If this doesn’t warm your heart, you must be dead..
What you see when you die…
For Mom
Mother’s Day: Always a Part of Us, Always a Part of Them
Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms everywhere. There’s a million jokes about mothers never letting go of their babies, no matter how old they get. But it’s true … we never leave them, and they never leave us.
When you’re in the womb, cells from your growing body entered your mother’s bloodstream. Just before you were born, one out of a thousand cells in mom’s blood was yours. Many persist for decades, and your cells may help to attack inflammation or maybe even morph into new neurons in your mother’s brain. Often, too, those fetal cells may harm the mother, tripping the alarms of the immune system. We help, and we hurt.
Her cells also took refuge in your body, with as many as one in a hundred thousand of your cells not being yours. Scientists aren’t really sure what they do, if anything. Perhaps they help train our immune system, perhaps they can lead to autoimmune disease. Whatever the answer, she is in us.
Some of those maternal cells may have come from brothers and sisters that were present in her body, themselves deposited years before you were conceived. We may carry more than thoughts and memories of our families. Perhaps we carry their cells as well.
Near or far from your mom today, you’ll always be there with each other.
For more: Check out Radiolab’s episode “Fetal Attraction”, or read more on Boing Boing.
(↬ Krulwich Wonders…, art by Spec-ta-cles on Flickr)
Hipster Games!!
There’s 94 naturally occurring elements on Earth. Mankind has a relationship with nearly all of them. 94 Elements is a new global filmmaking project that will explore our life through the lens of the elements.
It’s not just the silicon in the lens glass that captures these images, but the potassium, boron and lanthanum that improve its refractive index (great video on making Leica lenses here). The indium in the computer display the film editor used and on which you are reading this. The carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous, oxygen and hydrogen that makes up your genetic code, creating a body that seeks to discover, study, mine, and utilize these 94 ingredients of matter. Ingredients that we are running out of.
These movies are their human stories, and you can help support the ongoing project with your donations (via their Indiegogo fundraising site), or even your films. View the amazing first batch of films here.
