How natural selection helps design antennas, cancer treatments and adhesives

NASA faced a dual challenge: a tiny antenna for a small satellite, with strict size, weight, and power limits. To solve it, a design team used computer simulations that emulate natural selection. They built two rough “parent” programs and bred them, creating digital offspring that shared halves of each parent’s code. Mutations occasionally flipped bits, producing new variants. The best performers survived to become the next generation. After numerous cycles, the evolved antenna design outperformed a human-designed version, delivering a stronger signal, longer range, and lower energy use, and it was launched in 2006 for a planned 90-day mission.