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Category: evolution

Out of darkness, blind Mexican cavefish illuminate brain evolution

Deep within the dark caves of northeastern Mexico lives a fish that has spent hundreds of thousands of years adapting to a world without light. The blind Mexican cavefish (Astyanax mexicanus) has evolved in perpetual darkness, losing its eyes and pigmentation while developing remarkable adaptations that help it survive in nutrient-poor environments.

Now, scientists are using this extraordinary species to uncover how evolution rewires the brain and shapes behavior. Because Astyanax exists both as sighted surface fish and as more than 30 independently evolved cave populations, researchers can directly compare how life in darkness alters sensory systems, neural circuits and behavior.

With new genetic tools and advanced imaging technologies that allow scientists to watch brain activity in real time, this unique fish is providing unprecedented insights into how animals adapt to extreme environments—and how evolution transforms the brain itself.

Michael Levin: “We Grew Little Creatures That Were Never Meant to Exist”

Creatures evolution never designed. Come geek out inside The Giant’s Shoulder Community. Ad Free exclusive content and much more → https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shou…

Michael Levin’s lab takes ordinary frog skin cells and lets them reassemble into beings that have never existed in the history of life — xenobots — and then a version with a core of neurons: neurobots. With no evolutionary history as a \.

When the Virus Knows the Answer Before We’ve Asked the Question : How Scientists Are Learning to Forecast Pandemics Before They Happen

Climate change as the macro engine for viral emergence The BA.3.2 “Cicada” variant’s hidden evolution Yeast-display technology and viral forecasting Pan-coronavirus vaccine development at La Jolla Institute How conserved viral regions unlock universal defenses.

Scientists can now force a virus to evolve in a test tube — and predict a pandemic before it starts. Heliox explores the 2026 yeast-display breakthrough that reproduced Omicron’s exact mutations in just two generations, connects it to the climate-driven migration of bat populations worldwide, and asks: are we approaching the day when we vaccinate against a pandemic that hasn’t happened yet?

An AAV variant selected through NHP screens robustly transduces the brain and drives secreted protein expression in NHPs and mice

Tecedor et al. used directed evolution to engineer AAVs with enhanced ependymal and brain delivery after injection into the cerebrospinal fluid. I think it would be interesting to try lumbar puncture delivery of these AAVs as well to see if they maintain decent biodistribution. (See my other post about Hinderer et al.’s paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.omtm.2020.04.012).

AAV capsid variants enriched for transduction of ventricular lining cells and brain parenchyma reduce the dose required for gene therapy to the CNS.

Investigating quantum and molecular plumbing in nanofluidics research

Our body contains an intricate system of tiny vessels through which blood, water and other molecules flow. When the size of the pipes shrinks to the nanoscale, where only a few molecules can fit side by side, the classical laws of physics governing the behavior of water are influenced by the atomic structure of the walls. “It’s not that classical hydrodynamics breaks down, but rather that it gets mixed with the condensed matter physics of the solid walls,” says Nikita Kavokine, tenure-track assistant professor and leader of the EPFL Quantum Plumbing Lab.

How liquids, and water in particular, behave at scales of a few nanometers is one of the big gaps in modern physics. For example, in some experiments, it has been observed that water flows through carbon nanotubes orders of magnitude faster than expected. Scientists are trying to understand phenomena that biology has mastered after millions of years of evolution.

“At the nanometer scale, our body leverages specific properties of water to filter molecules with high energy efficiency,” explains Kavokine. Aquaporins, for example, are protein channels embedded in cell membranes that use these molecular-scale interactions to let water pass while blocking ions and other molecules.

These tiny genetic fragments may be critical for telling a brain when to rest

The altered presence of tiny fragments of neuronal genes, called microexons, causes hyperarousal in zebrafish. This is the main conclusion of an international study led by Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) and the Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG). An abnormal pattern of neural microexon presence leads to a hyperarousal state characterized by heightened neural activity and insomnia, commonly associated with stress but also with neurodevelopmental disorders.

