For those of you who fuss about your liver, and we should always be mindful of and grateful for our liver, here's some good news.

Surgeons know that the liver has remarkable regenerative properties. They can remove more than two-thirds of this powerhouse organ, and within weeks, it's back to its previous size.

Here's what George Michalopolous of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center has to say about the overlapping systems that the liver uses to reassemble itself in response to the various slings and arrows of liver fortune: [It's] like a car with 20 cylinders. You crank up the engine, all 20 cylinders fire. These are cylinders 21 and 22.