I have a joke about a snail lover.
He wanted to take it slow?
Yeah, I wrote that.
Hey everybody, this is Matt. You may have seen him before. He does our Facebook video and
and he's gonna help us out here on Youtube today, welcome!
Hi, everybody!
Which is larger, Matt? Your left foot or your right foot? I know you just got here
it's a personal question, we need to know.
Well my left foot is actually half a size larger than my right foot.
That's so weird! My right foot is actually a bit larger than my left foot
But I’ve gotten used to it.
Yeah, me too.
Lots of animals have body asymmetry, it’s a completely normal thing.
Even though our bodies are balanced with two arms and two legs and a usually fairly symmetrical
face…
Our hearts tend to grow to the left, our stomachs swoop down from left to right.
Yeah!
And scientists aren’t really sure why!
But not everyone has a heart on the left and liver on the right, they can be backwards
-- insidely speaking.
It’s called situs inversus and and it was first documented in 1788.
Today we know it happens to 1 in 20,000 people.
Everything inside their bodies are the same, but mirrored!
It’s so weird!
And yet, really interesting.
So to learn more about it, scientists are studying Jeremy.
Jeremy’s not a person with situs inversus though.
Nope.
Jeremy is a snail.
Matt did a whole video over on Seeker’s facebook page that talks all about Jeremy,
the loneliest left-handed snail.
In humans, doctors have determined exactly when this
asymmetrical mirroring happens -- in the womb, when the
pre-human is still embryonic.
A node, on the midline of the embyro -- inside that node are cilia which move at a rate “of
about 10 times per second” When researchers disabled the cilia by editing a gene in mice,
they produced mirrored organs!
Being backwards on the inside does come with some issues though... congenital heart defects
being the largest.
You’d probably know if you had it.
You know, I talked to Angus Davison, the scientist studying Jeremy, and he mentioned Enrique
Iglesias has a heart on the opposite side.
He can be my hero, yabab.
Is that baby, backwards?
Yeah, sort of.
Whatever.
You can watch more videos by Matt and our Facebook video team by heading to Facebook.com/SeekerMedia
-- they’re awesome.
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