A rock that might hold the oldest form of complex life on Earth

https://news.unsw.edu.au/en/erica-picked-up-a-rock-10-years-ago-it-might-hold-the-oldest-form-of-complex-life-on-earth

by jayhoon • 2 years ago

92 24 2 years ago

news.unsw.edu.au

EdwardDiego• 2 years ago

I love that an entire scientific career could be founded from one interesting rock picked up on a field trip.

copywrong2• 2 years ago

Life can be awesome

optimalsolver• 2 years ago

Runs the risk of the Anteater Epiphany:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXD9HnrNrvk

space_oddity2• 2 years ago

The story is both inspiring and a testament to the serendipitous nature of scientific inquiry

tetrisgm• 2 years ago

A little bit of a side here, but I'm impressed with the page's presentation. It's a university website, but the layout and overall design is really polished. Great work.

ordu• 2 years ago

The presentation has one of the most annoying things I know, it quotes itself. And it quotes a lot. It is like watching sports game when commentator says you that there will be a home run in a while, and the final game score will be such and such. You lose all the intrigue of the game this way.

latexr• 2 years ago

This one is particularly egregious. It has a quote, then a few lines down (if not the line immediately after, like in the first case) has a paragraph which is just the quote. Why is it making us read the same thing twice in a row?

mannykannot2• 2 years ago

This has become a pervasive journalistic practice, and I am mildly curious as to why. Has it been found to encourage a subset of readers to keep on reading, and maybe become subscribers? Maybe some readers routinely scan these teasers to decide whether they will read the article. Is it a form of SEO? (I would guess not, but it's not my field.)

It is almost as if some junior editor (or LLM, though I think this practice predates them) has been given the job of dividing the article into sections with headers, but can't be trusted to use their own words for the headers (though they can still, of course, both divide and quote out of context.) Here, this appears to have been applied after someone else (the author, perhaps?) had already divided it into sections with traditional summaries for headers.

That said, I felt this article is much more engaging than the average university press release, and presents a genuinely significant discovery without, as far as I can tell, another now-commonplace annoyance: the excessive exaggeration or misrepresentation of that significance (though one might quibble over "...and could rewrite our timeline of complex life on Earth altogether.")

gomoboo• 2 years ago

At the bottom of the page there is a credit for Shorthand (https://shorthand.com/). It seems to be the tool that produced such beautiful results.

space_oddity2• 2 years ago

A well-designed website can significantly enhance the user experience indeed

whimsicalism• 2 years ago

frankly i don’t trust university reported news articles

rwmj• 2 years ago

Does anyone know the smallest features preserved by fossils? For example, would cellular machinery like the ribosome be preserved? The shape of DNA? (Both assuming this cell had these)

gilleain• 2 years ago

I've no idea about fossils, but I suspect macromolecules like ribosomes or DNA might have too small features to fossilise?

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microfossil

A microfossil is a fossil that is generally between 0.001 mm and 1 mm in size

Which is a bit vague, but 0.001mm is 1000nm while a ribosome is in the range of 20-30 nm diameter. So a whole ribosome is around a 1/50 below the lower end of the microfossil range.

Even though DNA can be a lot longer (1000 base pairs is 3.4 nm - I think? - so a hundred kilobases would be 300-400 nm) the atomic features are too small to fossilise would be my guess.

maitola4• 2 years ago

The origin of life remains a profound mystery. The more we investigate, the further we push back its beginnings, suggesting that we may eventually need to search beyond Earth for answers. Since the Miller-Urey experiment, which successfully synthesized amino acids, we have made little progress in understanding the exact processes that led to the emergence of life. How were RNA and DNA formed? How did the first cell come together? What were the necessary timelines, energy sources, and chemical conditions? Is Earth uniquely capable of generating life, or is life, in its most basic form, a common feature of the universe? The formation of water involves processes akin to supernovae; perhaps the genesis of life requires a similarly extraordinary scale of events, or even more? We need to find out.

Jedd4• 2 years ago

This sounds a bit defeatist, and seems to ignore a large swathe of work that has happened since 1952 (the Miller-Urey experiment).

For example - this experiment was conducted a year before the structure of DNA was discovered / published - so it's quite a bold claim to say 'origin of life' research stalled in 1952.

To your first, second, and third questions - I can highly recommend Nick Lane's book 'The Vital Question' [0]. To some extent, I think he also spoke to your fourth question in that book - but I read 3 or 4 of his books around the same time, so my memory is fuzzy.

Either way, his hypothesis around alkaline thermal vents is hugely persuasive & compelling.

I'm really struggling to understand what you mean by the claim 'formation of water involves processes akin to supernovae' - do you just mean you need a star to explode before you get heavier elements (including Oxygen)?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vital_Question

maitola4• 2 years ago

I completely understand your struggle and wonder why this fact isn't more widely discussed. The vast majority of water on our planet (and in the solar system) was formed through either stellar formation or supernova events. During these events, an outward wind of particles collides with nearby material, forming new molecules such as water. Any other process of water formation is negligible in comparison.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water (see Distribution in Nature) https://web.archive.org/web/20000116054013/http://www.news.h...

Thank you for the books recommendations, I’ll check them out.

maitola4• 2 years ago

On the contrary, I don’t want to sound defeatist. We’ll figure this out sooner or later, and it’s actually quite exciting, after all, we didn’t just come from a little pond! The discovery of DNA, RNA, and many other cellular mechanisms has greatly improved our understanding of how life works. This knowledge helps us formulate theories about the origin of life. However, as of today, no one has, for example, taken a Miller-Urey like experiment and spontaneously generated DNA.

A rock that might hold the oldest form of complex life on Earth

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