Ancient Ice Age Multicellular Innovation

This is a news story, published by Wired, that relates primarily to Paleobiologist Carl Simpson news.

Paleobiologist Carl Simpson news

For more Paleobiologist Carl Simpson news, you can click here:

more Paleobiologist Carl Simpson news

biology news

For more biology news, you can click here:

more biology news

Wired news

For more news from Wired, you can click here:

more news from Wired

About the Otherweb

Otherweb, Inc is a public benefit corporation, dedicated to improving the quality of news people consume. We are non-partisan, junk-free, and ad-free. We use artificial intelligence (AI) to remove junk from your news feed, and allow you to select the best science news, business news, entertainment news, and much more. If you like biology news, you might also like this article about

Snowball Earth period

. We are dedicated to bringing you the highest-quality news, junk-free and ad-free, about your favorite topics. Please come every day to read the latest Snowball Earth conditions news, Snowball Earth news, biology news, and other high-quality news about any topic that interests you. We are working hard to create the best news aggregator on the web, and to put you in control of your news feed - whether you choose to read the latest news through our website, our news app, or our daily newsletter - all free!

shorter Snowball Earth period

Wired

•

The Physics of Cold Water May Have Jump-Started Complex Life

Summary

Nutrition label

89% Informative

A new study suggests that Snowball Earth may have been a trigger for the evolution of complex life.

The research offers a novel take on the emergence of multicellular life, a paleontologist says.

The last ancestor of animals emerged during the Sturtian Snowball era, sometime 717 million years ago .

As seawater gets colder, the density and viscosity of water molecules rises as the temperature drops.

Under the conditions of Snowball Earth , the ocean would have been twice or even four times as viscous as it was before the planet froze over.

Paleobiologist Carl Simpson has led a body of work to study whether the physics of cold water causes cells to act collectively like a multicellular creature.

Algal cells clumped up and coordinated the movements of their tail-like flagella to swim more quickly.

By working together as a collective, the algae could preserve their mobility.

Viscosity may have mattered quite a lot in the origins of complex life, whenever that was.

VR Score

Informative language

Neutral language

Article tone

informal

Language

English

Language complexity

Offensive language