The Science of Everything Podcast - Episode 26: Human Organ Systems

Episode Date: December 21, 2011

A brief overview of all the human organ systems, including their major components and functions. Also includes an examination of how the organ systems work together to promote the proper functioning of the organism. Recommended pre-listening is Episode 25: Organs, Tissues and Systems.

You're listening to The Science of Everything podcast, episode 26, human organ systems. And I'm your host, James Fodor. This episode is in continuation from the previous episode where I talked about tissues, tissues, organs and systems. In this episode, I'm going to discuss the human organ systems in more detail, what they do in general terms. And I'll conclude with a broad discussion of how organ systems work together to keep the human body going and to fulfill its function. Bear in mind that this is only a brief introduction to all the systems, just so you have an idea of what they are and what they do.

I'll go into more detail in each of these systems in a future episode, probably about one, maybe sometimes two systems to a podcast. So, hopefully this will be a relatively short episode, because it's just a continuation of episode 25. Recommend that you listen to that before you listen to this one if you haven't already. All right, so let's get started. Human organ systems. One thing that I'd like to point out, many of these systems are quite similar in most mammals. indeed many animals in general have similar systems, but my comments are going to be specifically directed to human organ systems. Okay, so the human organ systems, there are approximately a dozen of them,

depends exactly how to categorize them. They can be lumped together in different ways, but the way I prefer is to lump them into the very broad categories of the systems that provide for the structure and protection of the human body, those that provide for metabolism, those that facilitate communication, and then sort of on its own is the reproductive system. So I'm going to talk about each of those in turn in those groupings, rather than say alphabetical order or some other order

that sometimes is presented, which isn't very helpful. So we'll start with the systems that provide for structure and protection of the human body. The first one I'm going to talk about is the skeletal system. Now, this consists of all of the bones in the human body, both the fused bones, like the bones in the skull, and other bones connected together. Bones are generally connected and supported by ligaments, tendons,

also muscles and cartilage. I talked about some of those things in the previous episode. The purpose of the skeletal system is basically to serve as a scaffold to support the organs and also muscles in various parts of the body. It also protects important organs, such as, for example, the rib cage protecting the heart and lungs, and, of course, the skull protecting the brain. Remember, from the previous episode, bones are not just lumps of sort of hard matter. They're actually living tissue with constant death.

and rebirth of cells and changes in the mineral substrate of the extracellular material and so on. So the skeletal system is really a proper system. Perhaps one of the other main important functions of the skeletal system is also to move the body, because although muscles, many people think, are associated with moving the body, muscles actually what they do is pull on bones. It's actually sort of the bones that move things around directly in some sense. So it's sort of muscles contract, which then pulls on tendons, which then moves the bones. which allows the limbs to move and the body to move and so on.

So that's the skeletal system. Basically protects vital organs, helps support the body and helps move it around. So closely related to the skeletal system is obviously the muscular system. This consists of the skeletal smooth and cardiac muscles, which we covered in previous episode. Obviously, muscular system permits the movement of the body and maintains our posture.

It also produces a lot of body heat, obviously, as we move around, that requires contracting and relaxation of muscles, which requires metabolism to generate the energy necessary to move those proteins around, and that in turn generates a lot of heat. So muscles are important for maintaining body temperature as well. Muscles are also important for circulating blood, obviously, particularly the cardiac muscles, and also smooth muscles, are responsible for helping blood vessels,

pump blood around, and also moving other things like passing materials through the digestive system and so on. So muscles generally for moving the body and moving things around inside the body. Very important. muscles also comprise a large proportion of the overall weight of the body. I think it's something like a third or something like that. It does differ between men and women. So they do weigh a lot and use a lot of energy.

Okay, next one is the integumentary system. This is basically the skin and its appendages, which include hair, scales, obviously not in humans, and feathers, also not found in humans, but nails. So nails and hair are all part of the integumentary system, but it's mostly just the skin. The skin is also actually rather heavy. I forget how heavy exactly, but it's some things.

significant fraction of total body weight. Most people, this is a slightly less familiar system, but it's a very important one. First of all, as you might have guessed by its grouping, it does provide for protection and cushioning of the body. It's sort of part of the immune system, which I'll talk about in a second, so it does protect from pathogens from getting inside the body and infecting us. It also keeps out water, so it prevents, or keeps water in to prevent the body from becoming desiccated, dried out, and just generally keeps things together, protects us from injuries, and so on. Obviously, if internal organs like the brain or the heart were exposed to the outside world,

there'd be a much higher risk of injury. So the integramatory system is very important in providing for that. The thickness of the skin and also the adipose or fat tissue that lies directly beneath the skin in most places varies greatly in thickness, depending on how much support and protection that section of the body requires. So, for example, the buttocks and soles of the feet have a very thick layers of skin and fat and adipose tissue underlying them because they require a lot of support. Whereas, say something like the forehead or eyelids have very little, because that does not require as much support, which just emphasises the importance of the integumentary system and providing that protection, cushioning and support and so on.

