Anatomy 101

Amid firecrackers, nice weather and barbecue smells emanating from my neighbor's yard I might better be out celebrating the weekend, but, I'm locked up in the office clearing off a few things including a malware invasion of my computer. Should have avoided clicking on that video of Alex Rodriguez's wife. Thank goodness for Spybot Search and Destroy, and where the heck was my Norton 360.

But, on to the big stuff. Our youngster's cruising down the track and we're leaning over the rails thinking what's holding those front legs together. Knee carpals, sesamoids, metacarpals of the pastern, even the splint bone, but I'd think Dr. Cruz (last post) U of Ontario researchers are looking at cannon bone structure assuming the principles will apply across the board, and thus, so will I.

We know (from diligent reading of this blog), the cannon consists of collagen and mineral lattices in various stages of mineralization as well as significant enervation, blood vessels and various canals permeating the outer bone structure. We may find more collagen as opposed to mineralized bone in our youngster compared to my 13 year old retiree.

How strong is this bone, and what may it withstand? We go back to that image of Nunnamaker et. al. striking and bending cadaver bones to discover the breaking points. What confuses our conceptions here is the mixture in the bones of dead and live tissue. Is e.g. bone more akin to the strength of rock or steel (somebody compared it to reinforced concrete), or perhaps, as I'm thinking, a similarly sized limb of a tree?

To give a little more perspective, we're talking here bones and "fracture resistance", but fracture resistance is also a mechanical engineering concept that applies to all solid materials and becomes relevant in such inquires as the Minnesota bridge collapse. We know e.g. that many solid materials(absent weakness and cracks) will resist fracture until they reach a point of breakage where the particular bonding material will simply give way all at once.

To investigate this process a look at the atomic/molecular/cellular level is necessary, and we pull out our electron microscope. The inquiry will include the recognition that in mixed live/dead materials such as tree limbs and horse bones there will be a differing fracture effect on the ossified or dead wood portions than the collagen or living plant cells. You'd think the live stuff would "tear" in the fracture process whereas the more ossified materials might "explode" with sufficient stress.

Complex stuff because we also in bone look at the effect of stress on both live and dead substance and a mixture of the two. Now, I'm back to the barbecue until I investigate this further.

Training:
Wed 7/3: the horses went a slow riderless 1.5 miles yesterday in prep for today's speed work. Never happened. 3.17 inches of rain instead. Unknown that I've ever seen that much at once. It was about 9 inches in the buckets. Started just as I was leaving the office to go train.
Thurs. 7/4 Farm under water. Off for the second day.
Fri 7/5 Thanks to some sun we're back in business. It's been a questionable 5 days of training. Weather again. 15 minutes of riderless play for both to get back into it. Went something like 8 x 3f slow with rests between in the mud.