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NANOBACTERIA. "Recent evidence suggests a role for nanobacteria in a growing number of human diseases, including renal stone formation, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer. This large body of research studies promotes the view that nanobacteria are not only alive but that they are associated with disease pathogenesis." https://lnkd.in/dvNtRzz View in LinkedIn

GLACIAL TRIGGER. “Chemical weathering associated with the erosion that formed the Great Unconformity likely pulled the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, sequestering vast quantities in the ocean and lithosphere. This “primed the pump for the glaciations.” https://lnkd.in/ddDSSXe View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this two weekends on the Great Unconformity. Admittedly, the biblical push for a Great Flood interpretation has polarized the debate, where the flood needed a lot of water in a short time. " "And the Cambrian Explosion camp resolutely dug in their heels to new ideas, having built careers on the convoluted explanations of an improbable sudden emergence of diversity with no antecedent history. And so we are left with the grinding of a glacial paradigm shift emerging on this massively important topic. https://lnkd.in/d5T7qzX View in LinkedIn

SUBDUCTION. “Moreover, plate tectonic reconstructions suggest that much of the remaining sediment deposited during the latest Precambrian and Early Cambrian would have been subducted or accreted and destroyed at the Delamerian‐Ross subduction zone, which initiated in the Cambrian. The rock record, and therefore the fossil record, is probably particularly poor during the precise interval over which the first animals are predicted to have diversified and radiated, despite the apparently excellent potential for soft tissue preservation at this time.” https://lnkd.in/d8SyHX7 View in LinkedIn

NEW THINKING. “Although quantitative studies have yet to be undertaken in the Precambrian, it is clear that the rock record from the critical interval around the Precambrian‐Cambrian boundary is less complete than we might like. In many localities around the world, shallow‐marine Cambrian or Ordovician rocks lie unconformably above Precambrian rocks. This “Great Unconformity” records a prolonged period of continental denudation in the latest Neoproterozoic followed by a major marine transgression, suggesting that many latest Ediacaran shallow‐marine rock sequences – reflecting environments that may be expected to contain the highest diversity of animal life – have been eroded away.” https://lnkd.in/d8SyHX7 View in LinkedIn

BUILDING PROTOCELLS. "Efforts to bridge nonliving and living matter and develop protocells from scratch will rely on bottom-up self assembly with commensurate self organization of classes of molecules." https://lnkd.in/d7dZrnq View in LinkedIn

ARTIFICIAL CHEMISTRY. "This paper gives details of Squirm3, a new artificial environment based on a simple physics and chemistry that supports self-replicating molecules somewhat similar to DNA. These self-replicators emerge spontaneously from a random soup given the right conditions. Interactions between the replicators can result in mutated versions that can out-perform their parents." https://lnkd.in/dXZQRVS View in LinkedIn

DRY CHEMISTRY. "Simulating tens of thousands of atoms for days to weeks on a commodity cluster will produce a number of nanoseconds of real-time equivalent chemistry." https://lnkd.in/d7dZrnq View in LinkedIn

ARTIFICIAL CHEMISTRIES, a valuable overview for those interested. https://lnkd.in/dMJQS4i View in LinkedIn

IN SILICO CHEMISTRY. "The richness of biological life has never been replicated in our artificial models of evolution.' He gave four rather abstract requirements for systems to display open-ended evolution, where entities of increasing complexity and diversity are produced without limit.” https://lnkd.in/dXZQRVS View in LinkedIn