The integumentary system is also the attachment site for sensory receptors to detect pain, pressure, temperature, and touch, which basically means we feel with the skin, which really makes sense, because that's the part of us that interacts with the external environment, so it needs to be able to sense pain and pressure and so on. Okay, so moving on to the... the lymphatic system. Now the lymphatic system is another one that is a bit less well known. It's basically part of the immune system, although it does a few other things as well. The lymphatic system is actually interesting because pretty much everyone's familiar with the circulatory system,

which is the heart and blood vessels, veins and arteries, which I'll talk about in a second, but that run throughout the body, and there's larger ones and smaller ones, and they extend pretty much everywhere. So people have that concept, that we have this sort of system of blood vessels throughout the body, but what they don't realize is that we actually have a second system, of vessels, not blood vessels, but similar conduits with larger and smaller passages which extend throughout the body, called the lymphatic system, or lymphatic vessels. And the lymphatic vessels carry a clear fluid called lymph in the direction of the heart. Limf is essentially just the intercellular fluid or intercellular matrix that exists or is present throughout the body,

or through many regions of the body at least. You know, and it contains all the regular things you would expect to find like proteins and electrolytes and that sort of thing, but it's mostly water. So one thing that the lymphatic system does is carry that lymph around regulate its content so as to prevent swelling or desiccation of different areas of the body. But the lymph is also important, the lymphatic system is also important because it includes not just those lymph vessels but also specific nodes or glands such as the spleen, the thymus and some other ones, which are very important for the production of lymphocytes or white blood vessels of various sorts

or certain types of white blood vessels, I should say. So it forms an important component of the immune system and various white blood cells move around through the lymphatic vessels, or at least sometimes they're around through the lymphatic vessels to get to places that they need to and to access tissues and so on. So we'll talk more about that when we go through immunology. But just remember, we actually have two sort of two vessel systems networks throughout the body. Well, actually we sort of have three,

because the nervous system is kind of one of those as well, but two that are comprised of connective tissue, which surrounds sort of hollow passages which transmit fluid in the middle, one being the circulatory system, the other being the lymphatic system. And finally, moving on from the lymphatic system, the immune system, of which the lymphatic system is a part, is just the set of structures and also sort of broader processes that help protect an organism against disease

by identifying and killing pathogens, and also tumour cells. People perhaps know that the immune system is responsible killing things like germs and bacteria, viruses and bacteria, they may not realize that it's also important for tackling tumor cells, tumor cells, which is why many people who are afflicted with HIV, HIV-AIDS and therefore have compromised immune systems. Actually, many of them end up dying of some form of cancer because their immune systems don't have the ability to,

or have a greatly diminished ability to define off that cancer. The immune system can also do some harm, and it can also attack non-dangerous things, for example, our own tissue or organ implants, blood transfusion material or other things like pollens and other allergens that shouldn't be attacked. So once again, we'll look at that in more detail in the immunology episode, which I'll do later on. But yeah, the basic purpose of the immune system is to protect from pathogens and tumor cells and other things that would attempt to hijack the body.

So all of those systems that I've just gone through, skeletal, muscular, integumentary, lymphatic, and immune are all broadly responsible for maintaining the structural integrity of the body, helping it to move around and moving things around inside it, and also protecting the body against outside injury or influences. Now, that's only a very broad categorization. There's other ways you could do it, and there are sort of other sort of more minor functions of these systems as well, but broadly that's what all those do.

