Welcome to Quantum Magazine's podcast.

Each episode, we bring you stories about developments in science and mathematics.

I'm Susan Vallett.

Biomechanical interactions rather than neurons control the movements of one of the simplest animals.

The discovery offers a glimpse into how animal behavior worked before neurons evolved.

That's next.

Imagine you're in a lab where you've synthesized ancient DNA sequences and spliced them into modern bacteria just to see how they'd react.

They needed each other, but they didn't want each other.

So, you know, it was like a very complicated relationship unfolding in front of me.

This isn't Jurassic Park or some sci-fi movie.

I'm Steve Strogetz, and this is The Joy of Why.

A new podcast from Quantum Magazine that takes you into some of the biggest unanswered mysteries

in science and math today.

Join me on The Joy of Why as we explore these questions. We may not have all the answers

yet, but I'm pretty sure the curiosity to figure them out is in our DNA. Subscribe to the Joy of

Why wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes drop every other Thursday. Biophysicist Manu Prakash vividly remembers the moment late one night in a colleague's laboratory a dozen years ago.

He peered into a microscope and met his new obsession. The animal beneath the lenses

wasn't much to look at. It resembled an amoeba more than anything else, a flattened,

multicellular blob, only 20 microns thick and a few millimeters across, with neither a head nor a tail. It moved on thousands of

cilia that blanketed its underside to form the sticky, hairy plate that inspired its Latin name.

Trickoplax adherence. This odd marine creature is classified as a placozoan. It's practically an entire branch of the evolutionary

tree of life to itself, as well as the smallest known genome in the animal kingdom. But what

...