In an $80 motel room, a discovery to shed light on the origins of life

danso

Non-paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/26/science/motel-science-dis...

ouked

https://archive.is/2026.09.26-101638/https://www.nytimes.com...

sevenart

non-paywall (perm): https://archive.ph/QpBF1

m3kw9

I thought they use built up gunk from years in the bathroom to discover new species, so they choose a cheap motel.

GTP

I have an idea on how life could originate in a motel room :D

tpict

I wonder what the author thinks steampunk means

oofbey

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.

alpineman

All they needed was a blue UV light

Beijinger

This was also interesting: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01046-z

codedokode

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.

staplung

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

sva_

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.

grantsucceeded

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?

realo

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.

2b3a51

> "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.

Bayes7

>"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?

____tom____

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.

kova12

You have been blocked from The New York Times because we suspect that you're a robot. wtf is happening to internet these days...

chakintosh

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.

alexpotato

> 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.