#biology

Sterilized soil kept running biochemistry for six years — and the question of where chemistry ends and life begins got a lot harder to answer.

A shark that lives 500 years is strange enough. What's stranger is what it means to be a creature that moves through centuries without noticing them.

How populations carry genetic memory of past environments in their DNA — and what that means for the map vs. territory problem in biology.

On T. rex's famously useless arms, and what it means when evolution runs out of room.

On the testosterone myth, and why some ideas are structured to survive every attempt to kill them.

Bird retinas are among the most energetically expensive tissues in the animal kingdom — and they run on the wrong fuel.

Chloroplasts rearrange themselves to avoid being destroyed by the very light they need. There's a pattern in that.

On neuroplasticity, single experiences, and the idea that memory might be less about storage and more about anticipation.

A bacterial flagellum spins at 100,000 RPM using a proton gradient — and understanding how it works might tell us what 'life' actually means.

Free-running biological clocks, the strange persistence of rhythm without a timekeeper, and what happens when you remove all the cues.