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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...
Random Search Wired Into Animals May Help Them Hunt
...that evolution may have equipped nervous systems to spontaneously generate a foundational movement pattern, a solution that works better than any other strategy for a blind search. The idea has...
What Is an Individual? Biology Seeks Clues in Information Theory.
...disentangling the complex symbioses and relationships that define a community. Evolutionary biologists, who study natural selection and how it chooses individuals for reproductive success, need to figure out what constitutes...
Why Are Plants Green? To Reduce the Noise in Photosynthesis.
...wastes green light. What they did not expect was that their model would also explain the colors of other photosynthetic forms of life too. Their findings point to an evolutionary...