science

ATP: The Energy Currency of Life Right now, as you read this sentence, your body is producing about 40 kilograms of ATP. Not over your lifetime. Not per year. Per day. Every single day, you synthesize roughly your body weight in adenosine triphosphate—the molecule that powers nearly every energy-requiring

Every Cell Runs on an Ancient Bacterial Engine In 1967, Lynn Margulis submitted a paper to fifteen journals. Fourteen rejected it. The fifteenth, the Journal of Theoretical Biology, finally published it—and it became one of the most important papers in the history of biology. Her claim was outrageous: mitochondria,

The Warburg Effect: Cancer's Metabolic Signature In the 1920s, Otto Warburg noticed something strange about tumors. Cancer cells were consuming glucose at an astonishing rate—far more than normal cells. And they were fermenting it to lactate, even when oxygen was plentiful. This made no biochemical sense. Fermentation

Mitophagy: Clearing Out Damaged Mitochondria Your cells are eating themselves right now. Not all of themselves—just the damaged parts. The broken organelles. The misfolded proteins. The accumulated debris that would otherwise gum up the works. This process is called autophagy, from the Greek for "self-eating." And when

NAD+ and Aging: David Sinclair's Bet David Sinclair has made a career out of trying to reverse aging. The Harvard geneticist has been at the center of longevity research for over two decades, starting with his work on sirtuins—a family of proteins that seemed to mediate the

Engineering Life from Scratch In 2004, a group of undergraduates at MIT entered a competition to build biological machines. The challenge: design standardized genetic parts, assemble them into functional systems, and demonstrate that biology could be engineered like any other technology. The competition was called iGEM—the International Genetically Engineered