It is almost as if some junior editor (or LLM, though I think this practice predates them) has been given the job of dividing the article into sections with headers, but can't be trusted to use their own words for the headers (though they can still, of course, both divide and quote out of context.) Here, this appears to have been applied after someone else (the author, perhaps?) had already divided it into sections with traditional summaries for headers.
That said, I felt this article is much more engaging than the average university press release, and presents a genuinely significant discovery without, as far as I can tell, another now-commonplace annoyance: the excessive exaggeration or misrepresentation of that significance (though one might quibble over "...and could rewrite our timeline of complex life on Earth altogether.")
For example - this experiment was conducted a year before the structure of DNA was discovered / published - so it's quite a bold claim to say 'origin of life' research stalled in 1952.
To your first, second, and third questions - I can highly recommend Nick Lane's book 'The Vital Question' [0]. To some extent, I think he also spoke to your fourth question in that book - but I read 3 or 4 of his books around the same time, so my memory is fuzzy.
Either way, his hypothesis around alkaline thermal vents is hugely persuasive & compelling.
I'm really struggling to understand what you mean by the claim 'formation of water involves processes akin to supernovae' - do you just mean you need a star to explode before you get heavier elements (including Oxygen)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water (see Distribution in Nature) https://web.archive.org/web/20000116054013/http://www.news.h...
Thank you for the books recommendations, I’ll check them out.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microfossil
> A microfossil is a fossil that is generally between 0.001 mm and 1 mm in size
Which is a bit vague, but 0.001mm is 1000nm while a ribosome is in the range of 20-30 nm diameter. So a whole ribosome is around a 1/50 below the lower end of the microfossil range.
Even though DNA can be a lot longer (1000 base pairs is 3.4 nm - I think? - so a hundred kilobases would be 300-400 nm) the atomic features are too small to fossilise would be my guess.
