Climate change is threatening the survival of plants and animals around the globe as temperatures rise and habitats change.Some specieshave been able to meet the challenge with rapid evolutionary adaptation …
Naaman and his team discovered that chiral molecules filter electrons based on the direction of their spin. Electrons with one spin orientation will move more efficiently across a chiral molecule …
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. On warm summer nights, green lacewings flutter around bright lanterns in backyards and at campsites. The insects, with their veil-like …
At first glance, the grit crust could seem like a routine example of what researchers call a biological soil crust, or “biocrust”—a community of coexisting bacteria, fungi, algae, and other …
According to assembly theory, before Darwinian evolution can proceed, something has to select for multiple copies of high-AI objects from the Assembly Possible. Chemistry alone, Cronin said, might be capable …
A dense rainforest or other verdant terrestrial vegetation may be what first comes to mind at the mention of photosynthesis. Yet the clouds of phytoplankton that fill the oceans are …
The new paper is the result of herculean computational analyses, involving researchers in Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom, to better understand the role ancient retroviruses play in early embryonic …