They work together quite closely in that respect. The next four systems that I want to go through are all broadly responsible for metabolism, that is essentially generating energy for the body to use in carrying out its functions. So the first of those I want to talk about is the respiratory, system. This consists of the lungs and associated airways and muscles, for example, the diaphragm, which is basically responsible for breathing, opening and closing the, expanding and contracting the

lungs to, so that you breathe in and out. Basically, the purpose of the respiratory system is to bring in gases from the exterior of the body, extract the oxygen necessary, and get rid of the other waste gases like carbon dioxide that we don't need, and then expel that air again and bring us a newer. So basically it's moving around, it's moving air into the body and exchange and gases moving that air out again. That's basically what the respiratory system does. The respiratory system is very closely associated with the circulatory system, which I mentioned before. The circulatory system is the heart and associated blood vessels. The circulatory system carries nutrients, gases, hormones and other things, including white blood cells throughout the body, basically to and

from all cells in the body to help maintain homeostasis, which I'll talk about in a second. Homostasis basically means like stable conditions are necessary for life. Basically, the circulatory system is the, is sort of the basic infrastructure of the body, kind of like roads and the, kind of like, if you combine electricity, roads, waste disposal, and the water system is sort of a physical, economic infrastructure analogies to what the circular system does.

You might get a better perception. It carries, it not only carries nutrients to the cells, but also energy, also oxygen, and it transports waste away. the circular system is also responsible for stabilising body temperature and pH and various other things, and also transporting around white blood cells, which are responsible, which are part of the immune system, and responsible for fighting infections. So it's very important the circulatory system, which is why if you get things like a blocked blood vessel or an aneurysm or heart conditions, heart disease of various sorts, they can be very and very immediately life-threatening.

Okay, so that's the circulatory system. Moving on now to the digestive system. Now, I've said that The circulatory system transports nutrients two cells so that they can carry out their metabolic processes, but I haven't said where it gets those from. Well, it gets some of those nutrients from the respiratory system. Well, if we interpret nutrients in the broad senses, including oxygen, which is something, it's not exactly a nutrient, but it's something that the cells need for metabolism. But most of the rest of the stuff that the circulatory system transports around comes from the digestive system, the purpose of which is for the breakdown and absorption of food material to provide nutrients.

Nutrients includes not only basic energy like sugar and lipids, but also other vitamins and minerals and things that the body needs to carry out metabolism, to build proteins and so on. And once again, we'll look at those in more detail in a later episode. The digestive system's one of the, it's not one of the largest in terms of mass, but it is one of the largest in terms of the number of organs, a number of internal organs, and also the amount of space that it takes up sort of inside the body. So the digestive system includes the mouth and the teeth, the esophagus, the stomach, the small intestine, and large intestine, rectum and anus. So basically it forms a big long passage right from the mouth through the anus that goes throughout the entire body, and along which the digestive process and extraction of nutrients and energy takes place. And then these nutrients go into the circulatory system, and it carried to the cells that... Finally, we've got the urinary system, which is somewhat of an neglected system.

you know, everyone knows about the respiratory, circulatory, and digestive system, but the urinary system doesn't get as much attention. Perhaps rightly so, because it's kind of boring. It's basically just the two kidneys, the urethra and the bladder, and also the ureta's basically passages connecting the bladder to the kidneys. So it's not as interesting, perhaps, but it does perform a very important role, which is the storage production, production, storage, and elimination of urine.

And that's necessary for regulating the body's water content, and also maintaining homeostasis, for example, by managing the pH of the body's pH and also blood pH, electrolyte levels and things like that. So that's why if you have kidney disease or have kidney failure, you start to turn funny colors like green, because basically toxins and metabolic waste products and other things that you need to remove from your body and not being removed, not being filtered or removed by the kidneys as they should be, so you can die pretty quickly with kidney failure. So it is a very important system if it's perhaps a little bit less interesting than some of the other ones. Okay, so all of that's metabolism. All of that is connected to bringing in the necessary nutrients to the cells, which use it to metabolize, produce energy and other things that they need,

and then moving away the waste products. The final group that I want to look at, well, final main group that I want to look at is specialized for communication, the endocrine system and the nervous system. Now, these two systems work quite closely together, especially in the brain, because a lot of the more important endocrine gland, are in the brain, for example, the pineal gland and the pituitary gland. But basically, the endocrine system is a system of glands, which are tissues that excrete hormones into the body, which go into the bloodstream. That is, the glands excrete the hormones,

and the hormones go into the bloodstream. And these hormones are basically chemical messengers that regulate the body in various ways. And help maintain homeostasis, tell the kidneys how much water to extract or to put out, tell the circulatory system about how much to dilate the blood vessels or tell the heart in the respiratory system. excuse me, tell the lungs and the respiratory system how fast they should bring out, how fast they should breathe, basically, and so on. So it helps to regulate other systems of the body through releasing or taking up those hormones. And the endocrine system, as I've said, includes the adrenal glands, the pineal gland,

