Subject
The viruses written into your genome, a nerve that detours fifteen feet for no reason, cells that come back from the dead. Every one of them measured.
10 essays
BiologyMitochondria — the engines inside every cell — were supposed to be private property, sealed in and inherited only when a cell divides. They're not.
BiologyApoptosis — programmed cell death — was long treated as a one-way door. Once a cell switches on its executioner caspases and its DNA starts fragmenting, it was assumed to be gone.
BiologyYou think of your body as yours — one genome, one person, grown from a single cell. It isn't quite true.
BiologyYou think of your body as something that was built — cells added, tissue grown, fingers extended outward. That's only half the story.
BiologySomewhere in the 3 billion letters of your DNA are the corpses of ancient viruses — and they make up about 8% of your entire genome, four times more than the genes that actually build your body. Most are silent fossils.
BiologyYou think of yourself as one organism, built from one genome. But inside nearly every one of your cells is a second, separate loop of DNA — kept apart from your own, and written in the format of a bacterium.
BiologyYour eye is a camera — one lens, one chamber. A fly's eye is a mosaic of thousands of tiny tubes.
BiologyA hiccup makes no sense. It pulls in a breath and instantly seals it shut, so almost no air gets through.
BiologySomewhere inside the neck of a giraffe, right now, a single nerve is doing something so stupid no engineer would ever allow it. To carry a signal a few inches from the brain to the voice box, it runs all the way down the giraffe's enormous neck, loops around an artery next to…
