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What Causes Giant Rogue Waves?
...as hard because there’s evolution in space and time, but at least water is water, right? So its properties don’t change. And it’s hard because there is a free surface,...
Cells Across the Tree of Life Exchange ‘Text Messages’ Using RNA
Long known as a messenger within cells, RNA is increasingly seen as life’s molecular communication system — even between organisms widely separated by evolution. For a molecule of RNA, the...
The ‘Beautiful Confusion’ of the First Billion Years Comes Into View
...co-organized the meeting, said the community is scrambling to absorb both JWST’s data and its implications. Observers see things that are not explained in current theories about the evolution of...
The Thoughts of a Spiderweb
...and Kevin Laland, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Saint Andrews, proposed a bold answer to the question. They argued in a review paper, published in the journal Animal...
With ‘Downsized’ DNA, Flowering Plants Took Over the World
Compact genomes and tiny cells gave flowering plants an edge over competing flora. This discovery hints at a broader evolutionary principle. When people consider evolutionary events related to the origin...
Too Small for Big Muscles, Tiny Animals Use Springs
...the mechanical properties of their body’s structural materials like loaded springs. Evolution’s ingenuity in achieving such performance anticipated the designs that humans would eventually invent for their own tools and...
How Equality and Inequality Shape the Birds and the Bees
Two dynamic, seemingly opposing forces likely played an important role in the evolution of reproduction and child rearing in social animals like bees and humans. Before tackling this month’s puzzle,...
A Rapid End Strikes the Dinosaur Extinction Debate
...guide the post-apocalyptic evolution of surviving species — not to drive the extinction itself. Quanta spoke with Hull about that cataclysm — often abbreviated as the K-T extinction — her...
What Other Coronaviruses Tell Us About SARS-CoV-2
...bind effectively, making it harder to produce severe infections. Such evolution by deletion is actually a common feature of these viruses. A deletion of part of the spike gene and...