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Inside the Knotty World of ‘Anyon’ Particles
...for an evolution involving anyons will be different, depending on how their world lines got tangled up over time, the value of the amplitude provides a record of their relative...
How Life Turns Asymmetric
...Lefty, a gene that suppresses Nodal activity on the embryo’s right. The Nodal-Lefty team appears to be the most important genetic pathway that guides asymmetry, said Cliff Tabin, an evolutionary...
How Life (and Death) Spring From Disorder
...cells on Earth led predictably to the human race. Laws do not, it seems, dictate the course of evolution. The teleology and historical contingency of biology, said the evolutionary biologist...
How Viruses May Have Led to Complex Life
...idea that viruses played a role in one of the most significant complexity jumps in evolution: The transition from prokaryotes to eukaryotes. Prokaryotic organisms, which include bacteria and archaea, were...
Droplets That ‘Come to Life’
...these active-droplet “protocells” divided and proliferated, evolution could have acted on them, gradually making them more complex and leading to the rise of living cells. The physics of active-droplet division...
Dividing Droplets Could Explain Life’s Origin
...just think about droplets like Oparin did, then it’s not clear how evolution could act on these droplets,” Zwicker said. “For evolution, you have to make copies of yourself with...
The Shape-Shifting Army Inside Your Cells
...a protein has both disordered and ordered regions, how do the two interact? How did the evolution of disordered proteins differ from that of folded ones? Also, how do molecules...
Marcus Feldman: In Search of Actions That Alter Evolution
Marcus Feldman explains how he models the effects of a cultural preference — in this case, a preference for sons over daughters in China. Jason Henry for Quanta Magazine...
Finding the Actions That Alter Evolution
...while the existing framework of evolutionary theory, known as the “modern synthesis,” is basically solid, it needs to be expanded to account for newly recognized drivers of evolution. One such...