PRETTIEST CHRISTMAS LIGHTS EVER
Animated gifs of epithelial cells doing the mitosis

From Infinity Imagined, via Fresh Photons. (Source:MICROSCOPYU.COM)

Just staring at this makes me think about the brilliance of nature. Just consider the complexity of what’s going on during mitosis – you have a genome, compartmentalized with chromosomes, doubling. Then, you have a perfect splitting of the two copies into two separate cells!

That’s like having a group of people in a room, then somehow making copies of all of them, and then getting them to split perfectly into two groups, so that one set of them can move (in an orderly fashion) to another room entirely. But now imagine doing that blindfolded, and without being able to utter a sound to each other, and essentially getting this done solely on the basis of touch. Wondrous…

(see more of Popperfont’s Sciencegeek Advent Calendar Extravanganza here)