It all started with ants. Ordinary, everyday garden ants that I watched for hours as a child, fascinated by their silent, coordinated movements. How did they communicate so effectively without words? The answer, of course, was chemical signaling—pheromones. Those tiny scent breadcrumbs guiding their colony mates to food sources and warning of dangers with more efficiency than any human emergency broadcast system. Fast forward twenty years, and I found myself in my makeshift home lab,…

I’ve always found it a bit strange how much we notice each other’s lunches at work. I mean, we’re all adults with jobs to do, yet somehow what’s inside those plastic containers becomes this whole unspoken thing that everyone’s hyper-aware of but pretends not to be. The first time I realized this weird office lunch hierarchy was a thing, I was at my previous job – a marketing agency in Manchester where I’d been working…