Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. We all know about circadian rhythms, right?

We get tired at night, we go to sleep, we wake up, we're refreshed. Hopefully, maybe there's caffeine involved,

but there's a cycle that we go through roughly 24 hours. Our bodies and our brains, which are connected to our bodies,

are very much

influenced by internal clocks that let us know what time of day it is.

This is why when we travel to a different time zone, we get jet lag because there's a mismatch between the activities of the day

and the position of the sun and the sky versus those internal clocks. So here's something that maybe I knew before, but had forgotten,

but I learned during this podcast, essentially every cell in our body has its own circadian clock to let the cell know what time of day it is.

Of course, there's also systems in our bodies because the cells talk to each other. There's the nervous system and there's the metabolic system and so forth,

but it kind of bubbles up from the individual cells. So when you get jet lag or even just when you get tired at night, because you know that it's bedtime,

it's not just some large scale impression that your body has. It's every cell in your body is thinking this way,

which is kind of a remarkable fact. You know, biology is in a great position these days. It's a very exciting time.

There's enormous amounts of data coming in, of course. We can analyze genes and molecular biology questions in much greater detail than we ever could before.

And there's also tools to analyze that with great computational power, machine learning and AI, all that kinds of stuff. Plus, of course, there are questions to which we don't know the answers.

In physics, if you listen to my Long Solo podcast, one of the challenges is that we have theories that fit the data really well in the regimes where we can experimentally access in biology. Don't worry. That is not the case.

It's very easy to ask questions that are very important, but we don't know the answer, but it's plausible that we can find the answer.

So today, we're talking to Rosemary Brown, who's a biologist, molecular biologist, slash engineer at Northwestern, who works at the sort of systems level of biology, right?

Rather than looking at this particular organism and its whole life cycle, or for that matter, this particular organ in an organism, she looks at the various complexes, the various networks, the various systems that hook together inside biological organisms.

The circadian rhythm is one of them, but there's many different ways that this kind of paradigm plays out. It's very different than in physics where you can find a simple spherical cow, you know, abstract away all the complications and just look at the harmonic oscillator or whatever in biology, very often we have these intricate complex networks that are talking to each other.

And so that's where we're going to explore today. Before going on to that, let me just mention, I haven't mentioned it a while, we're still doing the Mindscape Big Picture Scholarship.

So this is something where people who are going to college, going to universities, can apply for this scholarship. It's $10,000 if you win. So it just goes right to your tuition.

It is aimed at youngsters who are going to go to college who are interested in the big picture. So who are interested in, you know, not necessarily doing something applied or primarily financially rewarding, but thinking about the big ideas.

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