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Comment by NiceWayToDoIT | Hacker News Reader

I find this weirdly amazing, as to this day I was reading some medical news and documentaries where it was said that entire human bodies were sliced by millimetre slices. So, somehow I always imagined that each part of body and tissue is 100% known and that only left is to find out what are inner workings on the nano-meter scale, deep molecular levels or genetic level.

But in 2018 there was a similar news about Interstitium: https://www.livescience.com/62128-interstitium-organ.html

In 2017 there was mesentery: https://www.livescience.com/57370-mesentery-new-organ-identi...

Now we have this. So, reading this left me with one though "hidden in plain sight" and wondering what else is there.

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We know there's stuff there, but we don't necessarily know what all of it does. In this case the tissue in question was probably thought to be part of a known larger structure, but now it turns out it has a distinct function. Slices aren't going to tell you that.

To phrase it another way: form is different than function

On top of that, not every one has the same tissues in the same places, or the same tissues at all. Most famous is the palmaris longus muscle in the arm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmaris_longus_muscle

~14% of humans lack this muscle.

Other deviations range from colorblindness all the way to lack of a cerebellum entirely.

Humans are quite variable, even when healthy.

TIL I'm missing a muscle.

Me too. Though I wasn't missing it as such, until now.

Still easy to miss if you don't know what you're looking for, which, by definition, we didn't, because in attentional terms, What You Know Is All There Is.

The Visible Human Project

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPPjUtiAGYs

There's also this: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-researcher...

lymphatic system connected to brain

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/06/150601122445.h...

(2013) https://www.livescience.com/40981-new-ligament-found-in-huma...

A new ligament discovered next to the ACL

https://www.livescience.com/37348-new-layer-discovered-in-hu...

new eye layer

From Wikipedia: "The total fluid volume of the interstitium during health is about 20% of body weight".

Wow. How could we possibly have missed this? Medical researchers must tend non-quantitative.

Putting aside your insult to medical researchers, it's not that they couldn't account for 20% of body weight. They knew there was fluid around cells, but the tissue sampling method would not preserve it so they couldn't inspect it. With the new sampling method they could see the structure, and realized these are more like connected spaces filled with fluid rather than small individual pockets.

>Although researchers already knew that there is fluid between individual cells, the idea of a larger, connected interstitium — in which there are fluid-filled spaces within tissues — had been described only vaguely in the literature, Theise said. The new study, he said, expands the concept of the interstitium by showing these structured, fluid-filled spaces within tissues, and is the first to define the interstitium as an organ in and of itself.

Well I guess you could say the Neuralinks that Musk implanted in everyone are hidden in plain sight. We're just programmed to not notice them ;)

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