While the research about Paulinella is very interesting, it has no relationship whatsoever with "the origins of life".
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.
The very next sentence in the comment begins "What this research is about is the origin of plants, which are indeed one of the most important forms of life..."
There were several jumps in complexity, this is only one of them.
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.
I appreciate you breaking it down for me. I wasn't aware (though it makes perfect sense now that I'm reading it) that the capture of a foreign cell and the fusion of its DNA into the host are separate jumps, but that makes sense. I think that's where, for me at least, the confusion came in.
I came here to say this, but you ninja'd me. To repeat what you're saying, the title is wrong on two counts:
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).
at best it's related to origins of eucaryotic life, but definitely not whole life in general
we basically uncovered early network sending unencrypted html, and you expect to understand how compiler works - simply different levels of abstraction
cracking the "origin of life" (I put it in quotes because if you subscribe to the panpsychism premise that consciousness is fundamental then the question of hte origin of life is a bit nonsensical; everything is a permutation of the same primordial life-consciousness) is a bit like cracking AGI; if some new insight gets us closer to the larger question, it is relevant to the larger question even if the larger question is a superset of the sub-question.
The origin of life means abiogenesis - how the first living "stuff" arose from simpler chemistry.
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.
> "He noticed that the scales were overlapping one another in different directions — in one, they overlapped on top of each other in a clockwise pattern, and the other was in reverse.
The fresh eyes of a person who hadn’t been staring at Paulinella for hours identified a curious, distinctive trait. Were they looking at two different species?"
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.
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.
+1 on this question, without any snark intended. What's a good, not too expensive beginner's microscope that's capable of this kind of citizen research (and other fun stuff)?
As magnification increases, your main spend requirement is glass. Light is now cheap in the form of LEDs, as are condensers/collimators (which are not strictly required). IMHO at most magnifications you will get better relative image quality enhancement from adjustable through-light and correct focus than from a prospective upgrade to collimated light. Cheapest way in is a mono 'zoom tube' system which incorporates configurable magnification and ties directly to an industrial CCD camera. This is 'digital native' and obviates the need to pay for additional elements including a rigid stand, a stage, a revolving nose piece, and multiple high grade objectives. If you buy online, you can get a lot of value for cheap. However, you then need to fudge a stage, a light source, and a condenser, none of which are hard. These systems are super fun because you can route HDMI or USB to a big screen and share exploration with others. If you find microscopic critters, you can even record videos of them doing their thing. If you want more detail resolution, you can patiently twiddle or automate the focal adjustment then do focus stacked images. However, to get really good results you need to start getting in to things like chemical staining, frozen sample preparation before microtome sample slicing, oil-immersed objectives, and high quality glass, at which point you are really better off with a traditional microscope. Once you have the platform it's the glass that costs money.
> Dr. Van Etten didn’t expect much from the water she had scooped from a random dock next to the highway
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.
Reading this article with a bittersweet feeling. This is exactly the kind of work I wanted to do for the rest of my life while in Biology class at uni 15 years ago. But I dropped out and ended up in a completely different field (Design). But I still have that fondness of Biology in me all these years later.
I'm in the process of building one myself. Take what I'm saying with a massive grain of salt, but I believe you basically need three things - objective, tube lens and a camera module.
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.
My household ended up with a couple of ancient binocular dissecting scopes that a university was throwing out. The magnification isn't amazing, but they're fantastic for just grabbing random shit and looking at it, or yes -- things like soldering.
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.
principle of sparcity. for mutations, we assume it only happened once considering how highly unlikely it is to happen. it is what helps us determine how species are related. if notable differences are detected, like in that case or for example in the case of wings (bird wings vs bat wings), we do an exception.
>"The first species of Paulinella was discovered on Dec. 24, 1894, in the sediments of a backwater of the Rhine River by the German biologist Robert Lauterborn. He named the genus after his stepmother, Pauline."
How can they say this without providing more background?
Right- that's really just a version of a worm pick. I use similar tools (including a mouth pipette... remember kids, in chemistry: don't pipette by mouth, in biology: oops I think I just inhaled something!) working with tardigrade. If it was steampunk there would be some sort of goggles, leather, gears, and a tincture of laudunum.
I came here looking for this :) like someone has to be making this joke right. Or another direction of making the connection that there must be some life growing from the filth in a motel room
My reaction: why is the U.S. government trying to kneecap science in this country?
This is a feel good story for sure. But advancing science should not have to rely on unfunded researchers pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps.
For every story of a scientist that figured out how to keep going after their funding was pulled there are 10 figuring out if they should apply to law or medical school.
>But advancing science should not have to rely on unfunded researchers pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps
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.
Why did they work in a motel room? The article kinda implies it had something to do with Trump’s funding cuts, but unless I missed something the connection wasn’t made explicit.
