#one cell

[yikesthesebikes]

Wow, I like a special type of stupid. Smart people better back up, I only like dumbasses.

[lovecraftsgarden]

Acetabularia crenulata

Mermaid’s Wineglass

What’s really cool about these guys is that each little cap and stem is unicellular. So one shoot is ONE CELL. The nucleus sits in the rhizoid (the anchoring part of the organism) so that if the cell is decapitated, it can still function. 

In the 1930′s - 1950′s, Joachim Hämmerling experimented with various species of Acetabularia. He found that if he grafted a cap from A. crenulata onto the base of A. mediterranea, and vise versa, the cap would change to match that of the base it was grafted on to. In this way, Hämmerling is responsible for proving that the nucleus of the cell contains the genetic information necessary for cellular development.

Here’s a nice write up concerning Hämmerling’s work.

[life-888]

[whisperthatruns]

One Cell ...contains a digitally coded database larger, in information content, than all 30 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica put together. ---Richard Dawkins, from The Blind Watchmaker So in our beds or in the beds of lovers, when we leave we leave volumes of information, the book of our days lost to ourselves, sloughed off into the world. As we wander a filthy city street we grow new cells, pungent with the old codes, so we can stop walking, remember the day we wept openly for a man in a casket, the night we touched a glass to our lips and saw all creation in a stranger's face. The pain of childbirth comes back, the scent of magnolia, a song from a commercial, an afternoon carnival, a choir. Our cells retain it, pinhead sponges soaking up whatever we need to keep walking, to keep stumbling into the blinding darkness ahead. 

Dorianne Laux, “One Cell,” Facts about the Moon (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2007)

[all-you-have-to-do-is-list-blog1]

Almost Lover Artist: A Fine Frenzy  Album: One Cell in the Sea (2007)