“It’s genetic” sounds like an answer. For most of my life, I think I heard it that way too. If something was genetic, you were born with it. It was written somewhere inside your DNA before you had any say in the matter, and there wasn't much you could do about it. Genetics felt almost like biological fortune telling. Here are the instructions you were given. Good luck. I still catch myself thinking that way all the time. Something about my body looks like someone in my family

The universe had to make carbon before anything like me could exist, and for some reason that has been stuck in my head all day. I obviously knew carbon was important for life. Carbon is in DNA, proteins, fats, sugars, basically all the important stuff that makes living things living things. But I never really stopped to think about where the carbon itself came from. I think I just treated the elements like they had always been here, like the periodic table was somehow part o

My earliest memory is the letter A. I was in kindergarten learning how to write it, and the page had a picture of an ant. I don't remember what the classroom looked like. I don't remember who was sitting next to me, what I was wearing, what happened before the worksheet was handed to me, or what happened when I finished it. I just remember the A and the ant. At least, I think I do. That's the strange thing about trying to locate the beginning of your own memory. There is no c

I have always thought zombies were one of the more believable monsters. Not believable in the sense that I think a dead person is going to crawl out of a grave and start eating people. I know enough biology to understand that death presents a few logistical problems there. Once circulation stops, oxygen stops reaching tissues, cells start dying, decomposition eventually begins, and we have officially passed the point where a person is going to get up and start sprinting after