When the ocean becomes noise, the ships we seek can vanish into it. Researchers publishing in Nature have drawn on the logic of biological evolution to solve a longstanding problem in maritime radar: how to accurately model the chaotic, heavy-tailed behavior of sea clutter so that real targets are not lost in the static. By running multiple populations of candidate solutions in parallel — a computational echo of how species diversify to survive — their algorithm finds the precise parameters that make a complex statistical model fit what radar actually sees, outperforming every existing method