the pituitary gland, the hypothalamus, and various other glands. The nervous system is a network of specialized cells that exists right throughout the body called neurons, and also they're associated, you might say helper cells, which are called glial cells. Now, the purpose of the nervous system is essentially to coordinate the actions of the organism and by transmitting signals, electrical signals, between different parts of the body. The overall control of the nervous system is obviously exercised by the brain, but the nervous system is not just the brain, it also includes the spinal cord,

peripheral nerves which innovate and give direction to muscles in the hands and legs and various internal organs and so on. Interestingly, the nervous system also includes the retina, that is the back of the eye, and many of the sensory systems, for example, neurons, pain receptors in the fingers and so on, although you can sort of call that part of the intercomentary system as well, so there's some overlap there. But that's the basic purpose of the nervous system to coordinate actions of the body by transmitting electrical signals, and we'll cover the nervous system and how it transmits signals in more detail quite soon. I'm hoping to do an episode on that in the not-so-duty future.

So the endocrine system, nervous system, closely related together both for the purpose of communication and regulating the whole body, the rest of the body. Finally, the one system that doesn't really fit into my categorization system is the reproductive system. Its purpose is obviously reproduction. It's a system of organs which work together for the purpose of reproduction. This is the main system that's, well, very different between male and female, and it's really the main distinction between the two sexes. The reproductive system includes the external genitalia, the penis in male or the vulva. in females, and also internal gamate-producing gonads, that is the testicles in males, ovaries in females, and also associated organs like the uterus, Vance-Dephyrins, and so on.

Once again, more details about that in future episode. Okay, so that's all the human systems. I'll just list them again briefly. For the purpose of structure and protection, we've got the skeletal system, muscular system, intercommentary system, that's the skin, lymphatic system, and the immune system. For the purpose of metabolism, we've got the respiratory system, circulatory system, circulatory system, digestive system, and the urinary system. For the purposes of communication, we've got the endocrine and nervous systems, and then finally we have the reproductive system by itself.

Now that I've gone through the systems and given you a basic idea of what they do, I just want to sort of give a brief discussion, overview, give you a feel for how they work together, how the systems of the body work together to fulfill the function of the organism to do what, to fulfill their purpose, but also as to why we need all these systems as to sort of how they fit together to help an organism do what it does. So I'll just get into it, and hopefully you'll get the feel of what I'm trying to do here. Basically, the purpose of an organism,

with a few exceptions, but essentially the purpose of a single organism is to survive and reproduce as successfully as possible. And all the organ systems within the body are in some way tailored to help achieving this goal. An organ system generally fulfills one broad function in achieving that goal of survival and reproduction, and an organ fulfills a more specific goal

and then tissue and cell and so on down. Now, I say that that's essentially correct, because in, for example, use social species like some insects and some bees and so on, it's maybe a little bit misleading to say the purpose of a single organism is to survive and reproduce, because often a single organism, single ant by itself doesn't actually reproduce it. It only reproduces by helping the queen reproduce, for example, or by fulfilling its specific function within the hive. And there are other examples of sort of what we would think of as strange relationships within animal or non-animal species. But by and large, the purpose of a single organism is, even if it might cooperate with others and someone, is to survive and reproduce and produce as many of its own offspring as possible of the highest quality and making sure enough of them survive and so on. So that's essentially the meaning of life of an organism. That's its purpose. So organ systems, all organ systems operate in order to fulfill that purpose. Obviously, the reason for that is simply evolution, that any organism or any organ system that developed that had any purpose other than reproducing, surviving and reproducing, you know, it's possible, but if such a thing existed or if such a thing evolved, it wouldn't be around anymore, it wouldn't last very long, because organisms which

evolved to survive and reproduce better would become more prevalent as time went on, obviously, because they're reproducing and surviving better, and therefore before long, any organism which doesn't evolve for surviving and reproducing isn't around anymore, or its descendants aren't around anymore. So that's why organisms have evolved this way, and also how they've evolved that way. Okay, so now I want to go through the systems and sort of give you a feel for what role they play in surviving and reproducing, of helping the organism survive and reproduce, and particularly how they work together to do that. So obviously, if you're going to reproduce, you need a reproductive system, the role of which is to produce, incubate, and then deliver the gametes at the correct time and location so that you can produce an offspring. That's fairly obvious. But once you've got a reproductive system, obviously you're going to need ability to generate those cells to provide them with nutrients.

to provide them with protection and the right environment and so on. Those systems in the reproductive system, and also the cells of your prodigy as well, are going to require energy and nutrients, necessary to synthesize proteins to undergo cell division to replicate DNA, all that stuff that cells have to do. Refer back to the episode we did on the cell.

