In an $80 motel room, a discovery to shed light on the origins of life
nytimes.com171 points by danso 6 hours ago
171 points by danso 6 hours ago
> "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.
> 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.
If labs want samples like that they should start a scheme, I’d be happy to mail in random stuff.
Reminds me of penicillin research, where random cantaloupe from Peoria yielded the best penicillin mold.
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.
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.
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...
+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)?
>"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 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.
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.
Perhaps better to ask here: https://www.reddit.com/r/microscopy/. They get that question a lot.
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.
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.
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.
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
This was also interesting: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01046-z
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.)
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.
All they needed was a blue UV light
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.
I thought they use built up gunk from years in the bathroom to discover new species, so they choose a cheap motel.
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.
"Trump administration’s freezes to federal science"
Nytimes can't help itself. love it.
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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
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..
> 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...
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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.
$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.
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.
You are supposed to be earning more than $80 a day. What do you do for a living that pays $10 an hour?