Scientists have believed that certain salt deposits are millions of years old. Live bacteria found within the deposits, however, are calling those age assignments into question. A new theory has been offered to explain how the bacteria could have remained alive for untold eons, but how well does it hold up?

One mystery that naturalists have yet to solve is how randomly shaped and distributed chemicals were organized, concentrated, and combined into the first living bacterial cell. The next great mystery is how eukaryotic cells—or cells with a nucleus—could have come from bacteria.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Since there could be neither a chicken nor an egg without each already existing in a fully functional state, they both had to have been put in place at the same time. But there are many interdependent parts in the chicken system, and new research has uncovered one of the tiniest--yet most vital--of them.

Researchers at the University of Aarhus in Denmark noticed something odd when they examined seafloor sediment that had been left for a few weeks in glass tubes—foul-smelling hydrogen sulfide had been removed from the top centimeter of the mud. This could not happen so quickly by oxygen passively diffusing down into the sediment, so they set out to find what was expediting the chemistry.

If life evolved from non-life through natural processes, then the organism most likely to resemble the first living cell would probably be the parasitic bacteria of the genus Mycoplasma. It has very little DNA and contains only a small number of proteins, and yet is a functional organism. This “primitive” cell, however, is proving to be anything but simple.