Catalase Systems / Education Portal
Before diving into a paper, a tool, or a concept, AIR helps you map where you are. Tick the concepts you know, flag the gaps, and get pointed to what you need. It's an honour system - the engine works better when you're honest with it.
by BrineDew
Identify proteins from structural and functional clues. Brutally hard.
Catalase provides: 17 supporting documents - fold terminology, crystallography milestones, Richardson's visual language, oligomer logic, and more. Plus AIR readiness check.
by Catalase
From Lewis acids to ferroptosis. How iron moves through the body, and what goes wrong.
by Catalase
Cooperativity, Bohr effect, fetal hemoglobin, diving mammals. The full picture.
24 papers
arXiv papers
24 papers from foundational to recent, ranging from Show Your Working to DeepSeek v2 .
Catalase provides: curated selection, "why this matters" context for each paper, and AIR prerequisite mapping - some need only curiosity, others need transformers and statistics.
Building - Spring 2026
by Catalase
These are the algorithms that changed what's readily computable - beautiful ideas that make calculations efficient.
Catalase provides: AIR prerequisite mapping. Animated interactive walkthroughs.
How calculators compute trig functions with only shifts and adds. Interactive using CodingQuests. Big rotations close the gap - small rotations hit the exact value.
The algorithm behind everything from MP3s to polynomial multiplication. Watch it split, recurse and combine.
Dynamic programming for sequence alignment. Watch the matrix fill, then trace back the answer.
by Andy Matuschak & Michael Nielsen
A spaced-repetition introduction to quantum computing.
Catalase provides: AIR prerequisite check for complex numbers and linear algebra - points you to 3Blue1Brown if you're not ready.
by Catalase
Polynomials, vectors, complex numbers, charting, tree structure. Understand what the tools are for, what quantities they work with, before you use them.
Anomalous Ideas
premium content by Catalase
Why is methionine the initiator amino acid? Why does the recurrent laryngeal nerve loop under the aorta? These are real puzzles with textbook non-answers.
Each entry teaches the background first - baroreceptors, anastomosis, tRNA charging - then proposes a synthesis you won't find elsewhere. The science is real. The explanations are mine. You might not agree with the answers, but you'll understand the questions better than most who never asked.
The first five essays are in an AIR assessment. The essays themselves and further AIR assessments for other alien archive essays are behind a paywall.
Essays release over time. More about this and other subscriber content on the plans page .