Nina Çapar 10/18/26 Nina Çapar 10/18/26

The science of having no answers

Almost everything in the universe is made of something nobody has identified. Physics treats that as a frontier and funds it. The same sentence, said about a woman's symptoms, gets her sent home. This post is about both, because they turn out to be the same sentence with different consequences.

Nina Çapar 10/18/26 Nina Çapar 10/18/26

Art & Evolution

Evolution is not sentimental. A species living at the edge of survival does not casually develop an elaborate reward response to marks on a wall. Every calorie spent grinding ochre is a calorie not spent on food, shelter or a child. So why has no human population ever been found that does not make art? Four serious answers, one of which starts somewhere you will not expect.

Nina Çapar 10/8/26 Nina Çapar 10/8/26

Mind Wanderings

You spend nearly half your waking life thinking about something other than what you are doing. Most of that is not good for you. A specific slice of it is where your best ideas come from, and the difference between the two is not luck. It is a set of conditions you can arrange, if you have the spare capacity to arrange them.

Nina Çapar 10/4/26 Nina Çapar 10/4/26

Art & Longevity

I love art so much it moves every fibre of my being. Recently I started wondering what that phenomenon in my body actually is, when I look at art I love and art I don't. Both provoke a sensation. It turns out both have been measured, and the difference between them is not one of degree. Your brain changes the category.

Nina Çapar 10/1/26 Nina Çapar 10/1/26

Stem Cells

I fasted past 72 hours once. My back hurt the whole way through, and afterwards it felt like a different back. That sent me into the stem cell literature, where the real finding turned out to be stranger than the supplement ads: your repair crew does not fade slowly. It collapses at around seventy. And in the female body, one of the hormones maintaining it withdraws two decades earlier.

Nina Çapar 9/24/26 Nina Çapar 9/24/26

Iron IV

If you're a woman with iron-deficiency anaemia, there's a good chance the cause is your period — and a good chance nobody offered you a choice about which iron infusion you received. Two bags of iron can look identical. What they leave behind is not.

Nina Çapar 9/17/26 Nina Çapar 9/17/26

Starting Cycle Tracking

A friend asked me over dinner how she should start tracking her cycle, and I opened my mouth to answer and realised I was about to overwhelm her. So I stopped. Here is the only thing you have to do to start — and it fits in one sentence.

Nina Çapar 9/13/26 Nina Çapar 9/13/26

Histamine

The headaches came on a schedule. So did the flushing, the sleeplessness, the way one glass of wine could undo me in the days before my period and do almost nothing the week after. I thought it was random. It was not.

Nina Çapar 9/10/26 Nina Çapar 9/10/26

Estrobolome

For years I treated my bloating like a crime scene, and food was always the suspect. Gluten one month, dairy the next. What I kept missing was the timing — it wasn't my plate, it was the conversation between my gut bacteria and my estrogen.