I think it's mainly to be close to the sample collection area while also having a place to do microscopy in semi-privacy. Looking at their equipment, I think they bought everything out of pocket and pay for the hotel on their own.
I've seen a big uptick in "prove you're a human" screens recently. Our ISP had issues the other day, and I suspect I was assigned a new IP (I've had previous ones for years). I've been attributing it to that. But, now I'm wondering if it's something else.
"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.
> Jugs of brackish water lined the walls. Buckets overflowed with hunks of marsh grass.
I don’t know, that goes a little above and beyond IMO. One typically doesn’t do science in a house-type setting, for many of the same reasons you don’t carpet a bathroom.
It takes ~30 minutes to turn around a nightly hotel room, front desk check-in and other labor can easily make that >1h of labor per room per day.
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/day is a cheap room in most of the US and Canada.
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 $80/day after taxes.
Per diems in the civil engineering union agreement in my Canadian province are 180$ a day to cover lodging and food when you're working away from home. Most people manage to spend less and save the leftover. That's tax free money unrelated to what you're actually getting paid for the work or transport time.
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.
I am not from US and with that money I could rent a tiny apartment for 2-3 days. However, I prefer cheaper accomodation. $80 is super expensive if you have no other place to live.
I'm currently on a business trip staying a Hampton Inn in a low cost rural area of the USA. The nightly rate is $120. This is not a high end hotel- generally considered 2-star level out of 5. The nearby Comfort Inn is one step lower in quality of accommodation and guests, and gets $75. Anything cheaper than that is a filthy, crime-ridden bucket of blood.
I'm in Singapore at the moment and it's 200 USD a night for my current hotel, which is near the office - not down town - and not particularly expensive. There are some cheaper ones which aren't on our corporate booking system.
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)
https://archive.is/2026.09.26-101638/https://www.nytimes.com...
Thank you !!
While the research about Paulinella is very interesting, it has no relationship whatsoever with "the origins of life".
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.
> it has no relationship whatsoever with "the origins of life".
followed by
> it can provide information about how the early stages of the hybridization happened
so…
the origins of major parts of life?
The very next sentence in the comment begins "What this research is about is the origin of plants, which are indeed one of the most important forms of life..."
[flagged]
Isn’t this about the origin of complex life?
There were several jumps in complexity, this is only one of them.
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.
I appreciate you breaking it down for me. I wasn't aware (though it makes perfect sense now that I'm reading it) that the capture of a foreign cell and the fusion of its DNA into the host are separate jumps, but that makes sense. I think that's where, for me at least, the confusion came in.
I came here to say this, but you ninja'd me. To repeat what you're saying, the title is wrong on two counts:
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).
Wait, are you saying that the NYT engages in clickbait..??
Perhaps they only offer insights in to the origins of a major branch of clickbait.
the origins of plant life is related to the origins of life; even if by abstraction.
at best it's related to origins of eucaryotic life, but definitely not whole life in general
we basically uncovered early network sending unencrypted html, and you expect to understand how compiler works - simply different levels of abstraction
cracking the "origin of life" (I put it in quotes because if you subscribe to the panpsychism premise that consciousness is fundamental then the question of hte origin of life is a bit nonsensical; everything is a permutation of the same primordial life-consciousness) is a bit like cracking AGI; if some new insight gets us closer to the larger question, it is relevant to the larger question even if the larger question is a superset of the sub-question.
It is related in that way.
The origin of life means abiogenesis - how the first living "stuff" arose from simpler chemistry.
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.
[flagged]
> "He noticed that the scales were overlapping one another in different directions — in one, they overlapped on top of each other in a clockwise pattern, and the other was in reverse. The fresh eyes of a person who hadn’t been staring at Paulinella for hours identified a curious, distinctive trait. Were they looking at two different species?"
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.
If you have a decent microscope and want to work on some citizen science that's directly related to the research in this article: https://www.vanettenlab.org/paulinella-consortium
What is a “decent microscope”?
Of course that's a whole discussion but perhaps in the $300 range. Sounds like that's what Dr. Van Etten herself was using when she first found one.
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...
In one of the papers:
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.
+1 on this question, without any snark intended. What's a good, not too expensive beginner's microscope that's capable of this kind of citizen research (and other fun stuff)?
