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Category: evolution

Evidence of ‘lightning-fast’ evolution found after Chicxulub impact

The asteroid that struck the Earth 66 million years ago devastated life across the planet, wiping out the dinosaurs and other organisms in a hail of fire and catastrophic climate change. But new research shows that it also set the stage for life to rebound astonishingly quickly.

New species of plankton appeared fewer than 2,000 years after the world-altering event, according to research led by scientists at The University of Texas at Austin and published in Geology.

Lead author Chris Lowery, a research associate professor at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) at the Jackson School of Geosciences, said that it’s a remarkably quick evolutionary feat that has never been seen before in the fossil record. Typically, new species appear on roughly million-year time frames.

NASA supercomputer just predicted Earth’s hard limit for life

Scientists have used a NASA-grade supercomputer to push our planet to its limits, virtually fast‑forwarding the clock until complex organisms can no longer survive. The result is a hard upper bound on how long Earth can sustain breathable air and liquid oceans, and it is far less about sudden catastrophe than a slow suffocation driven by the Sun itself. The work turns a hazy, far‑future question into a specific timeline for the end of life as we know it.

Instead of fireballs or rogue asteroids, the simulations point to a world that quietly runs out of oxygen, with only hardy microbes clinging on before even they disappear. It is a stark reminder that Earth’s habitability is not permanent, yet it also stretches over such vast spans of time that our immediate crises still depend on choices made this century, not on the Sun’s distant evolution.

The new modeling effort starts from a simple premise: if I know how the Sun brightens over time and how Earth’s atmosphere responds, I can calculate when conditions for complex life finally fail. Researchers fed a high‑performance system with detailed physics of the atmosphere, oceans and carbon cycle, then let it run through hundreds of thousands of scenarios until the planet’s chemistry tipped past a critical point. One study describes a supercomputer simulation that projects life on Earth ending in roughly 1 billion years, once rising solar heat strips away most atmospheric oxygen.

Presenting data from the largest integrated thyroid cancer single-cell sequencing atlas

Here, Vivian L. Weiss & team highlight stromal tumor-dynamics occurring across the spatial evolution of thyroid cancer from indolent to lethal disease, identifying a prognostic invasive cell subtype:

The figure shows two distinct patterns associated with anaplastic thyroid carcinoma.

6The Francis Crick Institute, London, United Kingdom.

7Institute of Interdisciplinary Research (IRIBHM), Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium.

8Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, Washington, USA.

Beta-decay half-life measurements reveal evolution of nuclear shell structure

An international team of researchers has systematically measured the β-decay half-lives of 40 nuclei near calcium-54, providing key experimental data for understanding the structure of extremely neutron-rich nuclei.

The study, published in Physical Review Letters, was led by researchers from the Institute of Modern Physics (IMP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with institutions including RIKEN in Japan and Peking University.

Atomic nuclei exhibit exceptional stability when the proton (Z) or neutron (N) number reaches certain “magic numbers,” such as 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82, or 126. The shell model successfully explained these magic numbers by introducing spin-orbit coupling, a contribution for which M. Mayer and J. Jensen were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963.

X-ray observations reveal hidden disturbances in galaxy cluster Abell 3571

Using the Einstein Probe (EP), astronomers from China and Germany have observed a nearby galaxy cluster known as Abell 3571. Results of the observational campaign, published January 8 on the arXiv pre-print server, provide more insights into the X-ray properties and structure of this cluster.

Galaxy clusters contain up to thousands of galaxies bound together by gravity. They generally form as a result of mergers and grow by accreting sub-clusters. Therefore, they could serve as excellent laboratories for studying galaxy evolution and cosmology.

Abell 3,571, or A3571, is a rich galaxy cluster in the Shapley Supercluster, at a redshift of 0.039. It has a radius of about 5.5 million light years and its mass is estimated to be 910 trillion solar masses. The brightest cluster galaxy (BCG) of Abell 3,571 is MCG–05–33–002, which exhibits a pronounced north-south elongation.

“Evolution and Intelligence: inversion and a positive feedback spiral” by Michael Levin

This is a ~50 minute video on evolution from the perspective of diverse intelligence. I discuss 3 main things: the nature of the mapping between genotype and phenotype (an intelligent, problem-solving process that interprets genomic prompts, not simply a complex mechanical mapping), the implications for evolution of operating over such a multi-scale agential material, and a few recent findings about the origin of the intelligence spiral taking place before differential replication dynamics kick in.

Editing by https://twitter.com/DNAMediaEditing

Multiplexed ultrasound imaging of gene expression

Great paper from Mikhail Shapiro’s lab where Nyström et al. used directed evolution methods to create protein gas vesicles which respond to distinct acoustic pressures, allowing for ultrasound imaging in two ‘colors’! Of note, Mikhail Shapiro is involved in the extremely exciting Merge Labs, which was publicly announced recently. [ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-025-02825-w](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-025-02825-w)

Ultrasound imaging with acoustic reporter genes has been limited to a single ‘tone’, restricting the types of experiments that can be achieved. This work introduces two acoustic reporter genes that enable multiplexed imaging in vitro and in mice.

Tiny titans of recovery: Fossil burrows reveal resilient micro-ecosystem after global mass extinction

An international team of scientists from South Africa, Canada, France and the UK has uncovered fossil evidence of a tiny ecosystem that helped kick-start the recovery of Earth’s oceans after a global mass extinction.

The team, led by Dr. Claire Browning, an Honorary Research Associate at the University of Cape Town (UCT), found fossilized burrows and droppings left by creatures so small they lived between grains of sand, revealing an ancient community that probably played a critical role in reviving marine life after the end-Ordovician ice age and mass extinction event. The discovery is reshaping how scientists understand early marine resilience.

The findings are published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Ancient Type II supernova discovered from universe’s first billion years

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international team of astronomers has discovered a new Type II supernova. The newly detected supernova, named SN Eos, exploded when the universe was only 1 billion years old. The finding was reported January 7 on the arXiv pre-print server.

Supernovae (SNe) are powerful and luminous stellar explosions. They are important for the scientific community as they offer essential clues into the evolution of stars and galaxies. In general, SNe are divided into two groups based on their atomic spectra: Type I (no hydrogen in their spectra) and Type II (showcasing hydrogen spectral lines).

Type II SNe are the result of rapid collapse and violent explosion of massive stars (with masses above 8.0 solar masses). Type II core-collapse supernovae (CC SNe), which can be brighter than the total emission of their host galaxies, allow astronomers to probe the final stages of stellar evolution, and studies of early-universe Type II CC SNe could be crucial to constrain early stellar evolution models.

New psychology research shows that hatred is not just intense anger

A new study suggests that anger and hatred are not merely different intensities of the same feeling but are distinct emotional systems with unique evolutionary functions. The study indicates that while anger motivates individuals to negotiate for better treatment, hatred drives them to neutralize or remove a threat. These findings were published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.

Scientists have long debated the relationship between anger and hatred. Some psychological models suggest hatred is simply a more intense or durable form of anger. Other perspectives argue they are qualitatively different.

The authors of the current study approached this debate through an adaptationist framework. This perspective views human emotions as evolved mechanisms designed to solve specific problems faced by our ancestors.

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