6. Bones & Skeletal Tissue
Gross Anatomy of Bone: Compact and Spongy Bone
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This example tells me that spongy bone and compact bone are sometimes compared to scaffolding in a brick or concrete wall, and it wants me to explain that analogy. So let's take a look. Alright. Over here on the left, we have scaffolding, and we have a little picture of scaffolding, and it has all these bars or pipes that are connected in different directions. It has a little ladder going up too. But all these bars and pipes, they're individually they're quite strong, but when you connect them in all these different ways, you can create a structure that together is incredibly stable and strong, stronger than any one pipe or bar could be on its own. And yet most of the structure is empty space. That reminds me a lot of spongy bone. Spongy bone, we said, are these bony struts that are pointed in all different directions and connected to each other with space in between them. Together, they create this quite rigid and quite strong structure even though most of the space is filled with marrow. So my reasoning, both of them are gonna be struts surrounding space. Now we can compare that to this brick wall over here, and this brick wall shows a little picture of some bricks. And brick wall is hard. It is heavy. It is solid. That reminds me a lot of compact bone. Compact bone is all those things. It's really hard. It's solid. Now technically, there's microscopic spaces in there, and we're gonna learn all about those microscopic spaces in future videos. But compared to spongy bone, it's much, much more solid, which also makes it heavier. But because it's heavy and hard, that's why it's on the outside of the bone protecting that scaffolding, the spongy bone on the inside that's a little bit more delicate. So for my reasoning, I'm just gonna say those things. It is solid. It's hard. It's heavy. Gotta spell heavy correctly, though. Alright. So we're gonna rely on these two analogies a little more going forward, so keep them in mind. For now, there's a couple more problems to fall. Give them a try.
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