Let’s start with a digression or “The nucleus must be conserved!”
Published by admin on Tagged UncategorizedWhen I was a kid I loved to watch Dr. Who (For that matter, I still love it, but I’m not terrified of it anymore) and follow The Doctor on his travels through the universe, encountering robots, aliens, time travellers and an endless sucession of alien planets that look like the same disused gravel quarry.
In one of these, The Ark in Space we meet a particularly nasty insectoid hive-mind which is gobbling up the sleeping crew of a long haul spaceship, one by one. As each crew member is posessed by the aliens, they say “Contact has been made”, to which the already-posessed crewmember who has awoken them replies “The nucleus must be conserved”.
Now, the suprachiasmatic nucleus is a little blob around the size of a pea, hidden somewehere deep in our brains. Among its task is the regulation of our bodily clocks. When we’re exposed to light, the suprachiasmatic nucleus acts to suppress the production of melatonin. When there’s not enough light, melatonin production is not controlled properly, and gloomy sluggish slothful winter blues result. Or that’s one theory of many, anyway. More on that later, but for the moment I just wanted to meditate on how every time I hear the phrase “suprachiasmatic nucleus” I see a giant alien insect saying “The nucleus must be conserved!”.
As indeed it must.
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- Let’s start with a digression or “The nucleus must be conserved!” posted on Jul.27
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