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and the moon was falling down to pieces

@sixtytwoseconds / sixtytwoseconds.tumblr.com

Hello there. This is Mich, chronic procrastinator, amateur writer and squirrel-in-training. Things you can find in my blog? Long-ass text posts, videogame rants, Game of Thrones, Doctor Who, Supernatural, porn (I'll be nice and tag it nsfw though) and general fangirling. If you'd still like this blog to grace your dashboard, thanks! I really can't see why you'd do that.

I’ve seen this photograph very frequently on tumblr and Facebook, always with the simple caption, “Ghost Heart”. What exactly is a ghost heart?

More than 3,200 people are on the waiting list for a heart transplant in the United States. Some won’t survive the wait. Last year, 340 died before a new heart was found. The solution: Take a pig heart, soak it in an ingredient commonly found in shampoo and wash away the cells until you’re left with a protein scaffold that is to a heart what two-by-four framing is to a house. Then inject that ghost heart, as it’s called, with hundreds of millions of blood or bone-marrow stem cells from a person who needs a heart transplant, place it in a bioreactor - a box with artificial lungs and tubes that pump oxygen and blood into it - and wait as the ghost heart begins to mature into a new, beating human heart. Doris Taylor, director of regenerative medicine research at the Texas Heart Institute at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital in Houston, has been working on this— first using rat hearts, then pig hearts and human hearts - for years. The process is called decellularization and it is a tissue engineering technique designed to strip out the cells from a donor organ, leaving nothing but connective tissue that used to hold the cells in place.  This scaffold of connective tissue - called a “ghost organ” for its pale and almost translucent appearance - can then be reseeded with a patient’s own cells, with the goal of regenerating an organ that can be transplanted into the patient without fear of tissue rejection. This ghost heart is ready to be injected with a transplant recipient’s stem cells so a new heart - one that won’t be rejected - can be grown. (Source)

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*prepares party popper*

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*nervously shakes the party popper*

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*slowly falls asleep with the party popper*

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*has a wonderful night with the party popper*

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*gets married to the party popper*

It’s a beautiful evening in February. My wife and I are sitting at the fireplace, when suddenly a terrible image appears on the screen of my computer.

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My wife looks at me. As I look in her terrified, cardboard eyes, filled with tears, she takes a deep breath, before saying with her shivering voice “It’s what you’ve always wanted, dear. Do it.” My hands start shaking and a lone tear rolls down my cheek. “I can’t, honey. I’m not like that anymore.” “I will do it.” a small voice behind us says. As I turn around, my eyes cross with my son; our son. “You don’t have to do this, Benedict.” I say, as I hold his hands.

Ignoring what I told him, young Benedict Popper-Are Optional holds my wife’s cardboard body in one hand, and her long, beautiful string in the other. With tears in my eyes, I turn my head away. A loud pop sounds behind me and I watch in terror as I see my wife’s confetti spread across the room.

"It’s what you’ve always wanted, dad…" my son says, putting his small, cardboard hand on my shoulder. "Yes," I say, "but not like this… Never like this…"

what the actual fuck

I wonder if there’s any Flappy Bird fanfiction…

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I think that’s enough adventure for today.

"I feel like a deeply flawed person who is certainly undeserving of much admiration from other people." "We were occasionally evicted, and often didn’t have money for rent. Me, my mom and my brother, and usually at least one dog. Ninth grade was the first time that I was in the same school for two years. Up until that point we moved around constantly which meant that I was always kind of the new kid or the outsider and sometimes we changed schools in the middle of the school year, so I was always an outsider and my mom also would send me to school wearing, for instance, tights and plastic cowboy boots and I thought ‘This is a great uniform’, but the other kids didn’t think it was as cool as I thought. We never had a television, so I was sort of cut off from pop culture, and from intimate peer group. It made me more of an outsider, and a little bit more introverted and cautious, and, you know, uncertain of my surroundings, and I kind of withdrew and I also kind of started to find ways to mask my insecurities and to blend in with my environment. So one of the things that I would do is I would sort of take on characters. And I would go into character, and I would be a Russian foreign exchange student or I’d develop an Indian accent or something like that, I’d develop these little characters and accents and shticks and ways to be funny, as a way of ingratiating myself to the other kids."