As magnification increases, your main spend requirement is glass. Light is now cheap in the form of LEDs, as are condensers/collimators (which are not strictly required). IMHO at most magnifications you will get better relative image quality enhancement from adjustable through-light and correct focus than from a prospective upgrade to collimated light. Cheapest way in is a mono 'zoom tube' system which incorporates configurable magnification and ties directly to an industrial CCD camera. This is 'digital native' and obviates the need to pay for additional elements including a rigid stand, a stage, a revolving nose piece, and multiple high grade objectives. If you buy online, you can get a lot of value for cheap. However, you then need to fudge a stage, a light source, and a condenser, none of which are hard. These systems are super fun because you can route HDMI or USB to a big screen and share exploration with others. If you find microscopic critters, you can even record videos of them doing their thing. If you want more detail resolution, you can patiently twiddle or automate the focal adjustment then do focus stacked images. However, to get really good results you need to start getting in to things like chemical staining, frozen sample preparation before microtome sample slicing, oil-immersed objectives, and high quality glass, at which point you are really better off with a traditional microscope. Once you have the platform it's the glass that costs money.
> Dr. Van Etten didn’t expect much from the water she had scooped from a random dock next to the highway
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.
Reminds me of penicillin research, where random cantaloupe from Peoria yielded the best penicillin mold.
If labs want samples like that they should start a scheme, I’d be happy to mail in random stuff.
Same! Ready to send random samples from Sheffield
We'll likely have robots sampling all over the world's diverse biomes in some short years.
I guess that depends on how many robots a company is willing to have stuck in random places.
and/or how many robots they are willing to loose in my shed.
Hey, hey, hey... what'd I tell y'all about coming in my shed?!
Are you saying they're going to shed some robots? I hope they have enough left after that.
[flagged]
Reading this article with a bittersweet feeling. This is exactly the kind of work I wanted to do for the rest of my life while in Biology class at uni 15 years ago. But I dropped out and ended up in a completely different field (Design). But I still have that fondness of Biology in me all these years later.
Then buy a microscope and start looking for Paulinella!
https://www.vanettenlab.org/paulinella-consortium
[flagged]
this revives my recurring desire to get a good USB microscope. Good, to me, in this context:
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?
I'm in the process of building one myself. Take what I'm saying with a massive grain of salt, but I believe you basically need three things - objective, tube lens and a camera module.
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.
My household ended up with a couple of ancient binocular dissecting scopes that a university was throwing out. The magnification isn't amazing, but they're fantastic for just grabbing random shit and looking at it, or yes -- things like soldering.
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.
Perhaps better to ask here: https://www.reddit.com/r/microscopy/. They get that question a lot.
Some random ones I've encountered (less for PCB work though):
- https://openflexure.org/
- https://www.eurekamicroscope.com/
They mention this event has only happened handful of times.
This seems unsupported. More likely is it's happened a large number of times, but has only established a lineage a handful of times.
principle of sparcity. for mutations, we assume it only happened once considering how highly unlikely it is to happen. it is what helps us determine how species are related. if notable differences are detected, like in that case or for example in the case of wings (bird wings vs bat wings), we do an exception.
>"The first species of Paulinella was discovered on Dec. 24, 1894, in the sediments of a backwater of the Rhine River by the German biologist Robert Lauterborn. He named the genus after his stepmother, Pauline."
How can they say this without providing more background?
I wonder what the author thinks steampunk means
Right- that's really just a version of a worm pick. I use similar tools (including a mouth pipette... remember kids, in chemistry: don't pipette by mouth, in biology: oops I think I just inhaled something!) working with tardigrade. If it was steampunk there would be some sort of goggles, leather, gears, and a tincture of laudunum.
Non-paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/26/science/motel-science-dis...
Thank you! (Also, haven’t seen this kind of gift link that has the little login requirement, suppose they’re looking to strike a better balance.)
Thank you!
I have an idea on how life could originate in a motel room :D
I came here looking for this :) like someone has to be making this joke right. Or another direction of making the connection that there must be some life growing from the filth in a motel room
Thank you, I came here expecting the same.
I can think of two. There are entire ecosystems in some of these places.
I thought they use built up gunk from years in the bathroom to discover new species, so they choose a cheap motel.
My reaction: why is the U.S. government trying to kneecap science in this country? This is a feel good story for sure. But advancing science should not have to rely on unfunded researchers pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. For every story of a scientist that figured out how to keep going after their funding was pulled there are 10 figuring out if they should apply to law or medical school.
>But advancing science should not have to rely on unfunded researchers pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps
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.
It's almost as if the current government is trying to cause as much damage to the country as it can.
s/country/world/
This was also interesting: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01046-z
I'm pretty sure if they kept looking in cheaper motels, they would've found thousands of new organisms.
Maybe I'm getting old but man, motel rooms run $80 now?
I'm driving along Route 66 now, and $80 is about the average for a decent motel room.
A cheap one.
If you’re lucky
Once a scientist, always a scientist.
Great reporting - reading this NYT article gives me a little bit of the excitement that I normally only get from reading Quanta Magazine.
