The Unsettling Link Between Sprawl and Suicide

It might surprise you to learn that human cells commit suicide. The process is called apoptosis. What happens is, cells in a dense cluster send each other survival signals, but those that get isolated from the group begin to self-destruct. As the biologist Martin Raff once wrote, the only thing keeping cells from killing themselves "is that other cells are constantly stimulating them to live."

Turns out whole human beings may behave in a sadly similar way.