When you look very close up at a butterfly wing, you can see this patchwork map of lattices with slightly different orientations (colors added to illustrate the domains). Scientists used X-rays to discover what creates one butterfly effect: how the microscopic structures on the insect's wings reflect light to appear as brilliant colors to the eye.

A bacterial colony showing individual cells undergoing transposable element events, resulting in blue fluorescence. "Jumping genes" are ubiquitous. Every domain of life hosts these sequences of DNA that can "jump" from one position to another along a chromosome; in fact, nearly half the human genome is made up of jumping genes. Depending on their specific excision and insertion points, jumping genes can interrupt or trigger gene expression, driving genetic mutation and contributing to cell diversification. Since their discovery in the 1940s, researchers have been able to study the behavior of these jumping genes, generally known as transposons or transposable elements (TE), primarily through indirect methods that infer individual activity from bulk results. However, such techniques are not sensitive enough to determine precisely how or why the transposons jump, and what factors trigger their activity.

Biologically speaking, we carry the outside world within us. The food we ingest each day and the trillions of microbes that inhabit our guts pose a constant risk of infection--and all that separates us from these foreign entities is a delicate boundary made of a single layer of cells.