Your Cells Work for You

At a cellular level, the human body has a dizzying array of workers.  Here are a few recent examples discovered.

Most of us are completely unaware of what goes on in each cell of our bodies.  If we knew, we might take better care of our team.

1. A protein rescues cellular factories when they get stuck.  (PhysOrg)
2. Cell repair stops during cell division to keep telomeres from fusing together.  (Medical Xpress)
3. The circadian clock is like a symphony with many conductors.  (PhysOrg)
4. Your walking motors get turbo-charged when they join together.  (PNAS)
5. One of your walking motors can wave its lever arm and get others to cooperate.  (PNAS)
6. Your cellular trash cans go through a series of checks before compacting the trash.  (PNAS)
7. Worried about hypermutation in your antibody genes?  Enhancers take care of it.  (Medical Xpress)
8. Your stomach does spring cleaning by bleaching away its bacteria, but the good bacteria know how to survive.  (Live Science)
9. Surprise: those precious multipotent stem cells scientists want from embryos are already present in many of your body tissues.  (PhysOrg)
10. A student discovered a protein that protects “genomic integrity” during meiosis.  (Medical Xpress)

Live Science posted descriptions of “10 Little-Known Body Parts” so that you can “Know Thyself Better.”  Reporter Bahar Gholipour found some interesting tidbits in the knee, eye, chest, voicebox, ear, fingernails, lip, backbone, skeleton, and stomach.  The only one suggested as an “evolutionary leftover” is the philtrum (medial cleft in the lip), but Gholipour ends, “However, scientists are still interested in this little body part because it is formed during specific embryonic ages, and an unusual form of the upper lip area is a clue to disruptions during the development of the fetus.”  Maybe there’s an undiscovered function for this part that is built during specific embryonic stages.

The more you know about the Creator’s art, the more you should be grateful.  After all, gratitude reduces costly impatience, Science Daily claims.  Don’t be grateful because it’s less costly, but because it’s right.  Try to fathom how many things the Creator had to design when he created man from the dust.  It’s unfathomable.  We have an omnipotent, omniscient, all-wise Creator, who deserves our love, our gratitude, and our obedience.  Start by turning around.