Attention to the Unseen

Microscopic image showing newly discovered Asgard archaeon (Nerearchaeum marumarumayae) derived from microbial mats that offers clues to the formation of complex life. Debnath Ghosal By Brendan Paul Burns, UNSW Sydney and Kymberley Oakley, Indigenous Knowledge On the shores of the west coast of Australia lies a window to our past: the stromatolites and microbial mats of Gathaagudu (Shark Bay). To the untrained eye they look like a collection of rocks and slime – but they are in fact teeming with…

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Yasemin Saplakoglu writes: At the dawn of complex life, evolution created a container for DNA, its most treasured item. A few billion years later, 20th-century microscopists looked at this container — the nucleus — up close and saw that it was covered in tiny openings. At the time, they didn’t know what to make of these structures, but as microscopy improved, something grand came into focus: what we now call “nuclear pore complexes,” some of the largest and most marvelous…

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Karen G Lloyd writes: If you had to nominate the slowest, longest-living organisms on Earth, what would you picture? Among the vertebrates, some people might think of tortoises, whales or perhaps more obscure creatures like the Greenland shark, which can live for centuries. Others might imagine coral colonies, or perhaps an ancient tree: there are oaks in England that could be more than 1,000 years old, whereas in California, a few Bristlecone pines have been around for millennia, dating to…

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Jake Buehler writes: Life’s fundamental structure is the cell, and so the main things that a cell does — processing biomolecules, growing, replicating its genetic material and producing a new body — are considered hallmarks of life. But earlier this year, scientists discovered a cell so severely stripped of essential functions that it challenges biologists’ definitions of what counts as a living thing. The species is a single-celled organism known only by the mysterious sequence of its genetic code. Its…

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Vladyslav Vyazovskiy writes: After decades of research, there is still no clearly articulated scientific consensus on what sleep is or why it exists. Yet whenever sleep comes up as a topic of discussion, it is quickly reduced to its necessity and importance. Popular media remind us of what can, and will, go wrong if we do not sleep enough, and serve up some handy tips on how to overcome insomnia. Discussed exclusively in utilitarian terms, we are force-fed the idea…

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Veronique Greenwood writes: In 2010, biologists made a shocking discovery. Living in the mud of the North Sea were microorganisms whose genes looked a lot like ours. Genetic analysis revealed that humans, oak trees, blue whales — any living things whose cells have nuclei and mitochondria — are related to these microbes, which were named the Asgard archaea after the home of the Norse gods. Two billion years ago, it was an ancestor of an Asgard that diverged from its…

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Jake Buehler writes: Over the last half-billion years, squid, octopuses and their kin have evolved much like a fireworks display, with long, anticipatory pauses interspersed with intense, explosive changes. The many-armed diversity of cephalopods is the result of the evolutionary rubber hitting the road right after lineages split into new species, and precious little of their evolution has been the slow accumulation of gradual change. They aren’t alone. Sudden accelerations spring from the crooks of branches in evolutionary trees, across…

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