This week, a complex eye, inside a single cell.

This sort of challenges a lot of our conceptions about what you need to evolve complexity.

And Australian lizards flip sex when the heat rises.

This is kind of a really interesting and exciting result because basically it means the best females are actually male.

Plus, teaching robots to be ethical. This is the Nature Podcast for July the 2nd, 2015.

I'm Adam Levy. And I'm Kerry Smith. Our eyes are made up of several specialised parts, including a cornea, a retina, a lens, which all come together to make a complicated structure.

You might think you'd need millions of cells to achieve such complexity.

But in one group of plankton called

dino flagellates, there are some species with complex eyes in a single cell. These minuscule

structures are called oscilloids, but what they're made of has until now been a bit of a mystery.

Most cells contain component structures called organelles, such as mitochondria which provide power to the cell.

Researchers thought that some of these structures may have been repurposed to form the eye-like oscilloid.

Now a team at the University of British Columbia in Canada have worked out which bits are doing what.

Noah Baker spoke with Greg Govellis, the PhD student who led the research,

and he first asked why oscilloids are interesting to scientists.

This is the first structure that is completely subcellular and is an eye.

There are things called eye spots, which are essentially just a little freckle of pigment,

but it was thought that you actually needed a multicellular organization in order to evolve a structure like that. So this sort of challenges

a lot of our conceptions about what you need to evolve complexity. How long have we known

about these oscilloids and why haven't we understood more about them up until now?

So the oscilloid was discovered in 1884 by a young researcher and his name was Oscar Hurtwig

and he saw swimming among these single cells, single cell with an eye and that turned out to be the

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