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How Do Fireflies Flash in Sync? Studies Suggest a New Answer.
...until now. It’s not yet clear why nature would favor the evolution of this hodgepodge state of synchronization rather than a more uniform one. But even basic synchrony has always...
Machine Learning Highlights a Hidden Order in Scents
...to explain these irregular cases, Wiltschko and his team considered the requirements that evolution might have levied on our senses. Each sense has been tuned over millions of years to...
How Pools of Genetic Diversity Affect a Species’ Fate
...save the species,” Steiner explained. “But that’s not enough if you think about it. When you talk about species, you’re not considering the whole evolutionary potential of all the different...
Fossilized Molecules Reveal a Lost World of Ancient Life
...off from one another in the evolutionary tree. Primary among those tools are molecular clocks: stretches of DNA that mutate at a constant rate, allowing scientists to estimate the passage...
During Pregnancy, a Fake ‘Infection’ Protects the Fetus
...pharmacology at the University of South Florida in Tampa and lead author on the new paper. “Evolution is so smart.” The Placenta Fakes Sick Totary-Jain discovered the placenta’s sleight of...
Evolving Bacteria Can Evade Barriers to ‘Peak’ Fitness
...a way. Nearly a century ago, the evolutionary theorist Sewall Wright imagined a landscape of mountains and valleys. The peaks represented states of high evolutionary fitness for organisms, while the...
The Year in Biology
...prevailing wisdom and reveal a stronger, better intellectual framework. Both kinds of revolution unleash avalanches of new ideas and insights that improve our understanding of how life works. This past...
Cellular Self-Destruction May Be Ancient. But Why?
...membrane are all that remains. “It’s really amazing how fast, how organized it is,” said Aurora Nedelcu, an evolutionary biologist at the University of New Brunswick who has studied the...
Meet the Eukaryote, the First Cell to Get Organized
...lineages that lack mitochondria used to have them and then lost them sometime in evolutionary history.) And across the evolutionary tree, different eukaryotes have evolved or procured additional organelles that...