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Biology

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The Thoughts of a Spiderweb

May 23, 2017

Spiders appear to offload cognitive tasks to their webs, making them one of a number of species with a mind that isn’t fully confined within the head.

Can Darwinian Evolution Explain Lamarckism?

May 11, 2017

Answering three questions can help reveal how the “inheritance of acquired characteristics” fits into modern evolutionary theory.

How Heat Kills Cells

May 9, 2017

The proteins that unravel as the temperature starts to rise turn out to be among the most vital.

Swirling Bacteria Linked to the Physics of Phase Transitions

May 4, 2017

The new experiments suggest that simple models can explain the behavior of thousands of interacting organisms.

Q&A

A Map of Human History, Hidden in DNA

April 20, 2017

The computational biologist John Novembre uses our genetic code to rewrite the history of humanity.

Solution: ‘A Ticking Evolutionary Clock’

April 3, 2017

How to calculate when a gene’s rate of evolution will slow to a crawl.

A Ticking Evolutionary Clock

March 16, 2017

How quickly will a gene’s rate of evolution slow to a crawl?

Evolution Runs Faster on Short Timescales

March 14, 2017

Examine evolution over the course of years or centuries, and you’ll find that it progresses much more quickly than it does over geologic time.

Why Did Life Move to Land? For the View

March 7, 2017

The ancient creatures who first crawled onto land may have been lured by the informational benefit that comes from seeing through air.