About This Blog

Substrate Notes exists for one reason: the biochemistry that runs your body is genuinely interesting, and most writing about it is either a textbook or a scare story. We think there is a middle path — careful, sourced, and readable.

What we cover

The articles on this site walk through human biochemistry topic by topic: the hormones that pace your day, the neurotransmitters that carry a thought, the slow chemistry of sleep and recovery, and the metabolic machinery that turns breakfast into motion.

• Hormones and signaling — cortisol rhythms, oxytocin bonds, and the feedback loops that keep them honest
• Neural chemistry — dopamine, serotonin, and what the signals actually do
• Energy metabolism — mitochondria, ATP, and the economics of being warm-blooded
• Recovery and repair — inflammation, tissue turnover, and what happens while you sleep

How we write

Every article starts in the primary literature — review papers and physiology references — and gets rewritten until a curious reader with no laboratory background can follow it. When the evidence is thin, we say so. When a claim is popular but wrong, we say that too.

Nothing here is medical advice. It is chemistry with the jargon removed, written for people who like knowing how things work.