Every living cell in your body—whether it’s part of your skin, your brain, or your gut—reads its genetic instructions using the same universal code. It’s an astonishingly elegant scheme: DNA letters—A, T, G, C—get read in triplets, called codons, and every triplet corresponds to one of 64 possible codons. Each triplet carries instructions to make proteins, which are the molecular machines running your cells. That exact system has remained unchanged across all life—from the simplest bacteria to the biggest blue whale—for billions of years. Here’s the surprising thought: this genetic code is stored as discrete symbols, a bit like the…