Videos

I made my project into a video like I did last semester, because I thought it was a unique and simplistic visual aid that everyone can watch and receive the message almost instantly. I hope that this style is okay with everyone; as making movies is actually a passion of mine and I am not very good at hands on crafts and art projects. My project is on the changes that occur during pregnancy, specifically to the breasts of a female’s body as it undergoes the changes necessary to facilitate the growth of life. I made a time-lapse video of myself sketching the breasts before pregnancy and breasts during pregnancy. Many changes take place during pregnancy, and a lot of changes actually take place in the breasts themselves. In my exterior sketch, you can see that the breasts become fuller and this is because the female body begins the production of milk when they start growing a child inside of their uterus. You can also see that purple stretchmarks appear as the breasts grow bigger, and these are due to the stretching of skin as they expand. Another important exterior change Is that the areolas and nipples increase in size and sometimes become darker due to increased blood flow to the breasts. These exterior changes are the ones that we hear about the most because they are the changes that we can actually see when we examine them, but there are also many important changes occurring on the inside as well. An increase in estrogen levels allows extra growth of milk ducts and glandular buds that help to produce the milk that the mother will eventually feed her baby with. Other hormones that play significant roles in milk production are human placental lactogen, luteinizing hormone, and oxytocin. As the breasts swell making room for milk storage, the milk ducts extend and elongate in order to accommodate this change. I really enjoyed learning about all of the changes that occur during pregnancy, as someone that would like to be a mom one day, I was interested in how my body will change throughout my pregnancy. I think that pregnancy is such an interesting topic and the reproductive system was one of my very favorite units from this entire class. I think it is very important to recognize all of the changes that a woman’s body goes through in order to bring life into the world, and I think it makes the whole birth process even more incredible and miraculous. Our bodies work hard to keep us alive and well throughout our entire lives, and when a woman becomes pregnant her body not only takes care of itself, but takes care of another life as well and that is something that I find absolutely amazing. The human body is incredible and I just wanted to say how grateful I am to have been a part of such a great class full of great people these last two semesters! Learning about the human body has been an amazing experience that I will not soon forget! Thanks for a great semester, you guys and have a wonderful summer!

All my best,

Miranda Lally

Citations:

Breast Changes During Pregnancy. (2019, November 8). Retrieved from https://americanpregnancy.org/pregnancy-health/breast-changes-during-pregnancy/

PATUREL, A., & KOKSHANIAN, R. (2011). the whole 9 months.  Fit Pregnancy,  18(1), 90—96.

Stanford Children’s Health. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.stanfordchildrens.org/en/topic/default?id=normal-breast-development-and-changes-85-P00151

I talk about the humoral adaptive response and have an interactive activity to show you how the symptoms of RA affect the patient.

My STEAM project is about juvenile polyps. I made a short video explaining how juvenile polyps disrupt our digestive system, a unit we most recently went over. I also share how polyps develop under an unfortunate mutation in the immune system. The immune system is a unit we went over towards the beginning of the semester.

I created my STEAM project to show the constriction of bronchioles during an asthma attack. It was hard to portray with the materials on hand and capturing it on video but hopefully the idea is there!

The bronchioles end in the alveoli, the sacs where gas exchange takes place- it’s here that carbon dioxide from the blood diffuses into the alveoli to be exhaled, while oxygen that is inhaled crosses into the blood to be distributed through the body. Obviously with such an essential process taking place here, it’s important that every passageway leading here is clear and functioning. My project shows what happens with asthma when the bronchioles become constricted and fluid filled which hampers not only basic breathing but the specific and very important gas exchange too.

The purple straw in my video is a healthy bronchiole: smooth on the outside, open, wide, and free of obstruction. The plastic white straw represents a damaged bronchiole due to asthma: it’s constricted, misshapen, narrower, and also is lined with “mucus”. The mucus is shown by honey and the smoothie stayed the same (consistency wise) except for the fact that I drank some between takes 🙂 the video was too big to upload so it should be accessible by

I created a model of fetal development through wax and dye on an egg. The top of the egg cycles through the beginning stages of pregnancy from a fertilized egg through a 2 and 4 cell stage to a 16-cell stage. The second cycle on the egg shows the development of the blastocyst and the final cycle shows the fetus from week 4 to week 20. This represents a normal pregnancy. I also separated these stages in order to compare a normal pregnancy to an ectopic pregnancy. An ectopic pregnancy typically lasts until around week 6 to 8 until it could become fatal to a mother.  This would be at the beginning of the second cycle shown on the egg. I made this distinction between the different levels (from top to bottom on the egg) to show that an ectopic pregnancy would not make it to the third level.