How long will life on Earth last?
All things must pass. That includes life on Earth, which will surely be wiped out eventually. But how long does it have? Image: Image Editor
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Tag: life
Buried microbes exist at limit between life and death
Look and learn, sloths: the microbes deep beneath the Pacific ocean take inactivity to new heights. They are so slow on the uptake of nutrients from their environment that they barely classify as alive. Their very existence could help define the limit between life and death. Paradoxically, though, they may also be among the oldest living organisms on Earth. Image: Hans Røy/Science/AAAS
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What a maze-solving oil drop tells us of intelligence
No one would equate an oil droplet’s apparent ability to solve a maze with intelligence. But new theories on human intelligence and the brain suggest the simple molecular processes governing the oil droplet’s apparently smart behaviour may be fundamentally similar to those that govern how we act. Image: aperte
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Evidence of fossil bugs found in volcanic bubble
Some microbes are happy to hide away from the big, bad world. Joachim Reitner at the University of Göttingen in Germany and colleagues have found the first evidence that microbes could survive inside gas bubbles within volcanic rock. Image: Krumma
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Is information essential for life?
We are used to thinking about how evolution selects for a wide range of physical traits, but the idea that natural selection could favour a quality as abstract as information content takes some getting used to. It’s something that physicist William Bialek at Princeton University takes in his stride, by thinking about organisms as computers. Image: Matthew Fang
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