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Humans have a new organ and it's thanks to surgeons in Limerick

The mesentery is now being classified as a single structure.

TIME / YouTube

YOU PROBABLY HAVEN’T heard about the mesentery but without it you wouldn’t be able to stand up.

Until recently, this six-foot long part of the digestive system wasn’t classified as a single organ in medical textbooks, but now largely thanks to surgeons at the University of Limerick it is.

Basically, what the mesentery does is keep your intestine in place in way that means it doesn’t have to be attached to your abdomen.

J Calvin Coffey, Professor of Surgery at the Graduate Entry Medical School in the University of Limerick, says you should be thankful for it every time you walk to the kettle.

“The small intestine has a spiral conformation and that’s important,” he explains.

“It’s determined by the mesentery because the mesentery attaches to the body wall in a spiral conformation.

What that means is when you stand up, let’s say want to make a cup of coffee, your intestine doesn’t fall into your pelvis and stop working. It keeps it in the right shape and keeps it suspended, it means we can all stand up.

The existence of the mesentery isn’t a complete surprise. Doctors have always known it was there but it was thought there were several mesenteries keeping your insides secure.

Instead, work by Coffey and his colleagues on patients who have had their colons removed was able to prove that it was one continuous structure.

This idea was suggested as far back as Leonardo da Vinci, who drew it as single structure, but erroneous descriptions in the 19th century have until recently been repeated as dogma.

Medical journal The Lancet recently published the results of Coffey’s research and the mesentery has also now been listed as an organ in human anatomy textbook Gray’s Anatomy.

It’s not just for research though. Coffey explains that knowing the true make-up of the mesentery and its place in the digestive system could make for less invasive surgeries.

“The embryonic roadmap that the body was put together in, persists into adulthood,” he says.

So we can identify embryological planes and the network of planes. We can actually identify them, act with them and dissect along them. By doing that we can, almost bloodlessly, separate things along the planes that nature actually put things together in the first instance.

Read: Cannabis ingredient to be classed as medicine in UK >

Read: Cannabis-based products won’t be in pharmacies tomorrow, but we have a timeline >

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    Mute Marlowemallow
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    Nov 26th 2016, 1:56 PM

    Same jihad, different country. The US has since 1983 resettled many Somali refugees in Minnesota. And they’ve had some screening issues with both the first and second generation.

    “Al Qaeda’s Somali affiliate has claimed credit for a Saturday suicide bombing that killed 10 in Mogadishu, and says one of the men who carried out the attack was a 22-year-old man from Minnesota known to his friends back home as “Bullethead.”

    Abdisalan Hussein Ali, who was born in Somalia but raised in Minneapolis, disappeared from Minnesota in 2008.

    …he would be the fourth Somali-American to launch a suicide attack in Somalia.

    “That is a fundamental change in how we have seen terrorism [since] the attacks of 9/11,” said Napolitano. Since 2006 as many as 30 young Somali men have left the United States to fight in Somalia. The probe into the youths going to fight overseas in Somalia’s war received increased attention from the FBI and DHS officials after Shirwa Ahmed, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Somalia, blew himself up in a suicide bombing in northern Somalia Oct. 28, 2008 in an attack that targeted an African Union intelligence post. A second young man from the Seattle area blew himself up in an attack in 2009.”

    http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/al-shabab-suicide-bomber-somalia-american/story?id=14851524

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    Mute Marlowemallow
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    Nov 26th 2016, 1:58 PM

    @Marlowemallow: And some are now joining IS instead. The mainstream media, of course, is ‘puzzled’ about why Somali heritage young people would go to fight in Syria. Because it’s apparently difficult to understand that not everyone views the world as divided into nation-states.

    “Refugees began settling in Minnesota after the government of Somalia collapsed in 1991. This isn’t the first time the community has struggled to counter the appeal of violent extremism to the state’s Somalis, but is much more puzzling. Somalis have no national or ethnic ties to Syria and Iraq, a link that helped explain why some went to fight with al-Shabab when Ethiopia invaded Somalia in 2006.

    Young men joining that terrorist group felt a nationalistic call to defend their nation against rival state Ethiopia, but many of those drawn to the Islamic State were born in the U.S. and have never been to Somalia, let alone Syria. Still in April, six Twin Cities youth were arrested for attempting to join the Islamic State group. At least one of the men has conspired to travel to Syria since 2014, according to prosecutors.

    “As far as we know there is no one profile that brings [together] all these people who are leaving,” says Abdisalam Adam, an imam at Dar Al-Hijrah Mosque in Minneapolis. “Some people say, ‘Oh they are the ones who are not doing well,’ or whatever. That’s not true. There are some of them who have the opportunity of working, some are in school.”

    http://www.usnews.com/news/the-report/articles/2015/07/02/minneapolis-somali-community-struggles-with-islamic-state-recruitment

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    Mute The Guru
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    Nov 26th 2016, 1:45 PM

    Are any bombings not horrific?

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    Mute Micheal OLainn
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    Nov 26th 2016, 2:14 PM

    @The Guru: all bombing are horrific.

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    Mute Marlowemallow
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    Nov 26th 2016, 2:19 PM

    @The Guru: It’s a quote from the police official who is the source for the story. Captain Mohamed Hussein is unlikely to be implying that Islamist bombings are more horrific than any other kind.

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    Mute Warthog
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    Nov 26th 2016, 1:45 PM

    Has not Al-Shabab aligned itself with ISIS?

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    Mute Marlowemallow
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    Nov 26th 2016, 1:52 PM

    @Warthog: Think that was part of Boko Haram – they became Islamic State in West Africa.

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    Mute Hugh Mannatee
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    Nov 26th 2016, 2:01 PM

    Lovely group of moderate islamists. Respectors of human rights par excellence. A beacon of humanity to the world.

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    Mute Patrick J O'CONNOR
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    Nov 26th 2016, 7:34 PM

    Little Mogadishu,Minnesota, home to high concentration of Somali support for Al-Shabab and ISIS is now represented by Jew-hater Muslim convert Keith Ellison in the house and is running for DNC leadership.
    Ellison has tried to thwart the FBI from blocking the money supply from Minnesota to Al-Shabab.

    —”The Little Mogadishu neighborhood is represented by Democrat congressman Keith Ellison, who liberals proudly tout as the first Muslim-American Congressman. Ellison – who famously swore his oath of office on a Koran – has been a key player in public attacks on those seeking to expose the threat of radical Islam, including former Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert.

    Somali terror cell Al-Shabaab has been actively and successfully recruiting in Ellison’s district for years, even producing a slick recruitment video inviting young men in Minnesota to travel overseas and join the jihad. The video has proven disturbingly effective.—-”
    http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/05/05/the-texas-terror-connection-to-muslim-congressman-keith-ellisons-minneapolis-district/

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    Mute Tony Hardwicke
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    Nov 26th 2016, 1:40 PM

    What a hole

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