Awesome news about new lifeforms

First, I have your Sense of Wonder right here: Multi-celled anoxic organisms: Animals that live without oxygen, discovered deep in the Mediterranean. They look like little anemones. Or little elongated jellyfish. Or little bottle brushes.

This is exciting, although I have trouble putting it into words why. It's just... neat, you know? Yet another different life form, yet another way in which life found a niche.

The nice thing about the development and spread of life is that once it starts, there's no stopping it short of planetary-scale disaster, and I don't mean piddly little disasters like global thermonuclear war or a little tiny bit of climate change. If things progress to Venus-level global warming, then we'll talk. Until then, life will find a way. (Human life is another matter.) Lifeforms vie with one another. Life itself has no rival, no competition---unlife does not propagate.

In other Sense of Wonder news, see if you can figure out what the little dot is before clicking on the picture and reading the explanation, assuming you did not see the picture before:



Again, awesome.

Artificial Photosynthesis? Awesome.

All our food is, ultimately, from sunlight (and CO₂); most everything that moves gets the energy from sunlight, though sometimes by quite a long and circuitous route as in the case of fossil-fuels. Photosynthesis is where it begins, and unless you count the (relatively very, very minor) contributions of solar and solar thermal energy harvesting methods, it was the only way.

Natural photosynthesis, that is.

Here's awesomeness: Folks at the University of Cincinnati developed an artificial photosynthesis method that is more efficient than the natural one, because there is no plant to grow around the photosynthesis center. And here's more awesomeness, from my point of view: Remove excess CO₂ from the air, for instance installing these things near populationo centers, and make candy, I mean glucose, or biofuels. I see no downside to this plan.

Well, actually I can see no downside, since this is technically not my area of expertise. But here is the original paper, if you are in a network that can access it. It starts with this:

We present a cell-free artificial photosynthesis platform that couples the requisite enzymes of the Calvin cycle with a nanoscale photophosphorylation system engineered into a foam architecture using the Tngara frog surfactant protein Ranaspumin-2. This unique protein surfactant allowed lipid vesicles and coupled enzyme activity to be concentrated to the microscale Plateau channels of the foam, directing photoderived chemical energy to the singular purpose of carbon fixation and sugar synthesis, with chemical conversion efficiencies approaching 96%.

And ends with:

Undoubtedly, the extraction and large scale implementation of our fully engineered multienzyme system is just beginning, but a photosynthetic foam designed for focused biologic energy conversion offers a new paradigm for carbon fixation and biofuel generation without the biomass limitations of arable land or excess quantities of water.

Let's hope this fulfills its promise.