The body in plain words
The body in plain words: 8 articles from What Are Peptides. Plain-English answers about peptides.
What Is a Feedback Loop? How the Body Keeps Its Own Thermostat
A feedback loop is a signal that turns down its own source. It is how the body keeps hormone levels steady instead of letting them run away, and it explains why the word "suppression" appears in research papers.
What Is the Blood-Brain Barrier? The Brain's Bouncer, Explained
The blood-brain barrier is a tightly sealed lining on the brain's blood vessels that decides, molecule by molecule, what may pass from the blood into brain tissue. Here is what the wall is made of, who it lets in, and why 'crosses the barrier' is such a hard claim to prove.
What Is the Pituitary Gland? The Pea That Runs the Hormones
The pituitary is a pea-sized gland at the base of the brain. It does few of the body's jobs itself; instead it sends instructions to the glands that do, which is why so many peptide articles mention it.
What Is a Half-Life?
It is the time it takes for half of something to disappear. Simple enough — until you notice that the second half takes just as long as the first, and that how long a molecule lasts in a body has nothing to do with how long it lasts in a vial.
What Is a Signalling Pathway?
A message passed down a line of molecules inside a cell, where every step can amplify it, delay it or stop it dead. Once you can picture the line, the phrase activates pathway X stops sounding like a conclusion.
What Is an Enzyme?
An enzyme makes one chemical reaction happen far faster than it otherwise would, and is not used up doing it. Here is the plain version — and why one family of enzymes explains most of what looks strange about peptide research.
What Is Metabolism?
In everyday speech, metabolism means how fast someone burns energy. In biology it means every chemical reaction happening inside a living thing — including what the body does to a drug. Those are two very different sizes of word.
What Is the Immune System?
It is not an organ, and it has no dial. Here is the plain version: the fast half, the slow half that remembers, why inflammation is a process rather than a fault, and why immune claims are unusually hard to prove.