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Discuss “How Things Work: Cells”

Imagine the Empire State Building. Now fill it with lima beans. If your little finger was the size of the Empire State Building, each of those lima beans would represent a single cell. In fact, there are more cells in the human body than there would be lima beans if you filled all of New York City with them.

To use the textbook definition, the cell is the fundamental unit of life. If our cells malfunction we get sick, and if our cells stop working we die. There are essentially two types of cells: eukaryotes and prokaryotes.

Prokaryotic cells are simply membranous sacs with genetic material, such as DNA, floating around in a viscous soup of proteins, sugars, and enzymes. All prokaryotes are single-celled organisms, such as bacteria and the...

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