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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...
A Multitalented Scientist Seeks the Origins of Multicellularity
...when those identities are not well represented,” explained Extavour, an evolutionary geneticist who in 2014 became the first Black woman to win tenure in the biological sciences at Harvard’s Faculty...
Solution: ‘Are Genes Selfish or Cooperative?’
...considered. As I said before, evolution is ruthlessly, incorruptibly meritocratic. If such phenomena exist, they do so because they are either evolutionarily neutral, or perhaps possess other advantages for the...
New Hybrid Species Remix Old Genes Creatively
...extent of hybrid ancestry in the genome has far outpaced our progress in understanding its evolutionary impact,” wrote Molly Schumer, an evolutionary biologist at Stanford University, and her colleagues in...
Bacteria Sacrifice DNA Repair for Better RNA
Preserving its DNA ought to be a cell’s top priority. But bacteria slow their DNA repair to a crawl in favor of proofreading gene transcripts. Evolution is a game of...
A Thermodynamic Answer to Why Birds Migrate
...Evolution, those wild differences in migration patterns — and the resulting distribution of bird species around the world — reflect the efforts of those species to maintain an optimal energy...
What Is the Sun Made Of and When Will It Die?
If and when physicists are able to pin down the metal content of the sun, that number could upend much of what we thought we knew about the evolution and...
An Italian Cosmologist Who Wanders in Dante’s Dark Wood
...different epochs and tracking its evolution under dark influences. Quanta Magazine spoke with Pettorino over Skype this summer as she helped organize the annual EuroPython conference for users of the...
‘Lava-Lamp’ Proteins May Help Cells Cheat Death
...have been trying to learn its significance. Now scientists are beginning to understand that evolution has tuned certain proteins to act in aggregate like liquids. Through phase separation, they spontaneously...