Nick Lane is a prolific writer and has some very interesting pieces available at “New Scientist” as well as his own web-pages. Very readable work from a biochemist. Here’s a sampler from “New Scientist”…
The Big O …not orgasm, but Oxygen and its variations through geological time. During the Carboniferous it was 35% of the atmosphere (just 21% today), yet a few million years later it was just 12% at the end of the Permian. How did Life respond?
Has the mystery of sex been explained at last? …why do we have sex when some animals get along without it just fine? Or do they? The old explanation is that sex helps defend against external parasites… BUT that doesn’t quite work. What about genomic ‘parasites’?
What’s the point of being warm-blooded? …maintaining a high, constant body temperature is what burns most of our calories in a day, and that’s true for almost all mammals and birds. Why the waste heat? Why not burn slower like our reptilian ancestors?
Was our oldest ancestor a proton-powered rock? …Think ‘Chemiosmosis’ and you’ll get the idea. The LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor) was a cell in a ‘rock’… read more for details and an engrossingly told story. A summary in 10 Steps is available too.
Finally, not from Nick Lane, is this ABC News item…
Cell’s Power Packs Came from Within
…which studies how mitochondria – the common energy factory of all eukaryotes – came to be converted from a free-living bacterium to energy centre. Apparently the transfer molecular machinery that shuttles materials from mitochondrion to host cell came together from diverse bacterial parts organised in those first eukaryotes, and the researchers recreated just how.