Some years ago, I had a colonoscopy without being fully anesthetized, and was able to watch on a computer screen the shifting views of the insides of my colon. I was both fascinated and disturbed. There, revealed in digital detail, was the deep interior of my body, a realm I had always considered a mysterious and forbidden temple, fragile and secretive as it went about its important business of keeping me alive.
Foul whisperings are abroad: unnatural deeds Do breed unnatural troubles … — MacbethSome years ago, the satellite radio and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt decided that she wanted a semblance of her wife to last forever.
Recently I met the astronomer Pascal Oesch, an assistant professor at the University of Geneva. Professor Oesch and his colleagues share the distinction of having discovered the most distant known object, a small galaxy called GNz-11. That galaxy is so far away that its light had to travel for 13 billion years to get from there to here. I asked Professor Oesch if he felt personally connected to this tiny smudge on his computer screen.