One of the most unique and interesting things about our lymphatic system is that it sends the lymph in only one direction. Think of it like a river - the water flows downstream to the ocean, but never runs back up the same way. However, unlike river water, lymph doesn’t rely solely on the help of gravity to get it moving. In fact, it sometimes needs to flow against gravity.

The integumentary system includes our hair, skin, and nails. Why are these all grouped within the same system? It might not be obvious at first, but they all serve a unifying function. The skin, hair, and nails provide a barrier between our internal organs and the external world, protecting our body from pathogens and our organs from injury.

Meditation is a practice dating back to ancient times. Early Hindu and Buddhist monks discovered techniques that allow a meditator to train their attention and awareness. There are many different forms of mediation, and all of these forms have different goals. Some styles are designed to bring up particular emotions, like love and joy. Other forms, like mindfulness meditation, are designed to help you better control your attention and awareness, and to help you regulate your emotions (parents, if you’d like to learn more about emotion regulation in kids, ask our resident psychology PhD student by submitting your interest on the Ask Dr. B page! 

Welcome, Know Yourselfers, to our twelfth and final adventure! It’s been a long ride, but here we stand at the integumentary system -- the perfect one to wrap it all up! As I’m sure you know by now, the integumentary system consists of your skin, hair, and nails, and I’d be happy to shed some light. It’s a big system, which leaves a lot of unanswered questions, but never fear, Dr. Bonafide is here to give you the skin-ny! I said give you the skinny -- did you hair me? Ha ha ha...nailed it!

The best games are the ones where you are moving your body. Not only are they entertaining, but they’re also extremely healthy. One of the best things you can do for your health is to move your body as much as possible, so we want you to get some fresh air and get moving with some fun activities. . This isn’t all fun and games, though - we also want you to understand what is going on in your body while exercising.

Are you afraid of spiders? Many of us are, and when confronted with one, we’ll have one of two responses - the first is fight- to spring into action and show that spider who runs the jungle. The second is flight- to run away in fear. This human response to perceived threats is aptly named the fight-or-flight response, and is the result of an interaction between our brain and endocrine system, an interaction called the - you ready? - hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis*. For brevity’s sake, we call it the HPA axis.

Say you need to get a bunch of your friends—more than a quintillion of them, in fact—from one place to another to do an important job. Naturally, you’re going to need a creative way to get them there. Would you use a plane, train, or car? Maybe you’d need all of the above! This is exactly what the respiratory system does: it gets oxygen from the air, through the body, and all the way to the tissues to help the cells make energy from the food you eat. Then it needs to send the cells’ waste—carbon dioxide—out of the body. We call this process gas exchange. Fortunately, it gets a hand from your circulatory system and several clever modes of transportation to get the job done.

Welcome back to another Ask Dr. B. Today we’re talking about social psychology—that is, how your thoughts, beliefs, and actions are changed by interacting with others (and I don’t just mean things you do by yourself that you would be embarrassed to do in front of other people—like singing into your stethoscope in front of a mirror! Not that I do that….). Let’s get out of our heads and into the questions.

We can't see it, and usually can't smell it...but have you ever thought about the air you breathe? What's it made of, anyway? Is all air created equal? The lungs are the central organs of the respiratory system. They play a vital role in a wide variety of critical bodily functions that keep you alive and healthy. For example, the lungs, assisted by muscles of respiration like the diaphragm (located below the lungs) and the intercostal muscles (found between the ribs), are responsible for the body’s ability to breathe.

When an allergen enters your respiratory system, it can set off a false alarm that causes your immune system to mistake it for an invader. Recall from Adv. 6 that your immune system responds to viral invaders by creating antibodies[note for web design: link to Adv. 6materials]. The immune system does just that - it forms antibodies to fight the allergen, even though it’s harmless. Each time you encounter the allergen thereafter, the new antibodies alert the immune system, which responds by releasing histamine (Say it like this: HI-stuh-meen).Histamine is a hormone, and we remember from Adv. 8 what they do[note for web design: link to Adv. 8 materials]- they tell your cells to do stuff! In this case, they tell your cells to sneeze, cough, irritate your eyes, or make your nose run.

Let's take a look at how we’re affected by what  others  are thinking and feeling (or what we assume they’re feeling). This science, called  social psychology,  is the study of how our interactions with other people change the way we act and think. People have been writing about social psychology as far back as the ancient Greeks (and likely even further), but it was William McDougall who published   An Introduction to Social Psychology  in 1908, the first notable work on the subject written in English.  Since then, psychologists have been studying and naming various ways the speech, actions, and presence of other people affect our own - in obvious and in not-so-obvious ways.

You’re sweating, flushed, nauseous, and fumbling for words...is the flu coming on? No, it’s just time to talk about the “P” word: puberty. Are you worrying about how to bring up the topic with your pre-teen? It can be an awkward subject for both parents and kids, but understanding the science of what’s happening can help to put everyone at ease.