Body Worlds 3, part 1

Yesterday I went to see Body Worlds 3 at The Leonardo, next to the Salt Lake City Library. I'd been wanting to see Body Worlds since my mom showed me an article about it in the Smithsonian magazine, a long time ago. It's been in Salt Lake since...November, maybe? and the exhibit is ending this weekend, so I finally went.

It's kind of a spendy exhibit; for me to see it (as a student) with an audio guide it cost me $26. I had a $2 coupon, which I was going to use online until I found out that there's a $2.50 service charge if you purchase tickets online. So I would be paying an extra .50 to use the coupon. I decided I would just take the coupon and buy my ticket in person. When I tried to do that, they told me that the coupons are valid online. Not at the ticket office. AND, not only that, there is a $1 service charge to buy tickets in person.

Whaaaat...? So I paid full price plus my extra dollar to buy a ticket at the actual thing. I think that's stupid. You're not supposed to have to pay a box office fee to buy museum tickets. AND! Furthermore! You could say that they have to pay to employ people at the box office, or something, except that they are volunteers. The people at the box office and the people throughout the exhibit are all volunteers.

I think the exhibit was worth $12 for students, $15 for regular admission. And no box office fees in person or online.

Still, I'm glad I went.

One of my coworkers volunteers there, and I asked him if photography was allowed. He said it absolutely was not. He said that if anyone caught me taking pictures, they would take my phone away and make some volunteer delete all of the pictures from my camera. It felt like a challenge to me. I got about 70 pictures. No flash, of course. And my phone doesn't click when it takes pictures. (My coworker was impressed.)

I won't post all 70, because that would be a really long blog post, and you'd probably feel like I did at the end of the exhibit--like I'd seen the same thing 70 times. But it was still kinda neat.

This is the nervous system:



Okay, so what they would do is, inject veins and capillaries with their plastic stuff, which would harden, and then use enzymes to eat away the real stuff. So this picture below is the blood flow of a brain, like, molded from the inside of veins. Using the plastic stuff this way makes it so that you can see better what's actually going on, and smaller stuff is more visible. Or something.


This is one of the ones like they're famous for. It's an archer.
One of the big themes of the exhibit is STOP SMOKING. These are normal lungs and smoker lungs. (Also in the lungs section, they have an I QUIT box where you can throw away your cigarettes and make a commitment to stop smoking then and there.)

Another one of the famous ones...

They had a whole section full of babies. They had fetuses from all different stages, and that section was really interesting.
After the room of babies, they have a case full of placentas. The funny thing about this was, there was a family next to me where the mom was holding her daughter, and the girl was young enough that you would probably still count how many words she knows how to say. She pointed at this one and said excitedly, "A pizza!". Her mom was amused, and so was I.

This one was of a woman pedaling, but they cut her in slices the long way. Very interesting.


This picture shows the basic layout of the exhibit. Veins on top. Cases down the middle. Posters on the sides, with nice quotes about the heart, or excerpts from writing about the heart, or QUIT SMOKING stuff, etc, and occasional big boxes on the sides with the bodies doing interesting things that these exhibits are famous for.

This one I really liked. It was a guy balancing on three balls, and then one arm reached up above him and he was balancing all of his internal organs. I have other pictures of this, but I felt like I already was putting a lot on here.

The veins, etc, of a rooster. (In the background you can see the same thing of a baby lamb.)
There was other interesting stuff too, but downstairs I think this was the coolest one. It's a couple, and out of the guy's back is his brain and all of his organs, and out of the girls back is her brain with all of her blood stuff (kind of like the rooster, except a person.)

The other stuff I want to post from the exhibit is not part of the exhibit at all; it's stuff from the end of the exhibit. It includes examples from the "What is your favorite body part?" wall of tiles, and also from the "Body Secrets" wall, where people were invited to post secrets about their bodies. Interesting.

Anyway, there were a lot of other things that I didn't post, and I highly recommend visiting the exhibit this weekend if you haven't been yet. I think they're doing an open-24-hours thing to finish stuff up, so you can make time for it at like 3 in the am hours, when you were just planning on sleeping. It was pretty cool.