There is a useful way of framing biological questions that makes familiar things strange, and sleep is the clearest case.
The framing is to ask what a trait costs, and…
Source: Wikipedia
There is a systematic bias in what the past leaves behind, and it favours hard things.
Bone, shell, wood and teeth survive burial. Skin, muscle, hair, feathers, membranes and…
There is a problem in measurement that comes up whenever something matters and cannot be instrumented reliably.
The problem is that a quantity may be important, variable and consequential while…
There is a category of biological material that outperforms engineered equivalents, and the interesting question is usually not the material but the manufacturing.
Silk is the clearest example. The properties…
There is a satisfying category of question where something entirely familiar turns out to be unexplained, and purring belongs in it.
The sound is known to essentially everybody. It is…
Two separate things are happening: the cells lose their internal pressure, and the walls between them break down. The first is quick and the second is slow, and the difference…