What is this, some content creator run Biohacker Lab in some basement on Microflix premises?
Ominous voice: the tiny cell withdrew into the cracks of existence and saved it's entire code to be in the lines between, the Singular Point which was neither a fraction of space, nor a unit of time, hidden in the void of Chututululu's (33rd degree cousin of Cthulhu) dreams, written in the unspeakable language of the subtext of the book of neither life nor death, that nobody would decipher until the time was right AND GODZILLA GETS TO WALK THE EARTH AGAIN.
> ... we report the discovery of Candidatus Sukunaarchaeum mirabile, a novel archaeon with an unprecedentedly small genome of only 238 kbp —less than half the size of the smallest previously known archaeal genome— from a dinoflagellate-associated microbial community.
Which, BTW, is about the same researcher and microbial host/parasite pair. More info, so I'm not complaining.
flobosg13 minutes ago
Yeah, I should have mentioned that. Article about the same topic, but released earlier this year.
cnnlives198738 minutes ago
We don’t even fundamentally understand physics yet. Certainly there is much to life that we don’t understand.
jacquesm19 minutes ago
This is not so much about the understanding of life as it is about the definition of life.
IAmBroom14 minutes ago
Eh, you're quibbling with words. We're getting closer to the quantum (indivisible) definition of life, and that's understanding.
willis9365 minutes ago
I don't think that they are. The term life, as it's currently defined, is not very useful. The reality is that there is a very colorful spectrum of microscopic biology and that a single bin of "alive" and "not alive" is like trying to paint the mona lisa with a single pixel.
This scishow video gives a good look at the tip of the iceberg.
Reminds me of how the discovery of giant viruses - like truly huge viral particles - was immediately also followed by discovering "virophages" which parasitized them.
Which of course makes sense to some degree: if an adaptive strategy is successful enough, then parasitizing something which successfully implements it is going to be resource favorable (and likely, presumably by being a member of that species and just shedding components you don't need if you take them).
> According to the shocked researchers
What is this, some content creator run Biohacker Lab in some basement on Microflix premises?
Ominous voice: the tiny cell withdrew into the cracks of existence and saved it's entire code to be in the lines between, the Singular Point which was neither a fraction of space, nor a unit of time, hidden in the void of Chututululu's (33rd degree cousin of Cthulhu) dreams, written in the unspeakable language of the subtext of the book of neither life nor death, that nobody would decipher until the time was right AND GODZILLA GETS TO WALK THE EARTH AGAIN.
They were shocked. It is shocking.
From the paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.02.651781v1
> ... we report the discovery of Candidatus Sukunaarchaeum mirabile, a novel archaeon with an unprecedentedly small genome of only 238 kbp —less than half the size of the smallest previously known archaeal genome— from a dinoflagellate-associated microbial community.
The ultimate form of outsourcing.
See also: “Microbe with bizarrely tiny genome may be evolving into a virus” – https://www.science.org/content/article/microbe-bizarrely-ti...
Which, BTW, is about the same researcher and microbial host/parasite pair. More info, so I'm not complaining.
Yeah, I should have mentioned that. Article about the same topic, but released earlier this year.
We don’t even fundamentally understand physics yet. Certainly there is much to life that we don’t understand.
This is not so much about the understanding of life as it is about the definition of life.
Eh, you're quibbling with words. We're getting closer to the quantum (indivisible) definition of life, and that's understanding.
I don't think that they are. The term life, as it's currently defined, is not very useful. The reality is that there is a very colorful spectrum of microscopic biology and that a single bin of "alive" and "not alive" is like trying to paint the mona lisa with a single pixel.
This scishow video gives a good look at the tip of the iceberg.
https://youtu.be/FXqmzKwBB_w
Reminds me of how the discovery of giant viruses - like truly huge viral particles - was immediately also followed by discovering "virophages" which parasitized them.
Which of course makes sense to some degree: if an adaptive strategy is successful enough, then parasitizing something which successfully implements it is going to be resource favorable (and likely, presumably by being a member of that species and just shedding components you don't need if you take them).
Indeed. Well deduced.
Inevitability of Genetic Parasites Open Access Jaime Iranzo, Pere Puigbò, Alexander E. Lobkovsky, Yuri I. Wolf, Eugene V. Koonin https://academic.oup.com/gbe/article/8/9/2856/2236450
Unsurprisingly maybe, DPANN archaea can also host viruses: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-025-02149-7 (Paywalled, but there’s a preprint at https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.15.638363v1)