Background science links

This is a thread for collecting links to useful scientific concepts and examples of species on Earth.

Environment

Here is some information on a relative shallow (570m) hydrothermal vent.

Information on abiotic oxygen production on exoplanets.

Microscopic Life

Journey to the microcosmos is an obvious place to start, if you want to learn more about microbes then just watch this series.

How proteins can be used to stop ice crystals from harming living things.

Here’s a playlist of video footage of microbes.

Here’s a list of the biggest single cells discovered on Earth. It seems the largest bacteria are 0.75mm, the largest cell with a single nucleus can be 10cm tall and the largest multinucleate cell can have fronds 3m long. Xenophyophorea are multinucleates that can create shells 20cm in diameter at depths up to 10km. Relevant video.

Here is some information on different proposed mechanisms for single cells to form mulitcellular species. This is the TLDR.

Bacteria propelled by slime jets.

Information on the warnowiids which have very sophisitcaed eyespots possibly used for hunting.

On the subject of the smallest animals. The animal with the least cells so far discovered is a Myxozoan and has “a mere handful of cells”. Rotifers have less than a thousand cells and also don’t add cells throughout their life.

Single cells such as Choanoflagellates and Slime Moulds can form colonies with the latter being up to several square meters and 30 grams in size. Volvox algae also live in colonies of up to 50,000 individual cells.

Information about microbes in soil, how they communicate and trade with plants forming networks up to kilometers long transmitting nutrients and information.

A lecture about unusual properties and behaviour of cells.

Information on gas vacuoles.

“Multicellular life has evolved independently at least 25 times”, Single celled “Yeast evolved from multicellular ancestors” link

Information on radiotrophic organisms. A patent for using melanin and radiation to make plants, worms, fungi and bacteria grow faster.

Vampyrella basically uses a straw pilus.

Plasmids are used by some Eukaryotes.

Small colony of algae, propelled by flagella, with a light spot for guidance towards light.

Paulinella, a Eukaryote, took a cyanobacterium as a symbiont 90-140m years ago distinctly from the original event 1bn years ago which most plants are descended from…

Tetrahymena thermophila is a microbe that has 7 sexes. It also has two nucleii and has been well studied.

Cochliopodium recombine their genes by having 6 cells fuse together, swap genetic material and then split apart again as new entities.

Bacteria which have lived in ocean sediment for 100 million years.

Chloroplasts moving around inside photosynthetic organisms.

Extremophiles which live in highly saline, highly acidic (~Ph 0) and hot (90-109c) water in the Dallol geothermal area in Africa. List of acidophiles,

Another acidophile, the eukaryote red algae “G. sulphuraria is unusual for a eukaryote in being thermoacidophilic – that is, capable of growing at both high temperature and low pH. It grows well in a pH range of 0–4 and at temperatures up to 56 °C, close to the approximately 60 °C sometimes cited as the likely maximum for eukaryotic life.”

Macroscopic Life

Flying and gliding animals have evolved separately many times, without any single ancestor. Flight has evolved at least four times, in the insects, pterosaurs, birds, and bats. Gliding has evolved on many more occasions. Link

Moreover convergent evolution is extremely common, here is a long list of examples, including:

  1. Trichromatic color vision, separate blue, green and red vision, found only in a few mammals and came about independently in humans, Old World monkeys and the howler monkeys of the New World, and a few Australian marsupials.
  2. Ruminant forestomaches came about independently in: hoatzin bird and tree sloths of the Amazon, ruminant artiodactyls (deer, cattle), colobus monkeys of the Old World and some Macropodidae.

On the colour of plants on alien planets.

Cool thread of unusual animals on the community forums.

Animals which can photosynthesize. Humans use UV light in the production of vitamin D.

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Potential units for the processes in the game before it gets buried.

So here’s a quick computation: From here

“Quiescent human fibroblasts of unreported volume were found to consume about 1 mmol glucose per gram of protein per hour”

“The protein content of a characteristic 3000 µm3 cell volume is about 300 pg corresponding to 3×10^9 cells per gram of protein.”

So 1 cell would use approx 3x10^-13 mol of glucose per hour. Molecular weight of glucose is 180g/mol so that’s 6x10^-11 grams per hour or 1.7x10^-14 per second which is like 17 femtograms per second ha ha, not sure I’ve ever used units that small.

So when a cell uses 0.21 glucose per second that could be 0.21 femtograms.

Noticed there is nothing on endosymbiosis here so I will start collecting resources for that. As well as resources for other topics I find interesting.

Endosymbiosis:
Writing detailing evolution of mitochondria within the cell.
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(17)31179-X?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS096098221731179X%3Fshowall%3Dtrue
Relatively shorter text describing evolution of mitochondria post-symbiosis.
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(08)00441-7?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0960982208004417%3Fshowall%3Dtrue
Article detailing potential evolution of the nucleus.


Writing describing nucleomorphs and their potential origin in secondary endosymbiosis of eukaryotes.

Binary Star Systems:
Paper reporting potential stable lifespans of celestial bodies in binary systems.

Article discussing potential habitable zones and weather patterns in Circumbinary bodies.
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14957

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Here’s a bunch of stuff from me on various Thrive-related things/science. If you read any of these papers and want to discuss or have me help you understand the jargon that’s probably in these papers please reach out. Primary sources are inaccessible at the best of times.

If there is a paper you want to read that is behind a stupid paywall message me and I’ll try and get it. The authors of paper make ZERO dollars on you paying to read their papers so you’re only hurting money-hungry journals.

Most of the papers linked here are going to focus on warm little pond origin of life rather than vent origins. Currently warm little pond origins is the more accepted dogma but astrobiologists argue about this all the time. I’m biased to ponds.

Here’s a powerpoint presentation I made for some community outreach. It’s an astrobiology primer for amateur astronomers. I dunno if it’s helpful to anyone here.
astrobiology primer powerpoint

Here’s a review paper on origin of life as a planetary phenomenon. This focuses on a “warm little pond” origin rather than a vent origin.
Sasselov 2020 Origin of life planetary phenomenon.pdf (2.2 MB)

Here’s a paper about why warm little ponds are better than vents for the origin of life
You can’t have membranes in seawater

Life on Enceladus
Deamer, Damer - 2017 - Can Life Begin on Enceladus A Perspective from Hydrothermal Chemistry.pdf (191.4 KB)

A paper by my friend Ben K.D. Pearce on RNA in warm little ponds. If you have questions about this paper definitely just email Ben.

RNA nucleobases in ponds

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Here’s more stuff.

David Deamer is a guy to look up - he’s basically one of the original origins of life dudes. He’s written a couple books which are way more accessible than journal articles. I couldn’t get a free PDF but I can get my university’s library to scan a single chapter from books so if you don’t want to spend $50 ona book but know which chapter you want, let me know.

Assembling Life by David W. Deamer

A roughly one hour video lecture by an incredible astrobiologist who’s discovered a ridiculous number of exoplanets. She’s super cool.
Plurality of Worlds: the Diversity of Exo-Earths and the Implications for Life by Natalie Batalha

A bunch of papers that summarize terrestrial origin of life theories. Mostly hydrothermal vents and/or warm little ponds. But also one paper on nuclear geyser systems.

Bioenergetics and Life’s Origins

Electrochemistry at Hydrothermal Vents

Hotsprings hypothesis for the origin of life

Nuclear geyser system for the origin of life

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Time to revive this topic a bit I guess after such a long time saying I should do it.

Bacterial motility

Bacterial learning

Miscellaneous (and not carefully read yet)

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