The average human body is made up of 37 trillion cells — that’s roughly 4.3 million times the population of New York City. This cellular world is vastly diverse, and biologists are constantly discovering new types of cells with novel functions. But what exactly makes one cell type different from another? How many different kinds of cells comprise a...

Equilibria will occasionally post lightning introductions to our favorite big questions in biology. This is our first, and is in collaboration with Josh Cofsky, a PhD student in Jennifer Doudna and John Kuriyan’s labs at UC Berkeley.  The world teems with an incredibly diverse array of lifeforms, each shaped by millions of years of evolution. Biologists...

We know a lot about what can go wrong inside cells during disease. But what about the healthy bystanders? Your body is a mosaic of cells, all squished together to form the tissues and organs that allow you to digest, think and breathe. The proper function of these organs depends entirely on the health and behavior of the individual cells that make...

This is a guest post by Eric Copenhaver, a Physics PhD student in Prof. Holger Müller’s lab at UC Berkeley. Follow him on Twitter @ecopenhaver. If you walked into my atomic physics lab at the University of California Berkeley two weeks ago, you would have found me in a pensive pose. Left hand nestled inside my right elbow, right hand clasping my chin,...

We really wish we could be writing about science right now. But this week, we can’t. By now, you’ve probably heard of — and formed an opinion on — the tax bill that was just passed by House Republicans. Maybe you’ve read about how it scraps the medical expense deduction, lowers corporate tax rates, or eliminates state and local tax deductions. But...

Scientists at Yale use gene-editing technology  to understand the remarkable regenerative abilities of an adorable amphibian. In 1864, a small shipment arrived in Paris from French colonialists in Mexico. It consisted of six fairly unremarkable animals — three female deer and three small dogs — and thirty-four monumentally strange animals that were...