Why did they work in a motel room? The article kinda implies it had something to do with Trump’s funding cuts, but unless I missed something the connection wasn’t made explicit.
I think it's mainly to be close to the sample collection area while also having a place to do microscopy in semi-privacy. Looking at their equipment, I think they bought everything out of pocket and pay for the hotel on their own.
> The team — brought together, in part, by disruptions and despair over the Trump administration’s freezes to federal science funding — [...]
I dunno about the states, but in most parts of the UK, it's considerably cheaper than 80 dollars a day to rent a small workspace.
Near the beach?
The cheapest, check out Blackpool
If they had been willing to chance the $60 room, it would have had even MORE weird microbes!
All they needed was a blue UV light
Proof that groundbreaking science doesn't need a fancy lab, just maybe a questionable coffee machine. Love the serendipity here.
cheap motel + microscope + stubborn curiosity beats a lot of polished lab theater. want more science that starts with "wait what is that"
> You have been blocked from The New York Times because we suspect that you're a robot.
Ok then.
https://archive.ph/Mw5Tc
Sometimes a very small journey leads to bigger discovery, I hope they keep it up and enlighten us more
You have been blocked from The New York Times because we suspect that you're a robot.
wtf is happening to internet these days...
I've seen a big uptick in "prove you're a human" screens recently. Our ISP had issues the other day, and I suspect I was assigned a new IP (I've had previous ones for years). I've been attributing it to that. But, now I'm wondering if it's something else.
I guess their ad platform for LLMs didn’t pan out?
Do you have a smart tv that might be getting used as a residential proxy?
That means your ISP is being used by residential proxies
I don't know what I should've expected, but I am a bit disappointed that they in fact did not find these organisms in the motel room.
Quoting the article:
"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.
non-paywall (perm): https://archive.ph/QpBF1
[flagged]
I just stayed in an $80 motel room myself and I also think I might have also discovered a new form of life in the showers.
[dead]
[flagged]
You think pond water is the worst thing an $80 motel room has seen?
> Jugs of brackish water lined the walls. Buckets overflowed with hunks of marsh grass.
I don’t know, that goes a little above and beyond IMO. One typically doesn’t do science in a house-type setting, for many of the same reasons you don’t carpet a bathroom.
Probably poetic license. You can look at the pictures and see everything looks very clean.
The jugs are sealed. We can't see any "overflowing" buckets. Looking at some water samples under a microscope is not really that messy.
> for many of the same reasons you don’t carpet a bathroom.
someone should inform the orange POTUS of this: https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/did-donald-trump-j...
> for many of the same reasons you don’t carpet a bathroom
For some reason this is a commonplace in the UK.
Yeah....
I had a colleague who walked the tiled floor in front of pissoirs in socks..
Ugh, I just realised my imagination is too good :)
[flagged]
"Trump administration’s freezes to federal science"
Nytimes can't help itself. love it.
So $80 is considered a "cheap room"? How is a person supposed to earn $80 a day to pay for it and have something left?
Also, cells can have scales? Amazing.
It takes ~30 minutes to turn around a nightly hotel room, front desk check-in and other labor can easily make that >1h of labor per room per day.
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.
There's very little labour cost in your price, not sure where automation would change the cost much.
$80/day is a cheap room in most of the US and Canada.
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 $80/day after taxes.
Per diems in the civil engineering union agreement in my Canadian province are 180$ a day to cover lodging and food when you're working away from home. Most people manage to spend less and save the leftover. That's tax free money unrelated to what you're actually getting paid for the work or transport time.
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.
Have you stayed at hotels? Most people that work don’t stay at hotels and pay the hotel out of pocket.
I am not from US and with that money I could rent a tiny apartment for 2-3 days. However, I prefer cheaper accomodation. $80 is super expensive if you have no other place to live.
I'm currently on a business trip staying a Hampton Inn in a low cost rural area of the USA. The nightly rate is $120. This is not a high end hotel- generally considered 2-star level out of 5. The nearby Comfort Inn is one step lower in quality of accommodation and guests, and gets $75. Anything cheaper than that is a filthy, crime-ridden bucket of blood.
I'm in Singapore at the moment and it's 200 USD a night for my current hotel, which is near the office - not down town - and not particularly expensive. There are some cheaper ones which aren't on our corporate booking system.
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)
In most places, you don't pay the day rate for long stays.
Yeah salaries in the US are higher in nominal terms
From my reading of the article, my understanding is that they’re doing science in the hotel room, not living there long-term.
Motels are not a habitation of last resort by any means. They’re a convenient place to stay while traveling.
I expect the vast majority of motel patrons are additionally paying a rent/mortgage for their main habitation.
Where are you from? What would be a normal or comfortable rate for you?
You are supposed to be earning more than $80 a day. What do you do for a living that pays $10 an hour?