Our Bodies, Our Cells (CBC radio program)

[David Dalton]

Tonight on CBC Radio One’s Ideas there was a very good
program called Our Bodies, Our Cells: An audio exploration
of life's building blocks, which can be accessed at
http://tinyurl.com/4rd659mb .

Here is the text from that page (which also has a button to play the audio):

Life is complicated. Beautiful. Bewildering. Astonishing. Busy.

And that's just on the level of our conscious experience. But if you look
closely at the sheer amount of stuff and activity in our bodies, the level of
sophistication and complexity is almost impossible to comprehend.

For a start, consider what the cell is: a protein factory, a shipping and
receiving bay, an information processor, an energy generator and a
communications hub in a network of trillions of other cells. Consider, too,
that the human body has around 37 trillion of them. A trillion may just sound
like a bigger "million," but it's equivalent to the number of seconds there
are in 1.2 million years.

It gets even more astonishing: each cell is a world unto itself, jammed full
of nanomachines and millions of moving parts. In an extraordinary feat of
coordination, each cell is also connected to the rest of the body, fine-tuned
to perform its own functions and yet respond to the body's overall needs.

It gets weirder as you zoom in even more and get to the atomic level. At the
heart of the atom is the nucleus, with electrons orbiting it. But imagine
that the outer radius of an atom is a cathedral. In the middle would be
nucleus, which makes up 99.5 percent of the mass of the atom: it would be the
size of a fly. The radius of the atom is 10,000 times greater than the
nucleus. The rest: empty space. Nothing.

And it gets almost incomprehensible when you consider this last fact: if you
took the empty space from every atom in every living human being right now
— about eight billion people — and you scrunched together all the matter
that's left over, it would be about the size of a sugar cube.

Welcome to the world of Our Bodies, Our Cells, a documentary exploring the
microscopic cosmos of the body, by Aaron Collier, theatre performer and
electronic composer, and IDEAS producer Chris Wodskou. The closer they zoomed
in, the closer they got to some of the fundamental truths about life and
found it even stranger and more wondrous and paradoxical than they could have
imagined.

--
David Dalton dal...@nfld.com https://www.nfld.com/~dalton (home page)
https://www.nfld.com/~dalton/dtales.html Salmon on the Thorns (mystic page)
“And the cart is on a wheel; And the wheel is on a hill
And the hill is shifting sand; And inside these laws we stand" (Ferron)