You might think that once you give birth to a child that they're
no longer a part of you physically—except, of course, for the
complete control they retain over your heart and mind. Well,
think again, because it turns out that during pregnancy some of
their cells scatter in your body and stay there for years, maybe
even forever. So they are literally a part of you. It's hard to
decide whether that is magical or deeply creepy. While it's been
known for a while that fetal cells migrate into a mother's body
during pregnancy, it hasn't really been understood what types of
cells stick around and what they do. So Diana Bianchi, Executive
Director of the Mother Infant Research Institute at Tufts
Medical Center, and her colleagues have done a new study on
pregnant mice that sheds some light on what exactly is happening
during this little alien invasion. In their study, Bianchi's
team found cells from the placenta and the fetus inside of a
pregnant mouse's lungs. Eek. They were able to determine that
some of the cells