

 Was our oldest ancestor a proton-powered rock?  - prat
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427306.200-was-our-oldest-ancestor-a-protonpowered-rock.html?full=true

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swombat
This is the kind of article for which I used to subscribe to New Scientist. If
only I had the time to read them every week... fascinating stuff.

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donaq
I subscribed for a while some time back, but I couldn't find an option for an
online-only subscription and I started running out of space to put the dead
tree versions, so I stopped. Do they have an online-only option?

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eru
How about giving the paper version away? (Just leave it in the commuter train
or so, if you do not know someone who wants it.)

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jbert
Presumably this is to some extent experimentally testable, if we can construct
lab analogues of the conditions?

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StrawberryFrog
Geothermal vents like those described in the article are still around, could
the same processes be observed there? Or have microbes (re)colonised them
thoroughly?

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three14
The article says surrounding chemical conditions are quite different.

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eru
Yes, and the article also says, that simulations support the hypothesis so
far.

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hegemonicon
This is a huge step forward if true - as far as I know, how a complex molecule
like DNA initially evolved has been one of the great unanswered questions in
biology for quite some time.

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rms
:) I know someone who got an tattoo of the primordial soup RNA world
hypothesis, covering her entire arm. People told her that it could be wrong
before she got the tattoo...

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trapper
I can see the creationists already: where is the transitional form between
rock and human?

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sp332
Their response to this news will be: "Evolutionists have realized that life
could not have naturally started on Earth. So their 'logical' explanation is
that it started somewhere else! Ha ha! Stupid evolutionists. Lack of evidence
is not evidence!"

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trapper
I was assuming they wouldn't read the article :)

