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Before the Cambrian Explosion came the weirdest chapter in animal history.

In this episode, we head back to the Ediacaran Period — a quiet world of microbial mats, shallow seas, and the first large, complex organisms trying out body plans for the very first time.

Meet Dickinsonia, the giant living pancake confirmed as an animal by ancient cholesterol. Meet fractal ferns, three-armed whirlpools, a tiny grain-of-rice burrower that may sit near our own branch of the tree of life, and a whole cast of creatures so strange scientists are still arguing over what they even were.

We’ll talk Snowball Earth, boneless fossils, how cells learned to specialize without a CEO cell, why the Ediacaran fossil record suddenly goes silent, and what a megalodon tooth can teach us about reconstructing lost worlds.

Welcome to Ediacaran Park: less running for your life, more staring at a fossil and asking, “What am I looking at here?”

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Quiz: fromcellstous.com/episode13_quiz 

Youtube: www.youtube.com/@fromcellstous

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For three billion years, life went solo.

Then one day, some cells forgot to separate after dividing — and that tiny accident changed the history of Earth.

In Episode 12 of From Cells to Us… How?!, we explore the rise of multicellular life: the first cells that learned to cooperate, the evolutionary battle against cheating cells (aka cancer), and how trillions of individual cells eventually became… you.

Because multicellularity didn’t just make life bigger.

It made complexity possible.

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Sources and quiz: https://substack.com/@fromcellstousshow 

Youtube: www.youtube.com/@fromcellstous

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Sex Didn’t Evolve to Make Babies

What if I told you sex didn’t evolve to reproduce?

A billion years ago, single-celled organisms were already doing something that looks a lot like sex — and it had nothing to do with babies.

No embryos. No development. No families.

Just two cells, briefly merging… shuffling their DNA… and separating again.

So why would evolution invent something so inefficient?

Why give up cloning — the fastest, simplest way to survive — for something slower, riskier, and more complicated?

The answer involves parasites, broken DNA, and a billion-year-old survival strategy that’s still running inside your body right now.

Ep 11 quiz: https://fromcellstous.com/episode11_quiz

Instagram: www.instagram.com/fromcellstous

Youtube: www.youtube.com/@fromcellstous

Sources and more: https://substack.com/@fromcellstousshow 

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Episode 10: Inside the Cell City 🧬

What if your cells weren’t just blobs… but fully functioning cities?

In this episode, we take a tour inside the eukaryotic cell — where proteins are built, packaged, shipped, and even recycled. From the rough ER and Golgi apparatus to lysosomes and motor proteins, every part of the cell has a job.

And none of it was planned.

Every organelle exists because it solved a problem — one solution leading to the next, turning simple cells into something incredibly complex.

🎧 Next: Sexual reproduction — one of the strangest innovations in the history of life.

🧠 Take the quiz (ep 1-9) - fromcellstous.com  

🧠 Take the quiz (ep 10) - ep10quiz.fromcellstous.com

📩 More + sources: https://open.substack.com/pub/fromcellstoushow

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A cell eats another cell… again.

But this time? It doesn’t just get energy — it gets the ability to make food from sunlight.

In this episode, we dive into chloroplasts, photosynthesis, and the moment life figured out how to turn sunlight and air into sugar.

Plants stop hunting. Animals don’t.

And every calorie you’ve ever eaten? It all traces back to this one ancient accident.

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Episode 8: The Rise of Eukaryotes — The Cell That Changed Everything | The Mitochondria and the Nucleus 

How did life become complex?

In this episode, we explore how eukaryotic cells evolved from simple prokaryotes through one of the most important events in biology: endosymbiosis — when one cell engulfed another and kept it alive.

Learn how mitochondria originated from bacteria, why more energy allowed complex life to evolve, and how this single evolutionary partnership led to animals, plants, and humans.

We also break down the difference between prokaryotic vs eukaryotic cells, the debated origin of the nucleus, and why evolution isn’t just “survival of the fittest” — it’s also about collaboration.

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Oxygen — the thing keeping you alive right now — was once a toxic waste product that triggered the first mass extinction in Earth's history. In this episode we're talking about the Great Oxygenation Event: the day cyanobacteria accidentally poisoned the planet, possibly froze it solid, and somehow set the stage for everything that came after. Including you.

We cover why early Earth had basically no oxygen, how a tiny bacterium changed everything by figuring out photosynthesis, why oxygen was a death sentence for most life at the time, and how the survivors didn't just cope with this new toxic world — they figured out how to weaponize it.

Plus: why you are technically on fire right now, what free radicals are actually doing inside your body, why aging might just be the damage winning, and a February 2026 paper out of Cambridge that just made the RNA World hypothesis a whole lot more likely.

It's a lot. But so was the apocalypse.

From Cells to Us... How?! is the podcast where we figure out how life went from a single cell to complex creatures like us — using analogies, humor, and the occasional Bond villain reference.

Episode includes: The Great Oxygenation Event, cyanobacteria, Banded Iron Formations, Snowball Earth, aerobic respiration, ATP, free radicals, oxidative stress, antioxidants, and QT45.

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 LUCA had kids. And like all kids, they went their separate ways. Today we're covering the first great split in the tree of life - when LUCA's descendants branched into Bacteria and Archaea. Same genetic code, completely different everything else. Plus: viruses (where have THEY been this whole time?), horizontal gene transfer (strangers sharing genes), and why bacteria sharing resistance genes is now one of the biggest threats to modern medicine. Also, I make a lot of puns. You've been warned. 

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Life learned to speak in Episode 4. Now it’s time to speak clearly. Tina gets her anticodon. Rick becomes Darth Vader. The wobble gives evolution room to experiment. And LUCA emerges - the ancestor of all life on Earth.

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How did life go from random chaos to organized machinery? Three-letter words. In this episode, we meet the RNA family - Mary, Rick, and Tina - and discover how they invented the genetic code. The same code you, me, E. coli, and blue whales all still use today.