Peter Strain
LIFE can be strange. Just look at narwhals, and those stick insects that resemble leaves on legs. Or consider the cockeyed squid, with its bizarrely mismatched peepers: one yellow and huge, the other tiny and blue. And yet almost nothing about life is as baffling as the lopsidedness at its core.
All biological molecules have an inherent “handedness”: they can exist in two mirror-image forms, just like your left and right hands. But for each type of molecule it uses, life on Earth prefers a single form. So much so, in fact, that their opposite numbers are rarely seen…
