How Your Cells Decide Whether to Be Part of the Brain, or the Colon
Before cells mature, they have to decide what they want to be — and new research shows that process gets pretty "noisy." Doctors Have to Trick Your Brain's ...
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Your body has trillions of cells in it, including web-like neurons in our brains that help us think, bundles of muscle cells that power our movements, and electricity-conducting cells in our heart that help pump blood around. But, if we rewind far back enough, they started out from the same thing. The point where they decide what to be is described as NOISY -- But how do they decide?! Just like how people experiment with different trends, and explore different types of music when they’re young, our cells also go through a bit of an identity crisis… Just like how I dabbled a bit in a suburban punk phase when I was younger, there’s a point where our cells are deciding whether they want to be a skin or heart cell. At one point everyone was just a tiny single cell, called a zygote or th...
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Your body has trillions of cells in it, including web-like neurons in our brains that help us think, bundles of muscle cells that power our movements, and electricity-conducting cells in our heart that help pump blood around. But, if we rewind far back enough, they started out from the same thing. The point where they decide what to be is described as NOISY -- But how do they decide?! Just like how people experiment with different trends, and explore different types of music when they’re young, our cells also go through a bit of an identity crisis… Just like how I dabbled a bit in a suburban punk phase when I was younger, there’s a point where our cells are deciding whether they want to be a skin or heart cell. At one point everyone was just a tiny single cell, called a zygote or th...
