The Universe Inside, original canvas & prints

As a physician, our body is literally like a miracle to me. The fact that our skin is self healing, our bones fuse back together, we breathe and our heart beats while we use our body to do other things all day long without even thinking about it, how we create life, how little humans grow within us and are born. The fact that all of it, almost every bit of it, comes from cosmic dust and stars — it’s all just so damn magical.  Researchers estimate that we are approximately 97% stardust, formed over 13 billion years ago.  Scientists used infrared spectrography to survey almost 200,000 stars and found that 97% of the same elements that make up human life make up the entire Milky Way galaxy. So now I have taken to calling our incredibly human bodies star suits. “We are now able to map the abundance of all of the major elements found in the human body across hundreds of thousands of stars in our Milky Way,” said Jennifer Johnson, chair of the SDSS-III APOGEE survey and a professor at The O