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Out-of-Sync ‘Loners’ May Secretly Protect Orderly Swarms
...synchronize can actually be harnessed by evolution to turn it into an interesting strategy?” Tarnita asked. Since evolution could potentially act on that process, “that might actually be really meaningful...
Cosmic Rays May Explain Life’s Bias for Right-Handed DNA
Cosmic rays may have given right-handed genetic helixes an evolutionary edge at the beginning of life’s history. If you could shrink small enough to descend the genetic helix of any...
A Physicist’s Approach to Biology Brings Ecological Insights
...yeast to experimentally probe the evolution of cooperative behavior. Over time, Gore was seduced by what he calls ecology’s “big, beautiful theories” for how living beings can exist in complex...
The Mystery of Mistletoe’s Missing Genes
...she said. Ditching energy-expensive traits, or “reductive evolution,” is a common theme in parasites, Meyer noted. And losing this particular suite of proteins might have additional benefits. Because complex I...
How to Understand COVID-19 Variants and Their Effects on Vaccines
...number of other SARS-CoV-2 mutations have been identified around the globe. Some of the variants currently circulating in the population do seem to be more evolutionarily fit than their older...
DNA of Giant ‘Corpse Flower’ Parasite Surprises Biologists
...and weigh a whopping 10 kilograms, roughly the heft of a toddler. More than a decade ago, Rafflesiaceae parasites caught the eye of Jeanmaire Molina, an evolutionary plant biologist at...
A Backdoor Lets the Immune System Monitor the Brain
...have identified how evolution achieves a balancing act, limiting the dangers of immune responses in the central nervous system while still providing protection from disease. The researchers reported recently in...
DNA’s Histone Spools Hint at How Complex Cells Evolved
New work shows that histones, long treated as boring spools for DNA, sit at the center of the origin story of eukaryotes and continue to play important roles in evolution...
Secret Workings of Smell Receptors Revealed for First Time
...and discriminate among astronomical numbers of smells. It also sheds light on key principles of receptor activity that might have far-reaching implications — for the evolution of chemical perception, for...