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NEURONAL SWARMS. "Most neuroscientists would agree that, while brains considered as a whole function as centralized command centers for most animals, within the brain there doesn’t appear to be any command post; rather, one finds a leaderless network." https://lnkd.in/dvFaNgd View in LinkedIn

BESTING BEE MEMORY. "Mimosa, the “sensitive plant”, can learn which stimuli are worth curling its leaves against in defence and which are not – and retain this knowledge for 10 times longer than the memory span of bees." https://lnkd.in/drcPRwf View in LinkedIn

PLANT LEARNING AND MEMORY. "Researchers in Australia recently sought to investigate this hypothesis by attempting to “train” a group of touch-me-not plants (Mimosa pudica)." Drop experiments showed that they could learn, and recall that memory after a month.” https://lnkd.in/dGP73v2 View in LinkedIn

Remains of an ancient sea with iron metabolizing bacteria that gave a variety of red rocks reflecting the oxidation states on Fe. View in LinkedIn

ON CELLS AND NUCLEI. “And while cell–cell and nuclear–nuclear fusion play prominent roles in sexual reproduction today, there may have been an era in which endoreplication cycles followed by meiosis drove the processes of ploidy change during ancestral modes of sexual reproduction. In this view, cell–cell fusion may be ancient, but perhaps not as ancient as other features of sexual reproduction.” https://lnkd.in/dn4azG7 View in LinkedIn

NUMBER OF CHROMOSOME SETS. “And when we think of how sex first evolved, this involved changes in ploidy and the process of meiosis, given their conserved nature throughout eukaryotes.” https://lnkd.in/dn4azG7 View in LinkedIn

AQUATIC BIFLAGELLATE. “But in other ways, it was already quite complex, with a nucleus, mitochondria, secretory apparatus, RNAi, and reproducing both asexually and sexually. Thus, when we think of where sex first evolved, it was in the water, involving swimming cells.” https://lnkd.in/dn4azG7 View in LinkedIn

DERIVED TRAIT. “If so, then the original form of sexual reproduction may have been unisexual, onto which sexes were superimposed as a later feature. In this model, unisexual reproduction is both an ancestral and a derived trait.” https://lnkd.in/dn4azG7 View in LinkedIn

DERIVED NOT ANCESTRAL. “That a myriad of different types of sex determination and sex determinants abound in animals, plants, protists, and fungi suggests that sex specification itself may not be ancestral and instead may be a derived trait.” https://lnkd.in/dn4azG7 View in LinkedIn

OUR ORIGINS. “No one knows the exact nature of the LECA, but we think that this ancestor was a unicellular, aquatic, motile creature with one or two flagella. Thus, in some respects the LECA was simple.” (LECA = last eukaryotic common ancestor). https://lnkd.in/dn4azG7 View in LinkedIn