It requires energy and nutrients, amino acids, that sort of thing, in order to do that. So you've got to get those from somewhere. And that's where the digestive system effectively comes in, which consumes the food, and then digest the food, extracting the necessary materials and for use by these cells that we have in the reproductive system

and also now the cells that we have in the digestive system. In order to get these nutrients from where they're being digested in the digestive system to the cells that need them, like to the cells in the reproductive system, we have to have some mechanism to do that. That's a separate task from just getting the nutrients. And therefore that is where the circulatory system comes in. That's the network of blood vessels, which, among other things, transports the nutrients

from the digestive system to the reproductive system and other cells that need it. Okay, so now we've got a source of energy and other nutrients, so we've got a mechanism for getting that to the reproductive system, but we still have a problem because the way that animals generate energy, certainly the way the humans generate energy, is by a complicated system of interactions, sorry, a complicated system of chemical reactions, which together are referred to as metabolism,

and we haven't done, I haven't discussed that in detail yet, but I will do so soon, basically, metabolism starts with glucose, which is a simple sugar molecule, a simple monosaccharide, and converts that into energy and carbon dioxide and water. That's the chemical reaction known as respiration. Now, that's useful because the organism needs energy, and that's why this reaction occurs. It's done to generate the energy that the organism needs to survive and to carry out its other chemical reactions, which are endothermic chemical reactions.

That is, they require energy in order for them to take place, because they're highly complicated. they wouldn't take place just naturally by themselves, so they require that extra input of energy. However, in order for the respiration chemical reaction to take place, you require not only constant inputs of glucose, okay, that's what the digestive system is for, you also require constant inputs of oxygen, because basically you need those oxygen atoms

to continually accept waste electrons, which are generated by a previous process of the process of breaking apart of glucose molecules, you have these excess electrons, which you need to go somewhere, which need to be taken up by some other atom, otherwise they just sit around and repel further electrons and the chemical reaction would stop. And because oxygen atoms have a very high electron negativity, they're very good for accepting those waste electrons.

And so that's what most animals and certainly humans have evolved to do. They take in oxygen, use it to accept the waste electrons that occur when you break apart glucose, and thereby perpetuate the respiration chemical reaction necessary for metabolism. Okay, all of that is a long way of saying that we need, If cells are going to make use of the nutrients and energy that they've obtained from the digestive system, they need oxygen. And that's where the respiratory system comes in. It brings in that oxygen and also removes and exhales that carbon dioxide waste product that builds up as a consequence of respiration. Okay, so now we've got a digestive system of respiratory system, a circulatory system and the reproductive system.

You might think we're set. But the trouble is that food, air and water and also other things that animals need, like, for example, a shelter from the environment. or to escape from predators or whatever, they're not always easy to get, they're certainly not always in the location where you need them. By the way, reproductive partners can be described as difficult to get as well. So in order to get, say, food, water, shelter and so on, it's helpful to be able to move around. Hence, the need for muscular and skeletal systems,

in addition to their benefits in also protecting and sort of providing structure to the organism itself. However, once you start moving around, you're going to need to take into consideration what your environment is, you know, because you don't want to walk off a cliff or Australian to a predator. So you need to have some way of interacting with your environment to respond to stimuli, and that's what the nervous and endocrine systems are for. The nervous system specialises in fast, specific control of particular things,

like moving the legs here, running over here, getting frightened and running off or hiding, whatever. The endocrine systems specialize for sort of slower and more widespread, sort of body wide, but also longer lasting control, like feeling hungry or feeling tired, so it's time to sleep and so on. So the nervous system and endocrine system work together in responding to the environment and helping to direct, among other things, the muscular and skeletal system into what they should do, but they specialize in different things. The nervous system is sort of the specific short-term outcomes, actions,

the endocrine system more long-term widespread body-wide actions or commands. Okay, so we've already put in most of the systems by now, and you can see that they all have their important role to fulfill. However, the trouble is that with all of the complex chemical reactions occurring, all the proteins and carbohydrates and lipids that are being produced and stored in, in these different systems that we've set up, and also the complex cellular machinery that we have to get it all running, it's going to be necessary to protect all this stuff

