Frankly speaking ...

Introduction: The Informational Universe We typically perceive our world through the lens of tangible matter and flowing energy. We see a landscape of atoms, forces, and heat. However, modern science is beginning to realise that these physical properties might merely be the surface of a deeper architecture. At its most fundamental level, the universe appears to be composed of “bits” of information. Consider the extraordinary feat of a single microscopic cell: how does it “know” how to construct a complex human being? The answer lies not just in chemistry but in the sophisticated processing of data. By shifting our perspective to information theory, we can begin to decode the underlying software of existence and see ourselves as nodes within a vast, self-optimising system. This article follows that idea from first principles to wider systems. It moves from Shannon’s formal definition of information, through biology and thermodynamics, then into active theoretical debates in physics...

For some time, I have been following research on LUCA—the last universal common ancestor of all life on Earth. This short article draws mainly on recent work, especially the 2024 paper by Moody and colleagues, as an introduction to current thinking. What makes LUCA so compelling is the scale of the question it represents. This is not just another organism in the history of life, but the most recent point from which all modern biology descends. What seems increasingly clear is that this starting point was not simple in any everyday sense of the word. Many of us picture the earliest life as fragile and barely formed—a transitional step between chemistry and biology. In that picture, complexity emerges slowly over immense stretches of time. Current evidence points in a different direction. LUCA appears to have been a recognisable, free-living microbe rather than a primitive intermediate. It likely possessed core systems we associate with modern cells, including: A genetic code and...

Reading Pathogenesis by Jonathan Kennedy , the first revelation came very early in the book. In the introduction Kennedy claimed that human birth wouldn't be possible without an ancient retrovirus. I went down a research rabbit hole trying to make sense of it, and that's when I hit on this mind-bending number… 8% That is the percentage of your genome that is made up of Endogenous Retroviruses (ERVs) . To put that in perspective, the protein-coding genes that make up your "human" parts - your eye colour, your enzymes, your height - only account for about 1-2% of your DNA. You are literally more "ancient virus" than you are "human. Usually, we are told this is just "junk DNA"—fossils of old infections that didn't kill our ancestors millions of years ago. But recent research suggests something far stranger. We didn't just survive these infections; we domesticated them. In fact, without these ancient viral invaders, mammals as we kno...

CRISPR: The Tiny Tool Changing Everything Every now and then, a scientific breakthrough comes along that feels like it’s been plucked from science fiction. For the past decade, that breakthrough has been CRISPR . At its core, CRISPR is a gene-editing tool—short for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (yes, a mouthful). It started out as a defence system in bacteria, but scientists figured out how to repurpose it for editing DNA. Imagine having a pair of molecular scissors that can snip, tweak, or rewrite the genetic code. That’s CRISPR. And it’s powerful enough that its discoverers, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna , were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry back in 2020. CRISPR Gene Editing: Molecular Toolkit How Does CRISPR Actually Work? Think of CRISPR as a tag-team: A guide RNA , like the GPS coordinates, tells the system where to go. The Cas9 protein , acting as scissors, makes the cut in the DNA. Once the cut is made, the cell rushes in...