Scientists recreated classic origin-of-life experiment and made a new discovery
In my mind STEM topics exist on a scale that has math at one end, then there&#x27;s a slight pause&#x2F;discontinuity (as in point 2 in the underpants gnome business plan) before it continues with physics, chemistry, biology and onwards to god knows what.  As you move along this axis stuff feels more and more complex, messy and hard to nail down definitively.  More practical.  More prone to get tripped up by silly mistakes and things you never imagined you had to think about.<p>The new compounds they discovered in the old samples kind of illustrates how much hard work is required to get good answers.  You can&#x27;t just suck on your pipe, scratch your quill on some parchment and exert yourself mentally, you have to scrape gunk out of test-tubes and be really careful and thorough in a highly practical sense.  The world is imprecise and gnarly and you kind of have to hope for the best.<p>I really admire people who are capable of wringing results out of goo and specks of dust using gadgets that require calibration that has to be able to distinguish actual good signal from residues of the danish you had for breakfast.<p>(Example not entirely random since one of our engineers eating a danish for lunch in his office made the electrochemical sensors he was working on go absolutely apeshit.  Kind of good to know before you evacuate a whole industrial site and send in the people in yellow hazmat suits)