The shape of life

The shape of life

  • March 16, 2018
Table of Contents

The shape of life

Last spring, the geobiologist Dominic Papineau and colleagues reported that fossilised microorganisms were identified in 3.77-4.28-billion-year-old iron-rich rock in Quebec: hematite tubes and filaments whose appearance is similar to microorganisms that today live in hydrothermal vents. Others dismissed their findings as ‘dubiofossils’, a term the geologist Hans Hofmann coined in 1972 to describe controversial fossils. ‘Fossils,’ Hofmann wrote, were proven biological; ‘pseudofossils’ resembled life but were inorganic; ‘dubiofossils’ (also known as Problematica or Miscellanea) were equivocal.

No one is sure whether either of these findings has discovered ancient petrified organisms or not.

Source: aeon.co

Tags :
Share :
comments powered by Disqus

Related Posts

A Look Back at the 1960s PLATO Computing System

A Look Back at the 1960s PLATO Computing System

In the 1960s, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana—Champaign developed a computer system that they hoped would expand access to education. They envisioned instructors usingthe system to build lessons, and students stationing themselves at machines—whose touchscreen plasma displays had a distinct orange glow—to complete coursework.

Read More
The Birth of A.I.

The Birth of A.I.

Waze famously disrupted GPS navigation by crowdsourcing user data from mobile phones, instead of purchasing costly sensors tied to city infrastructure, as Nokia had done before them. Waze then scaled with low overhead costs by using machine learning algorithms to find precise traffic patterns that optimized each user’s route. The end result of this dynamic was massive layoffs at Nokia, and Google’s acquisition of / integration with Waze in 2013.

Read More
Ancient DNA Is Rewriting Human and Neanderthal History

Ancient DNA Is Rewriting Human and Neanderthal History

Geneticist David Reich used to study the living, but now he studies the dead. The precipitating event came in the form of 40,000-year-old Neanderthal bones found in a Croatian cave. So well-preserved were the bones that they yielded enough DNA for sequencing, and it became Reich’s job in 2007 to analyze the DNA for signs that Neanderthals interbred with humans—a idea he was “deeply suspicious” of at the time.

Read More