The Liquid Wall: Where the World Ends and You Begin
The difference between a living organism and a beaker of biochemical soup is surprisingly simple: a boundary.
Proteins, Explained
You are, quite literally, a machine made of proteins. This is the story of how tiny folded chains keep you alive.
Your Body Builds Itself. But How Does It Know What to Make?
One cell. 37 trillion outcomes. Here’s the system running it all. You started as one cell. Not a particularly special looking one either. Just a tiny sphere, sitting there, with no obvious signs that it was about to do something quite insane. Because from that one cell came a brain, a spine, two eyes in exactly the right place, ten fingers, and a heart beating on the correct side of your chest. The same outcome, repeated across every human who…
The Mitochondria Is the Powerhouse of the Cell
If you’ve spent any time on the internet, you’ve seen the joke. Someone asks a biology question and the answer is always, inevitably, without a doubt “mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.” It’s the one biology fact everyone remembers, usually because it was drilled into them so aggressively in school and over the internet that it’s almost impossible to forget. The problem is that’s basically where the explanation stops. Powerhouse of the cell. Great. Thanks. But what does that…