activating them to grow naturally. It could be a major gamechanger that could one day replace dentures and prosthetics. The team has moved onto human trials and has a target date of having a drug ready by 2030.

2. Cancer vaccines

Medical scientists have made amazing strides in cancer research, especially in the field of vaccines.

Did you know that lung cancer is considered to be the most deadly of the bunch? A lung cancer vaccine could be available very soon. If a cancer vaccine sounds odd, think of it this way: Cancer can be treated by chemotherapy and radiation, but there's always a chance of it coming back. People who have survived cancer could theoretically take the vaccine and massively improve their chances of reoccurrence.

A similar vaccine is showing promising results in clinical trials for pancreatic cancer.

3. Better treatment for Alzheimers

Alzheimer's Disease is one of the most destructive and heartbreaking conditions imaginable. It's also extremely difficult to treat, with most currently available therapies and medications focusing on slowing or temporarily relieving certain symptoms.

One new avenue scientists are exploring is a vaccine that could target a protein called tau, which clumps together and tangles up crucial neurofibers that deliver information in the brain. One such medication aims to activate a patient's immune system and produce "a strong antibody response against both pTau and its harmful aggregated form." The drug was recently fast-tracked by the FDA and has shown promising results in human clinical trials.

Another relatively new development is the availability of monoclonal antibody treatment, which helps slow the progression of the disease. Currently, the treatments are not particularly cost-effective but may become moreso in the near future.


smiling woman in gray cardigan Photo by Tatiana Zanon on Unsplash

4. Breakthrough treatment for Huntington's Disease

Huntington's is a fatal central nervous system disorder that shuts down key brain functions in patients like speech, walking, and cognitive function. Some of the symptoms can be treated but, so far, little can be done to slow or stop the progression of the disease.

However, a new drug known as PTC518 was recently fast-tracked by the FDA due to promising results in clinical trials. It attacks mutant Huntington protein in blood cells and in cerebrospinal fluid and has been shown to improve symptoms of the disease in a 12-month trial run. What's especially exciting is that this drug attacks the disease itself rather than just treating symptoms at the surface level.

5. Targeted viruses that kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria

Bacteria is getting smarter and evolving. Antimicrobial resistance is a grave threat to the global population as well-known antibiotics become less effective against infection and new antibiotics are expensive and difficult to develop.

(If you've ever dealt with a staph infection, you know how scary it is when drugs just... don't work.)

This is where special viruses, called bacteriophages or just phages, come into play. These viruses selectively target and kill bacteria, and were actually first used about 100 years ago. Scientist are coming around to using them again. In select settings, they've proven to be incredibly effective against resistant infections, but will need more testing before they become widely available. However, it's definitely possible that this become a viable alternative to antibiotics in some cases in the next few decades!

6. Synthetic and bioprinted organs


human heart Photo by camilo jimenez on Unsplash

There are simply not enough donor organs going around for all the people who need a healthy liver, heart, or kidney.

Luckily, incredible strides have been made in creating artificial organs that can function like the real thing. A man in Australia just lived for 100 days with a titanium heart while he awaited a transplant! And bioprinting technology – quite literally 3D printing using real tissue and living cells — has the potential to create new working organs from scratch in the near future. Genetically modifying animal organs to function in humans temporarily or maybe even permanently has also come an extremely long way and is a process that will drastically improve in the coming years.

7. A one-pill cure for Hepatitis B

Hepatitis B is a potentially fatal infection of the liver that affects hundreds of millions of people worldwide. There is a safe and effective vaccine available to some people, but it's only preventative and won't treat active infections.

A research team in Israel recently discovered that a low dose of well-known chemotherapy drug, Curaxin-137, completely destroyed a crucial and mysterious protein that the Hepatitis virus depends on. The testing was done in a lab setting, so the next step is clinical trials. The team hopes that one day in the not-so-distant future, patients could take a single dose and completely eradicate the virus in their system. That's about as close to a miracle-cure as you can get!

Not all of these potential breakthroughs will come to fruition, but it's pretty amazing to dig into the advancements and discoveries that are being made every day. This list is just scratching the surface, to say nothing of robotic surgeons that will make major surgeries less invasive, new treatments for baldness, nanotechnologies that can deliver medicine to specific parts of the body, and more. Ultimately, good news is coming relatively soon for people who need it.


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Doctors share bizarre things about the human body that we still can't explain

No one knows why anesthesia actually works.

Photo credit: Canva

We know a lot, but we clearly don't know everything.

Ever watch a period piece movie or TV show where the well intentioned doctors used maggots in hopes of cleaning a wound? Or when lobotomies were the tried-and-true method of relieving mental disorders? We’ve come quite a long way in terms of medical progress since those days, but in other ways, we are just as much making our best guess about how the human body actually works as we were in the maggot days.

Even doctors can admit that many biological ins-and-outs remain a mystery, which can be frustrating as a patient when you’re told to take certain medications "because it helps” this or that ailment, without actually knowing why. But at the same time, you have to kind of marvel at how much there is yet to discover, even within us. It only further shows the need to continue investing in medical research, but that’s a different conversation.

