Animals
The Most Venomous Animals Explained: How Venom Works and Why It Evolved
The geography cone snail moves at walking pace, cannot bite or scratch, and looks harmless enough to pick up from a beach. Its venom can kill an adult human within hours, and there is no antivenom. Venom is not a single thing — it is a convergently evolved chemical toolkit, independently invented more than 100 times across the animal kingdom, that does radically different things in different species. Here is what venom actually is, how it works at the molecular level, and why the most dangerous molecules on Earth are also among the most medically promising.