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Solution: ‘Are Genes Selfish or Cooperative?’
...considered. As I said before, evolution is ruthlessly, incorruptibly meritocratic. If such phenomena exist, they do so because they are either evolutionarily neutral, or perhaps possess other advantages for the...
New Hybrid Species Remix Old Genes Creatively
...extent of hybrid ancestry in the genome has far outpaced our progress in understanding its evolutionary impact,” wrote Molly Schumer, an evolutionary biologist at Stanford University, and her colleagues in...
Bacteria Sacrifice DNA Repair for Better RNA
Preserving its DNA ought to be a cell’s top priority. But bacteria slow their DNA repair to a crawl in favor of proofreading gene transcripts. Evolution is a game of...
A Thermodynamic Answer to Why Birds Migrate
...Evolution, those wild differences in migration patterns — and the resulting distribution of bird species around the world — reflect the efforts of those species to maintain an optimal energy...
What Is the Sun Made Of and When Will It Die?
If and when physicists are able to pin down the metal content of the sun, that number could upend much of what we thought we knew about the evolution and...
An Italian Cosmologist Who Wanders in Dante’s Dark Wood
...different epochs and tracking its evolution under dark influences. Quanta Magazine spoke with Pettorino over Skype this summer as she helped organize the annual EuroPython conference for users of the...
‘Lava-Lamp’ Proteins May Help Cells Cheat Death
...have been trying to learn its significance. Now scientists are beginning to understand that evolution has tuned certain proteins to act in aggregate like liquids. Through phase separation, they spontaneously...
New Quantum Paradox Clarifies Where Our Views of Reality Go Wrong
...evolution of the wave function at face value and denies that it ever collapses. If a quantum coin toss can be either heads or tails, then in the many-worlds scenario,...
The Year in Biology
...known to science. Because of evolution, we can see how the web of life also extends back through time, with genomic connections that link very different organisms through common ancestry....