Recently, several doctors online shared many things that we still don’t really know about the human body, and some of the answers were pretty surprising:

“I’m an anesthesiologist. We still don’t really know why inhaled volatile anesthetics like sevoflurane, the principal anesthetic agent used to maintain general anesthesia, work. We kind of have an idea of maybe how it happens, but really we don’t know. It’s commonly said in my field that whoever figures this out will win the next Nobel prize in medicine.”

doctor providing anesthesia to a patientWeird...but effective. Photo credit: Canva

That’s interesting. And now for something a tad grosser…

“We apparently don't know precisely how our bodies can distinguish gas from poop. We have some ideas, we know there are a ton of nerve endings in the area, but the precise mechanism of our bodies telling our brains ‘this is a fart, let loose’ isn't really understood. What blows my mind is, it's distinct enough that we even pass gas while asleep. That difference must be wired DEEP!”

a person holding their behind that's glowing red to signify gasWe don't know how our bodies know, but thank goodness they do. Photo credit: Canva

Quite a few answers pertained to some topics we might never actually solve.

“The Role of Our DNA: We’ve sequenced the human genome, but a large part of it remains unexplained.”

a hand holding a strand of DNASeems pretty important. Photo credit: Canva

“I’m a derm. We don’t know what exactly causes itching, like the molecular pathways for it. That’s why it can be so hard to find a good treatment when a patient comes in for itchy skin.”

a woman scratching her armTrial and error.Photo credit: Canva

“I'm a sleep specialist. While we do have some good theories about some of the functions of REM as far as how it affects the brain and health, we still don't fully understand the purpose of dreaming. Like, why do we dream at all and why do dreams have a narrative instead of random incomprehensible imagery? Unfortunately this is unlikely to even be solved..”

a woman sleepingMaybe our brains get bored while we're out and want to watch a self-made movie? Photo credit: Canva

There were a few mysteries that pertain specifically to women’s health. Historically, women's health research has been significantly underfunded and understudied, so this is fairly unsurprising.

“OBGYN here: we still don’t know exactly what makes labor start. We know all about the mechanics and physiology, but we don’t know what makes the average uterus say it’s ‘go time.’”

pregnant woman holding her stomach in pain When the body knows, it knows. Photo credit: Canva

“Apparently we know next to nothing about fibroids, which like 75% of women have at some point in their lives. That's great, considering that the largest one removed was 100 lbs- so not exactly a minor issue. There are theories about different hormones and what things put you at higher risk, but aside from having surgery to have your existing ones removed, there is basically no information on what you can to do prevent them from coming back.”

doctor presenting a model of a uterus while a woman sits on a medical chair in the backgroundIt's a big deal and we need to understand it. Photo credit: Canva

There was also talk of how our gut—how we process nutrition, and how that affects our mental health—is somewhat of a final frontier in medicine.

“We don't know the precise mechanism by which B12 deficiency causes nerve damage. We know that it happens, but not why.”

collection of foods around a sign that says, "Vitamin B12"B12, the final frontier.Photo credit: Canva

“Not MD but PhD, right now we are working on the connection between our intestinal microbiome and neuropsychiatric disease and brain aging. For instance, people with inflammatory bowel disease are more likely to develop dementia and experience co-morbid anxiety and depression, but we don't know why.”

“The Gut Microbiome: While it's well-known that the gut plays a huge role in digestion, researchers are discovering just how much our gut bacteria affect other parts of our health, like mood, immunity, and even brain function.”

diagram of the digestive system with a close up of gut bacteriaSome say we have two brains: in the head and in the gut.Photo credit: Canva

For those who have ever taken anti-anxiety medication…

“Benzodiazepines, BZD, are medications like Xanax and Valium. They produce anti-anxiety effects. And they have a very distinct chemical shape to fit into the BZD site in a group of five proteins. But we don’t know what is supposed to go there. Many medications are analogs of naturally binding molecules that we copy and then use to create an effect. The BZD site is for something, we just don’t know what.”

close up of a bunch of pillsPhoto credit: Canva

By and large, mental health is still the Wild Wild West for medical professionals, it seems.

“Doctor here. Off the top of my head, here's a few deceptively big ones:

  1. Psychiatry is still shockingly infantile in our understanding of human disorders. It's constantly in a state of flux, we don't understand a lot about the meds we currently use, and the diagnostic criteria for disorders still changes as we realize "hey maybe all these behaviors aren't the same source disorder". It's incredibly hard to diagnose when the criteria is largely based on self report and subjective observations.
  2. To a lesser degree than #1, neurology is still learning a lot. It's further because you can observe more objective findings in neuro than psych, but we still struggle a lot with how brains function."

a red cut out of a head with a tangle of string where the brain would be; a blue cut out of a head with a spiral of string where the brain should beAren't we all just brains trying to understand ourselves? Photo credit: Canva

And yet, another doctor writes:

“One of the few ABSOLUTES in medical science is that nobody born blind has ever developed schizophrenia.”

Goes to show, we might be in the age of information, but there is still so much of the unknown to marvel at. Hopefully it keeps us humble and curious.

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