No larger than the head of a match, Potamopyrgus antipodarum doesn’t look very impressive. Few people visiting New Zealand’s Lake Alexandrina even notice the tiny gastropods littering the shores. The snail’s diminutive size, however, conceals a massive secret. Sometime in the recent past, its genome doubled. Instead of having two sets of chromosomes and two copies of every gene…

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Every second, trillions of watts of solar energy — more than 10,000 times the energy used by modern humans — blast the Earth’s surface. Around 2.4 billion years ago, life took an evolutionary leap when bacteria learned to harness these photons to break apart water molecules and stitch carbon atoms into sugars. Along the way, they flooded Earth’s atmosphere with oxygen and rewrote the rules of life.

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