Arousal regulation is highly conserved in evolution. Therefore, this finding could help researchers understand the mechanism underlying some human neurodevelopmental disorders, such as autism and schizophrenia, conditions associated with microexon mutations.

To survive, animals need to be ready to react to external and internal stimuli. This activation of the central nervous system, arousal, is highly conserved throughout the animal kingdom.

Flipped quantum interference unlocks clearer gluon maps from near-miss nuclear encounters

Scientists studying particle collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) usually capture what happens when atomic nuclei smash into one another at nearly the speed of light. But even when the nuclei don’t collide, interesting things can happen. In a new paper just published in Physical Review Letters, members of RHIC’s STAR collaboration describe a new way to use near-miss collisions at RHIC to study what’s going on inside the nucleus. The approach advances the reach of RHIC, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, into the next frontier in nuclear physics—a journey into the inner workings of the building blocks of matter.

The technique relies on particles of light, known as photons, that surround the nuclei as they speed around the 2.4-mile (3.9-kilometer) RHIC racetrack. Acting something like the beam of a giant X-ray machine, the photons around one nucleus can interact with particles called gluons inside a nucleus whizzing by in the opposite direction. By tracking the signals produced by those interactions, scientists can map out the distribution of the gluons—the glue-like particles that hold the nucleus together.

“This is an extension of the many ways people have used light to probe hidden structures in our world—from using X-rays to see broken bones and reveal the 3D atomic structures of proteins, to capturing signals from the cosmic microwave background to study the evolution of the universe,” said Ashik Ikbal, a STAR collaborator from Kent State University who carried out this work as a major component of his postdoctoral research. “In this case, we’re using light to map out features at a scale much smaller than atoms to study the gluons that hold quarks together inside the protons and neutrons of atomic nuclei.”

Testing the problem of time with cold atoms

An ultracold atomic gas is used as a self-contained miniuniverse to show that time can be defined without an external clock. It’s demonstrated that entropy exchange between different sectors of the system provides an internal time that robustly orders the dynamics and yields a Schr\ odinger description of the observed evolution.

Genomes from Oceania offer new clues to human evolution

A new Yale-led study provides one of the most detailed and comprehensive analyses to date of genetic variation in human populations in Oceania, filling a major gap in representation in genomics research. Despite harboring remarkable diversity, populations in this vast region in the South Pacific historically have been overlooked in global human genetic studies, which have often focused largely on people of European descent, researchers say. The study is published in the journal Science.

“The drastic underrepresentation of Oceanians limits our understanding of human evolution and could exacerbate health inequalities as genomic research is used to develop novel medical treatments,” said lead author Serena Tucci, assistant professor of anthropology in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and principal investigator of the Yale Human Evolutionary Genomics Laboratory. “To fill that gap, my research team embarked on a large-scale project to expand what is known about human genetic variation, including genetic variants inherited from extinct hominins.”

The work shows how the genes that ancient humans acquired after mating with extinct hominins continue to shape the biology, health and survival of our species today.

How Life Learned to Think: The Complete History of Intelligence

Your brain is running on twenty watts right now. The power of a dim lightbulb. And yet it contains the entire eight-hundred-million-year history of life’s most improbable experiment — the experiment of intelligence itself. In this episode, we follow that experiment from its very beginning: from the first bacterium that navigated a chemical gradient in the ancient ocean, through the nerve nets of jellyfish, the distributed arms of the octopus, the tool-making crow, the grieving elephant, the dreaming mammalian brain — all the way to the only creature that has ever turned its intelligence on the question of where intelligence came from. This is not a story about the human brain. It is a story about what matter does when evolution pressures it long enough and hard enough. It is the deepest origin story you have.

/ @theevolutionoflife2026 Subscribe to the channel and join us — there is much more of this story still to tell.

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