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Introducing The Quanta Podcast
...now. We do a lot of stories, as you said about molecular biology, about evolution. What are the rules through which evolution through natural selection works? So, we kind of...
Will AI Ever Understand Language Like Humans?
...evolution of cooperation, from a biological perspective. I’m not even sure that values are outside of science. I guess I’m espousing what the critics call scientism. LEVIN: Mmmm… uh-oh… STROGATZ:...
Intelligence Evolved at Least Twice in Vertebrate Animals
...that support vertebrate intelligence evolved independently in birds and mammals. It’s hard to track down which path evolution took, given that any trace of the ancient ancestor’s actual brain vanished...
Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex
...be widespread. In this new view, biological evolution appears not as a unique process that gave rise to a qualitatively distinct form of matter — living organisms. Instead, evolution is...
A New Proof Smooths Out the Math of Melting
...to mean curvature flow. Should a singularity appear, the flow can go on — making it possible for mathematicians to assess the surface’s evolution. Over the past few decades, mathematicians...
How Did Multicellular Life Evolve?
...of what we call the Multicellularity Long-Term Evolution Experiment… M.U.L.T.E.E… MuL-TEE… absolutely a pun. It’s also named in homage of the long-term evolution experiment, which is a 70,000 and counting...
The Road Map to Alien Life Passes Through the ‘Cosmic Shoreline’
...an Atmosphere Stripped of its fanciful name, the cosmic shoreline might not seem like a particularly interesting boundary. But planets are enormously complicated, long-lived objects. Simple questions about their evolution...
The Poetry Fan Who Taught an LLM to Read and Write DNA
...to understand biological sequence,” said the computer scientist Brian Hie, who heads the Laboratory of Evolutionary Design at Stanford University, based at the nonprofit Arc Institute. This was the impetus...
Scientists Re-Create the Microbial Dance That Sparked Complex Life
Evolution was fueled by endosymbiosis, cellular alliances in which one microbe makes a permanent home inside another. For the first time, biologists made it happen in the lab. Far from...