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Andreas Wagner Pursues the Secrets to Evolutionary Success
...what drives evolution, and he has wondered about evolutionary innovations that seem to lead nowhere — until they suddenly become the next big thing. His most recent book, Sleeping Beauties:...
Quaking Giants Might Solve the Mysteries of Stellar Magnetism
...is tipped on its side, meaning that the technique could determine the orientation of magnetic fields, which is crucial for updating models of stellar evolution. A second study, led by...
What Makes Life Tick? Mitochondria May Keep Time for Cells
...evolution exploits in creating new species. However, what sets the tempo of an organism’s growth has remained a mystery. “Our knowledge of what controls developmental timing has really lagged behind...
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...
Bats Use the Same Brain Cells to Map Physical and Social Worlds
New research in social bats raises the intriguing possibility that evolution can program the brain’s “place cells,” which are typically associated with location, to encode all kinds of environmental information....
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 New Quest to Control Evolution
Modern scientists aren’t content with predicting how life evolves. They want to shape it. Evolution is a complicated thing. Much of modern evolutionary biology seeks to reconcile the seeming randomness...
New Cell Atlases Reveal Untold Variety in the Brain and Beyond
...organ. How these cells are distributed and are related to one another suggests many intriguing ideas about the evolution of the mammalian brain. Last month, in another landmark contribution to...