against other organisms that might want to co-opt all of these nice resources for their own use, essentially their own reproduction. And that can occur in different ways. It can occur through predation, just someone might want to eat you and take up those nutrients, or they might want to infect you and, say, inject themselves into your cells

and hijack the cells into producing copies of themselves. That's what viruses do. or they might just want to leach off you and withdraw your nutrients or benefit from you in other ways like a parasite does, a leech, for example. So there's different ways organisms might want to do that. Basically take advantage of your nutrients, your proteins, your lipids you're selling your machinery and so on. And that's what the lymphatic and especially the immune system afford to protect against that, to stop others from taking advantage of all your specialized machinery and other things that you've acquired to facilitate your own reproduction. Okay, so given that we've put all this in place, all this machinery in place, and now protected it from,

external problems, there's still one issue that even if this body that we've got is protected from external threats, we haven't provided any mechanism or any sufficient mechanism for protecting against internal problems. Because essentially this body, this organism that we're sort of imagining that we're building, is a giant collection of chemical reactions, metabolism being one of them, but there's protein synthesis and breaking down proteins and lipids and all sorts of, basically everything that occurs in the human body is some sort of chemical reaction. Most things Anyway, and it's necessary to safeguard and carefully manage the conditions in the body to ensure that those complex chemical reactions can continue to occur.

Because if the pH or temperature or water content or any of, you know, hundreds of other conditions go out of whack or too high or too low, then the reactions or some reactions might stop or slow down too much or go in the wrong way and the body will stop functioning properly. This is what homeostasis is for, maintaining those specific conditions, especially if things like pH and temperature, that are necessary for the chemical reactions requisite for life to be able to continue, and therefore for the organism to be able to live and function.

Now, the endocrine system plays some role in maintaining homeostasis, but the urinary system is also a very important player in that, because it basically monitors to ensure that the blood, say pH and electrolyte levels are about the right levels in it, retracts water and electrolytes or puts them back into the bloodstream sometimes, so as to maintain that level, and then expels urine as necessary to remove those wastes, metabolic wastes from the body. So that's also a very necessary function.

Finally, the only system we haven't put in yet is the integometry system, but obviously if you just had all of these organs, all of these organs and organs systems and tissues exposed to the world, they would dry up very quickly, just get caught on, bush, and be torn off, or infected very easily or whatever. So the integumentary system fulfills the quite obvious role of keeping everything together, protecting the body, preventing it drying out and so on and that's it that's all of the organ systems so you can see from

starting from a very basic assumption as that you know we want to just reproduce survive and reproduce and given the conditions that creatures living on earth and given the requirement for oxygen and nutrients a few basic things like that we essentially generate a requirement for really all of the organ systems that we have now i'm not exactly trying to say that you can sort of derive complex life a priori or something weird like that I'm just saying that there is a rational, sort of comprehensible function that you can easily, for our organ systems, for mammalian, especially human organ systems, all animal organisms, that you can easily see just by looking at the process of evolution and the purpose essentially for which organisms have evolved. Okay, so that's it for this episode. I hope you enjoyed it and learned something. I just took a look on iTunes, and I seem to be ranked at number 160, I think, on the natural science podcasts.

I don't really know how many there are, so I don't know if that's good or bad, but I would like to be higher than that. Obviously, the higher ranked I am, the more listeners, but in order to become higher ranked, I need more listeners. So it's kind of circular. So basically what I'm asking you to do is rate the podcast, leave comments on iTunes or anywhere else. You might get access to the podcast, tell people about it, encourage listeners. I'm going to be putting out a fairly rapid stream of episodes over the next couple of months at least, and hopefully keep it more regular over the next year. But definitely over the next couple of months,

there'll be lots of new episodes coming out. So there's lots of exciting things going on. Other podcasts, as you probably know, sort of stay around for six months or, you know, a week, and then you never see them again. I certainly don't plan to do, don't plan on doing that. I've already continued the podcast for over a year now, and I plan on doing it for many years to come.

If I ever do stop making the episodes for any substantial period of time, I will definitely post a note or brief, message or something like that letting you know about it and the reasons for it. So I'm not just going to leave the podcast and let it disappear as some do. So you need and fear about that. This podcast is going to be useful material for a long time to come. So that's a good reason for encouraging new listeners. So with that excitation over, I thank you for listening again, and I'll talk to you next time.