The simplest of lifeforms are often the most fascinating. In high school biology, we learn that the fundamental state of all living things is the cell, and students spend a lot of time pouring over cartoons and blurry microscope images of a cell’s function and anatomy. Cells are microscopic, so it can be hard to visualize the wide array of biological processes—diffusion, osmosis, reproduction, etc—and the scale on which they occur. It would be nice if a cell was large enough to hold in the palm of a hand, allowing us to relate the inner workings of a cell to the scale of our world. Such a thing exists but we must dive into the ocean to find it. Ubiquitously, upon the seafloor, we find the algae Valonia ventricosa, or “sailor’s eyeballs”, which provide a lot of macroscopic insight to certain aspects of the cell that we normally relate to on a microscopic level.
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I’m sure you’ve all had the experience of encountering something mysterious or unknown while out and about, thinking to yourself something along the lines of, “Hmm, I should really look into this further when I get home,” but then getting distracted, forgetting to do so, and as a result, finding yourself in the exact same situation over and over again. This happens to me all the time.
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Whenever I take the red line train from Silver Spring, MD to downtown Washington, D.C., I look out the window of the train and stare at this strange structure:
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Muay Thai, the art of eight limbs, but also known as simply “Thai boxing,” is a devastatingly effective martial art of Thailand characterized by the combined use of fists, elbows, knees and shins. In recent years, competitions in Muay Thai have spread throughout the western world and many foreigners from the U.S., Europe, South America, etc. travel to Thailand for personal training with individuals who have trained in the art since their childhood.
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My dad’s dad turned 80 this past June and decided to move out of his house in Lake Zurich, IL and in with my aunt and uncle’s family a few hours south in Peoria. I grew up down the street from my grandparents, and even though my parents moved across town a few years ago and I’ve spent the last few years all over the place, it happened that I was in my hometown in early September when my grandpa moved away; and that meant that it fell to my dad and I to sell or throw away most of his possessions and fix up the house to rent or sell.
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Chicago, and the Rust Belt more generally, is full of former industrial sites, now-vacant properties that manufacturers gradually abandoned over the second half of the 20th century. The flight of industrial capital for cheaper environs destroyed entire communities of laborers, like the steelworkers on the city’s Southwest Side; it also left residents to cope with the damaging environmental effects those factories created for the earth they worked on. (Of course, there’s also plenty of dangerous pollution still taking place.)
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