by Neil Dale | Aug 17, 2022 | Uncategorized
About 1.2 billion years ago a new kind of cell arose. From the work of Lynn Margulis, it is now accepted that this came about through symbiotic cooperation between several kinds of bacteria. A kind of bacteria came to produce the cellular energy exchange medium, ATP. ...
by Neil Dale | Aug 17, 2022 | Uncategorized
We pause on the path of the unfolding of life and take a step back to take in the whole, both as it has been seen so far, and how it will develop. Several characteristics of the journey can be seen from this point of view. Life is a journey in discrete stages. The...
by Neil Dale | Aug 17, 2022 | Uncategorized
After its fiery Hadean beginning, Earth seems to have spent up to a billion years covered completely in a world ocean. Volcanoes and small islands probably broke through the surface, but life’s first few 100 million years were probably underwater. Simple...
by Neil Dale | Aug 17, 2022 | Uncategorized
In the 1990s James Lovelock proposed the Gaia hypothesis. This proposes that the whole of life on Earth acts as a single system, maintaining both the composition of the atmosphere and the temperature at the surface. Both conditions seem to be maintained by negative...
by Neil Dale | Aug 17, 2022 | Uncategorized
Less than 1% of the bacterial species, about 4500, can be cultivated in the lab. Most of the research on bacteria has therefore been done on a tiny fraction of the bacteria. Slava Epstein, at Northeastern University in the US, has been able to cultivate about...
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