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LESS STRESS. “When selection is less stringent, more genetic diversity can usually be sustained, which allows more opportunities for populations to optimize by exploring alternative mutational paths.” https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg3564 View in LinkedIn

EXPERIMENTAL STRESS. “An important 'dial' that can be adjusted in experimental evolution studies is the strength of selection, particularly if the goal is to improve some phenotypic property. In one limit, selection may be so strong that it becomes a genetic screen in which only rare mutants with extreme, perhaps innovative, phenotypes can survive the stress (Fig. 2c).” https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg3564 View in LinkedIn

CONFOUNDER. “The earlier potentiating mutations did not confer any immediate advantage with respect to using citrate, but they may have been beneficial with respect to growth on glucose. If so, it is possible that other populations in the LTEE have also become potentiated and might evolve the Cit+ phenotype, although no others have done so even after >50,000 generations.” https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg3564 View in LinkedIn

MECHANICS OF THE ADAPTATION. “The key actualizing mutation arose by a chromosomal duplication event that 'rewired' gene expression by placing a new transcriptional promoter upstream of a previously silent citrate transporter gene to give the Cit+ phenotype (that is, the ability to use citrate as a nutrient source).” https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg3564 View in LinkedIn

BACTERIAL OLYMPICS. “This innovation was difficult because it was contingent on one or more earlier 'potentiating' mutations that had to be present in the genetic background for the key 'actualizing' mutation to establish in the population.” https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg3564 View in LinkedIn

Seeing inside living cells with the external context, a huge jump forward in microscopy. https://youtu.be/FHJo_eQPOG8 View in LinkedIn

“THE STUFF which the world of our experience is composed is, in my belief, neither mind nor matter but something more primitive than either. Both mind and matter seem to be a composite, and the stuff of which they are compounded lis in a sense between the two, in a sense above them both, like a common ancestor.” (Bertrand Russell, 1921). https://lnkd.in/dGjr7B9y View in LinkedIn

“Tensegrity is a design principle that applies when a discontinuous set of compression elements is opposed and balanced by a continuous tensile force, thereby creating an internal prestress that stabilizes the entire structure.” https://lnkd.in/dnijBjC5 View in LinkedIn

PENROSE’S CONSEQUENCES. “During the U-process, symmetric in time, a superposition of states exists in which all the possible fates of the two particles exist.” https://lnkd.in/gDaxUYAS View in LinkedIn

A MATTER OF QUANTITY. “All substances are poisons; there is none which is not a poison. Solely the dose determines that a thing is not a poison,.” (Paracelsus, 1493–1541) https://lnkd.in/d8cAT8Cf View in LinkedIn