Billions of tiny motors hum inside every living creature. Cells ceaselessly pump substances, burn sugar, and build new proteins, and all this invisible motion warms us from within. To maintain order, life must dissipate heat into the environment, like a stove that never goes out.

The power of this internal heating is almost independent of size. A bacterium, an ion channel in a membrane, a human: every kilogram of living matter releases about one watt. That's ten thousand times more than a kilogram of solar material. And astonishingly, it matches the power that can be attributed to the entire universe, if you take the speed of light and the Hubble constant (the number describing how fast galaxies are receding). This coincidence was noticed back in the last century by Paul Dirac, pondering the mysterious connection between the microcosm and the cosmos.

The author proposes to call this constant heat leak a universal signal of life. It can distinguish living from non-living, a healthy cell from a sick one. To measure it in practice, he devised a simple method: track the tiniest jitters of cellular structures and, from their amplitude, calculate how much energy is lost as heat. Thus a new field is born — chitomics, the science of the thermal fingerprint of living systems.

In the end, those billions of motors humming inside us are not just a source of heat. They remind us: life and the universe breathe in the same rhythm, and each of our breaths is measured by the same measure as the recession of galaxies.