"That anatomy should still contain such surprises is itself something of a surprise. It’s easy to think that 19th-century anatomists pulled apart the body tendon by tendon, vein by vein, describing and drawing every filament they came across, no matter how tiny. But eight years ago, Matthias Gunzer, an immunologist at the University Duisburg-Essen, in Germany, saw something that didn’t fit the current models. He had dyed some white blood cells red and green so that he could trace the path of their fluorescence through a mouse’s leg under the microscope. What he saw was strange: These cells seemed to be crossing a wall of solid bone." (StatNews.com)
One day we'll look back and realize the doctors of China figured this out, mapped it, based an entire system of medicine on it and called it "acupuncture". In Chinese medicine, these are called "collateral vessels" and have been known about for over ~2,000 years, as documented in Huángdì Nèijīng - Yellow Emperor's Internal Classic. The German scholar Paul U. Unschuld says several 20th-century scholars hypothesize that the language and ideas of the Neijing Suwen were composed between 400 BCE and 260 CE, and provides evidence that only a small portion of the received text transmits concepts from before the second century BCE. Similarly, it has long been understood that the component of the body governed by the Kidney Network, which includes the tissues of bone, governs the production and functions of what was called Kidney Essence. In basic Chinese Medical physiology, Kidney Essence/bone marrow is converted/transformed into blood. This same finding was only relatively recently confirmed through biomedical science in the last century but has long been understood in Chinese Medicine for nearly 2,000 years.
It's wonderful to see the unfolding of a deeper scientific understanding of the body that strengthens the Chinese Medical view, rather than dismantles or contradicts it.