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Deeper Science of Green Slime
An anonymous reader writes: "As the source of all breathable air, and often-cited as the oldest fossils (3.5 billion years, Western Australia), cyanobacteria or green slime is discussed today in NASA's Astrobiology Magazine. The fascinating parts are the two survival paths that make cyanobacteria ductile, but not fragile (relatively unchanged since the beginning of life on Earth): sharing genes (lateral transfer) to get new capabilities for photosynthesis, and absorbing other cells by engulfment. It is the evolution by engulfment that seems so amazing as a means of species survival, since it is the opposite of parasitism."
This is quite a ways before trees evolved.
Overall, this has a pretty neat synopsis of single celled molecular evolution. And the pnas.org link was pretty cool, too. The article cites quite a bit of hard core research, but is still readable.
If it wasn't for cyanobacteria, we'd still have a primarily methane and carbon dioxide atmosphere. Cyanobacteria can be credited with resposibility for the major atmospheric change that occured around 2.5 billion years ago as the first photosyntheic lifeforms.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
> Did you notice that - these structures might be
> chemical artifacts, or they might be geological
> processes. The equivocations are there, a very
> nice thing to see - science is rarely so open
> about the alternative explanations when quoted in
> the popular press.
More appropriately, the popular press is rarely so open to the alternative explanations offered by science. Lucky for us, these articles are too obscure to be of much interest to the popular press. Science-oriented journals are generally less likely to try to sell with sensational headlines and more likely to get into the meat and potatoes of a particular subject.