the.com/cell
a wet bag of chemistry that decided it wanted to keep existing
means The smallest unit of life, a self-contained packet of chemistry wrapped in a membrane — or, by extension, any small enclosed compartment, from a prison room to a battery to a unit in a larger organization.
from From Latin 'cella,' meaning a small room, storeroom, or hut — the same word that gave monks their bare little 'cells.' For centuries it just meant a tiny chamber. Then in the 17th century the naturalist Robert Hooke peered through a microscope at a sliver of cork, saw rows of tiny boxes, and thought they looked like the cells of a monastery — so he borrowed the word. The biological meaning grew from that single glance, and the room-sized senses (prison cell, honeycomb cell, battery cell) all trace back to the same humble little chamber.
- power source
- mitochondria were once free-living bacteria you absorbed
- tiny world
- a single cell holds two meters of coiled DNA
- built to die
- cells self-destruct on command via apoptosis
- old design
- the first cells appeared 3.8 billion years ago
- crowded
- your body runs on 37 trillion of them
hela cells — cancer cells from henrietta lacks taken in 1951, still alive and used in millions of experiments worldwide
red blood cells — biconcave discs produced at 2-3 million per second in human bone marrow
alcatraz federal penitentiary — maximum security prison on san francisco bay island, operated 1934-1963