the.com/organism
a brief, stubborn argument with entropy that occasionally develops opinions about itself
means A living thing—any single life form, from a bacterium to a blue whale—that functions as a self-sustaining, organized whole.
from From the same root as 'organ' and 'organize,' tracing back to Greek 'organon,' meaning a tool or instrument (and a cousin of 'ergon,' work). The idea is a body made of working parts, each an instrument doing its job. 'Organism' itself is a relatively modern formation—an 18th-century coinage built on that ancient sense of a coordinated set of working tools.
- cell count
- Your body is mostly microbial cells, not yours
- oldest
- Some bacteria revived after 250 million years dormant
- largest
- A single Oregon fungus spans 2,385 acres
- immortal jelly
- Turritopsis jellyfish can reverse aging back to youth
- shared code
- All life uses the same four-letter DNA alphabet
escherichia coli — bacterium with 4.6 million base pairs, discovered in human gut in 1885
saccharomyces cerevisiae — baker's yeast with 12 million base pairs, used in brewing for thousands of years
caenorhabditis elegans — nematode with 959 cells, primary model organism for developmental biology since 1974