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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...
A Map of Human History, Hidden in DNA
...His early exposure to human differences — “I loved geography, I loved languages, I loved history” — morphed into a deep curiosity about evolution and genetic diversity. His work reflects...
Beating the Odds for Lucky Mutations
...resistance to UV or antibiotics. The question that has tormented some evolutionary biologists ever since is whether nature favored this arrangement. Is the upsurge in mutations merely a secondary consequence...
DNA Analysis Reveals a Genus of Plants Hiding in Plain Sight
...of the original naturalists. The rising importance of the theory of evolution to biology altered the purpose of taxonomy. Taxonomy began simply as a way of naming and cataloging organisms...