It's easy enough for us to feel like we understand things like proteins or DNA or how cells are put together, at least in the abstract, functional biology class sense.

But the more I learn about how biology actually works, how life is assembled

from all these parts, the more baffled I am that any of this actually works. In a recent story in

Quanta about how crowded it is inside cells, we noted that there are an estimated 1 billion,

with B, biochemical reactions every second in each and every one of the

30-some trillion cells in our bodies. To me, that's every bit as mind-blowing as the idea that

there are a trillion galaxies out there in space. In fact, it's almost easier to figure out

things about those galaxies than it is to get a grip on the biochemical nonsense that's going on in ourselves.

Welcome to the Quanta podcast where we explore the frontiers of fundamental science and math.

I'm Samir Patel, editor-in-chief of Quanta magazine.

Our latest foray into this baffling complexity was a story by biology staff writer Yasmin

Saplicolu about a very complex molecular machine that's churning away in our cells every day and how much the latest

imaging technology is teaching us about it. The story was called Disorder Drives,

one of Nature's most complex machines, and Yasmin is here to tell us about it. Welcome back to

the show, Yasmin. Hi, thanks for having me back. So Yasmin, what's the big idea?

So the big idea is our quest to understand one of biology's most complex machines called

the Nuclear Poor Complex.

This is a machine that sits within the membranes of eukaryotic nuclei, letting in and

out certain molecules.

Okay.

Let's first establish a little bit about what goes on inside cells, and specifically

in the nucleus of a cell. So what's in a nucleus?

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