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Category: evolution

Chang’e mission samples reveal how exogenous organic matter evolves on the moon

Elements essential to life, such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur, were “delivered” to Earth and the moon during the early stages of the solar system via asteroids and comets impacting their surfaces. These exogenous materials may have provided the chemical building blocks necessary for the origin and early evolution of life on Earth. But extensive geological activity and biological processes on Earth have largely erased the direct records of these early inputs on our planet.

In contrast, the moon, with its relatively limited geological activity, serves as a natural “time capsule,” making it easier to unravel the history and evolution of extraterrestrial organic matter.

A recent study has, for the first time, systematically identified multiple nitrogen-bearing organic species on the surfaces of lunar soil grains returned by China’s Chang’e-5 and Chang’e-6 missions. The research further reveals an evolutionary pathway defined by exogenous delivery, impact modification, and continuous solar wind processing.

DNA as a quantum system in evolution

Time may be viewed as an emergent consequence of increasing information entropy. I explore a toy quantum‑information model in which DNA is treated as an open quantum system. In this framework, weak, time‑dependent perturbations (potentially arising from thermal fluctuations, ionic microfields, metabolic noise, or electromagnetic signals) bias the micro‑timing of events during replication and repair. These slight timing shifts can influence the fate of transient electronic and protonic configurations (including short‑lived tautomeric states driven by proton‑transfer tunnelling), subtly altering mutation probabilities. To test this idea, I map nucleotides in the Mycobacterium tuberculosis genome to constrained qubit states and quantify informational structure using Shannon and von Neumann entropies and coding to non‑coding correlation metrics. Simulations of Hamiltonian dynamics under physiologically plausible perturbations show that real genomic segments exhibit distinctive dynamical signatures compared with controls. I also examine a variant in which a weak, slowly varying external signal is introduced as a background “beat” against which DNA dynamics can be compared. Because a Doppler shift in electromagnetic waves encodes the flow of time through the relative motion of source and observer, a cosmic microwave background (CMB) with a tiny frequency drift provides a conceptual clock and a source of informational entropy: it feeds a time‑correlated input into the DNA quantum system, allowing the molecule to sample cosmic time and translate it into a biological scale by modulating tunnelling probabilities and thus mutation patterns. This CMB‑inspired drive is simply a convenient illustration; the model does not rely on it, and other sources of weakly structured entropy could be tested. Across simulations, sequence‑dependent responses to both intrinsic and structured perturbations generate testable predictions: changing the structure or timing of these weak perturbations should produce reproducible shifts in mutation spectra. This framework connects cellular ageing and evolution to the flow of cosmic time and suggests experiments to probe DNA’s sensitivity to time‑dependent perturbations.

Citation: Garcia NA (2026) DNA as a quantum system in evolution. PLoS One 21: e0344520. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.

Editor: Yang Jack Lu, Beijing Technology and Business University, CHINA.

‘Oldest octopus’ fossil is no octopus at all, scans reveal

A famous 300-million-year-old fossil that was thought to be the world’s oldest octopus—even featuring in the Guinness Book of Records—has turned out to be something else altogether. In what amounts to a case of mistaken identity, the fossil hid its true nature through decay 300 million years ago, before being fossilized.

Using the latest synchrotron imaging to search inside the fossil rock, researchers discovered tiny teeth preserved inside the rock that prove that Pohlsepia mazonensis is not an octopus at all, but an animal related to a modern Nautilus—a multi-tentacled animal with an external shell.

This revelation, revealed in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, solves a long-running puzzle in the understanding of octopus evolution that has confused scientists for decades. It also provides evidence of the oldest nautiloid soft tissue preservation known in the fossil record and means that the record-holding “oldest octopus” should be quietly written out of the Guinness Book of Records.

First close pair of supermassive black holes detected

Supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies are one of the most active fields of research in astronomy. In order to accumulate their enormous masses, they must merge with each other. A research team led by Silke Britzen from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn has found direct evidence of two supermassive black holes in the galaxy Markarian 501, which orbit each other very closely. This could be the first time that a pair has been detected that is about to merge. This provides a unique opportunity to better understand a central process in galaxy evolution.

The findings suggest that there is a supermassive black hole at the center of almost every large galaxy, with a mass millions or even billions of times greater than that of our sun. It is still unclear exactly how they can reach such enormous masses. Collecting (accreting) gas from the surrounding area alone would take too long, so it is likely that they have to merge with other massive black holes. Galaxy collisions have been observed throughout our universe. It is thus very likely that the supermassive black holes at the centers of these colliding galaxies also merge, first orbiting each other ever closer and ultimately coalescing into one.

Astronomers thought the early universe was full of hydrogen: Now they’ve found it

The Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) has discovered tens of thousands of gigantic hydrogen gas halos, called “Lyman-alpha nebulae,” surrounding galaxies 10 billion to 12 billion years ago. Known as Cosmic Noon, this is an epoch in the early universe when galaxies were growing their fastest. To spur this growth, they would have needed access to vast reservoirs of hydrogen gas, a key building block for stars. However, until recently, astronomers had only found a handful of these essential structures.

A new study published in The Astrophysical Journal has now increased the known number of hydrogen gas halos by a factor of 10: from roughly 3,000 to over 33,000. This confirms suspicions that they are not rare curiosities. The study also increases the range of known sizes, providing a more representative sample for astronomers to study as they continue to tease out the origin and evolution of the first galaxies.

“We’ve been analyzing the same handful of objects for the past 20 or so years,” said Erin Mentuch Cooper, HETDEX data manager and lead author on the study. “HETDEX is letting us find many more of these halos and measure their shapes and sizes. It has really allowed us to create an amazing statistical catalog.”

Rare Type Icn supernova SN 2024abvb is among the most luminous known

An international team of astronomers has carried out photometric and spectroscopic observations of SN 2024abvb—a recently discovered supernova of a rare Type Icn. The new observational campaign yields important information regarding the properties and nature of this supernova. The study was published February 18 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 and Type II. Type I SNe lack hydrogen in their spectra, while those of Type II showcase spectral lines of hydrogen.

Type Icn SNe are an extreme subtype of interacting stripped-envelope supernovae (SESN). They have strong, narrow oxygen and carbon lines but weak or absent hydrogen and helium lines, presenting additional complications to the stripping mechanism. They have narrow emission features indicative of circumstellar interaction.

First carbon-enhanced metal-poor stars discovered in Milky Way’s companion

Using the Baryons Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) spectrograph, astronomers have discovered five new carbon-enhanced metal-poor stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). This is the first time such stars have been identified in this galaxy. The discovery was reported in a paper published January 15 on the arXiv pre-print server.

Metal-poor stars are rare objects, as only a few thousand stars with iron abundances [Fe/H] below-2.0 have been discovered to date. Expanding the still-short list of metal-poor stars is of high importance for astronomers, as such objects have the potential to improve our knowledge of the chemical evolution of the universe.

Observations show that a significant fraction of these stars exhibit a large overabundance of carbon; therefore, they are known as carbon-enhanced metal-poor (CEMP) stars.

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