In an $80 motel room, a discovery to shed light on the origins of life
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
What this research is about is the origin of plants, which are indeed one of the most important forms of life, but the origin of plants is distant by billions of years from the origin of life and it is even distant by billions of years from the origin of phototrophy (frequently, but not really correctly, called "photosynthesis", i.e. the extraction of energy from solar light).
The ancestor of red algae and green algae (the terrestrial plants are descended from green algae) has been created by the hybridization through symbiosis between a unicellular eukaryote (i.e. nucleated cell) and a cyanobacterium, a.k.a. blue-green alga.
As explained in TFA, Paulinella is the second case of such a symbiosis between a nucleated cell and a cyanobacterium, which happened relatively recently, unlike the symbiosis from the origin of plants, which happened about a billion and a half years ago.
Because Paulinella and its internal symbionts have not been modified so profoundly by symbiosis like the red algae or green algae, it can provide information about how the early stages of the hybridization happened, eventually allowing a better understanding of how plants function.
we basically uncovered early network sending unencrypted html, and you expect to understand how compiler works - simply different levels of abstraction
It is related in that way.
And it is just as relevant if you believe in panpsychism as it is if you don't - panspsychism holds that rocks and even electrons are conscious to some extent, but that has nothing to do with how we got from organic chemistry to proto-cells (as both protocells and organic molecules have some degree of consciousness in this theory).
Questions of the origin of life are only irrelevant/settled for those who subscribe to explicit divine origins of life, such as Creationists, who hold that God literally created the first life from nothing directly - that it was an unknowable miracle, not a physical process.
The first jump in complexity was the appearance of the eukaryotes, a.k.a. nucleated cells, which also happened through hybridization through symbiosis of different kinds of cells.
The event discussed in TFA was the second jump in complexity.
After the ancestor of the red algae and green alga was created by the hybridization of an eukaryote with a cyanobacterium, eventually the cyanobacterium was reduced to a smaller cellular component named chloroplast, which is the site where solar light is captured, and a big part of its DNA has migrated into the nucleus, where it fused with the DNA of the eukaryote host.
Probably after a few hundred million years after the hybridization event, and after the descendants have split into red algae and green algae (the former are adapted to deeper water, which is not reached by the reddish part of the solar light, while the latter are adapted to shallow water with strong light, which enabled them to also spread on the continents, in freshwater), both red algae and green algae evolved multi-cellular forms, which was the next step in increasing complexity.
There is evidence of multi-cellular red algae and green algae from slightly more than a billion years ago. These are the most ancient living beings whose kind can be identified with certainty, because for most unicellular living beings identification is not possible without checking for features that are not preserved in fossils.
The multi-cellular animals, which brought another jump in complexity, appeared only a few hundred million years after the red algae and green algae, in a world where there was a surplus of food from the activity of the abundant algae.
followed by
> it can provide information about how the early stages of the hybridization happened
so…
the origins of major parts of life?
1) The research is not about the origin of life, it's about the origin of (one type of) cell structure. (Whether other eukaryote structure originated in the same way as chloroplasts did is unknown, although probably true.)
2) The research is about something that happened during the Mesozoic, not the original origin of chloroplasts back in the Pre-Cambrian. Whether the two events happened the same way is unclear (although plausibly true).
I found it reassuring that sketching what you see down the microscope is still part of a scientific practice. Also the 'fresh eyes' could perhaps point the way to a more collegiate organisation of research.
She actually made some specific recommendations on the microscopy sub-reddit but they're a bit pricier ($425+). (scroll to last comment by Jay211TF):
https://www.reddit.com/r/microscopy/comments/1dhagyr/entry_l...
The samples were transported to the lab and observed at 100 to 400X magnification using an inverted microscope (IX51, Olympus, Tokyo, Japan).
A source for inexpensive high-quality equipment of questionable working order is whatever auction site your local hospital system uses to dispose of excess equipment.
There are stories of companies asking their employees to bring back soil and water samples from wherever the employees go on vacation.
The idea is that this is a somewhat random sampling of locations that the company wouldn't have thought of on their own. Plus, it's possible that one of the samples has some novel chemical or biological compound that could lead to a breakthrough discovery.
a few hundred bucks
able to look at microbes
also able to look at less micro level stuff, like maybe the thing i'm trying to solder or fix
is it wrong to solicit comments/recommendations here?
If I were you, I would probably buy a normal microscope that supports a microscope camera attachment, instead of specifically looking for USB microscope. There is a lot of misleading marketing around USB microscopes, a lot of them are literally just doing digital zooming in (I have a 30€ "1000x" microscope from Amazon which is nice for soldering and such things, but these fake microscopes appear even at higher price ranges). Treat anything >1000x for light-based microscopes as a red flag.
Ours aren't properly set up for photography, but I did manage to finagle this great shot of a bug curled up inside a hole in the side of a lentil: https://gallery.brainonfire.net/v2/image/18906
The objective lenses are just 1.7x and 3.4x so you can see some cells but not really any details in them. But free is a really good price for that.
This seems unsupported. More likely is it's happened a large number of times, but has only established a lineage a handful of times.
How can they say this without providing more background?
This is the case and unfortunately this will continue being the case. Even when research is funded by the govt it will be only projects that their mediocre member ( who are prone to lobbyists, kick back etc.) approve of.
Great reporting - reading this NYT article gives me a little bit of the excitement that I normally only get from reading Quanta Magazine.
Ok then.
wtf is happening to internet these days...
"The team — brought together, in part, by disruptions and despair over the Trump administration’s freezes to federal science funding — then made an exciting discovery."
Apparently this is the new way of life for Scientists under the Trump regime.
Sad.
Nytimes can't help itself. love it.
Also, cells can have scales? Amazing.
My standards for hotel rooms on road trips are quite low and I will call the crappy motels to avoid the bloated .com booking rates and it’s not very often I find even 1 star hotels under $80/day after taxes.
I expect the vast majority of motel patrons are additionally paying a rent/mortgage for their main habitation.
Last week in Beijing it only cost 150 USD at a fairly central Crown Plaza, which I felt was very cheap compared to how much it normally costs in London, and London is a bargain compared to anything I/work pays for in the US (which is mainly in DC and NY)
The flights dwarf the cost of the hotels though, indeed the flights cost more than the cost of me for the two week trip (Work paid a premium to avoid Russian airspace though)
Even in the budget industry, your nightly utility usage comes close to $10, consumables are $3+.
Hotel stays are typically taxed higher than typical sales tax.
Once you add that in, real estate taxes, and any corporate taxes - you're getting close to the $50 price point...
That's before you factor in the cost of maintaining the building, or the financing to buy the building itself (or any profit).
Are we supposed to live in a world where everyone's entitled to be able to stay in hotel rooms for 1 hour of minimum wage labor? Because, until we have far more automation, I don't see how that makes any possible sense.
80$ might seem like a lot of money if you're making 60k a year as a biologist. If you're in a field where profit is the reason you work 80$ is peanuts.