AP Photo

Every living thing is a pulse. We quicken, then we fade. There is a deep beauty in this, but deeper down, inside every plant, every leaf, inside every living thing (us included) sits a secret.

Below the pulse, which you see here, elegantly captured by Shanghai photographer/designer Yunfan Tan, is a life/death cycle, a pattern that shows up in the teeniest of plants, (phytoplankton, algae, moss), also in the bigger plants, (shrubs, bushes, little trees) — and even in the biggest, the needle bearing giant sequoias.