Has Your Mind Been Blown Lately?

In true biology-nerd form, I'd like to share a video today called "The Inner Life of the Cell." It's an animated representation of what's going on in the cells of your body at this very moment. And if it doesn't blow your mind, you might want to investigate as to whether or not your mind was installed upside-down. Just saying.

To be quite honest, I have loved this video for years, and am a bit surprised at myself for waiting this long to share the awesomeness.

Although there is no way for me to completely explain this movie, I'm going to try a little.  The movie starts out inside a blood vessel.  The red blood cells travel up the middle, and the white blood cells are rolling along the sides.  This movie shows what happens when a white blood cell receives a signal to leave the blood stream (a process known as diapedesis).  Most of the little blobs that float around and stick to each other and everything else are proteins.  The stuff that looks like scaffolding is called 'cytoskeleton' and it basically is scaffolding...  The long, thin, stringy things are called mRNAs and are the directions for how to make new proteins.  And yes, there totally is a little guy that walks along the cytoskeleton delivering stuff to the cell membrane.  He's called 'kinesin.'

How much do you remember about cells from fifth grade?  Organelle pop quiz anyone?  The nucleus was at 1:30.  Did you spot the mitochondria hanging out at 1:56? And there's some golgi body action at 2:14.

Sorry if you don't feel as jazzed about all that as I do.  But seriously, the next time you're feeling sorry for yourself, remember that God gave you a really incredible body.  One three-minute animation doesn't even begin to cover how cool it really is.  And if that doesn't help you feel better about life, call me and we'll talk about kidneys.  Or hearts.  Or nerves.  Or brains.  Because if you woke up this morning and you were alive, there's no reason to not feel like the luckiest person on earth.

In a completely unrelated vein, I was also informed about this cool website called Credit Karma where you can check your credit report and score for *free* as often as you want.  It's the first site like that; most of the time you have to pay, or you're limited in the number of times you can check.  Some people think that the more you check your credit report, the more it hurts your score.  That's not true.  It only hurts your score when other people check your credit report (i.e., when you apply for a new line of credit.)  Credit Karma also gives you a breakdown of why your score is the way it is, where you are potentially losing points, and how you rank compared to the average American, as well as other Americans in your demographic. Go take a look!

PS:  I heard about this site from my personal finance professor, so don't worry, it really is legit.

(I feel very much like Suzanne, blogging about credit reports and all...)