Photo of the Week: DNA

My cousin Jon is a lab technician at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, and, as such, has access to one of the most powerful electron microscopes in the world. When I visited him last August, he swabbed my tongue with a Q-tip and took this photo with his 'scope, showing the strands of DNA that make me... me. It's kind of scary. If one of those strands was broken or configured in a different way, I might be a completely different person -- an albino hermaphrodite, perhaps, or a seven-foot elephant man.

Actually, I just made that up. This is a pile of beads I photographed at the antiques fair last summer, just for the sake of creating a colorful, complex, semi-abstract image. If this was an oil painting, I might be able to exhibit it in a gallery. Or at least in a bus-station waiting room. Click the pic for a close-up and prepare to be dazzled.