[10:46 a.m., 31/12/2024] Milea 2: Dozens of patients and the wounded have been evacuated for treatment outside the war-ravaged Gaza Strip, where the United Nations says Israel’s attacks on and around hospitals have pushed health care to the brink.
The 45 patients left the European Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis early Tuesday and traveled through the Kerem Shalom Crossing into Israel, Palestinian health officials said. They will receive treatment in the United Arab Emirates.
Among them was a 10-year-old boy, Abdullah Abu Yousef, suffering from kidney failure. He was accompanied by his sister after the Israeli authorities rejected his mother’s application to join him. Israel says it screens escorts for security.
“The boy is sick,” said his mother, Abeer Abu Yousef. “He requires hemodialysis three to four days a week.”
The Health Ministry says several thousand Palestinians in Gaza need medical treatment abroad. Israel has controlled all entry and exit points since capturing the southern city of Rafah in May. Israel’s offensive, launched after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack has gutted the territory’s health care system and forced most of its hospitals to close. Those that remain open are only partially functioning.
[10:50 a.m., 31/12/2024] Milea 2: Protocells emerge in experiment simulating lifeless world: ‘There is no divine breath of life’
[10:52 a.m., 31/12/2024] Milea 2: Researchers from a Spanish laboratory observe, for the first time, the formation of compartments alongside the basic ingredients of organisms Geologist Juan Manuel García Ruiz still speaks with amazement about how he and his colleagues have created “a proto-world” in their laboratory, located just 1,500 meters from La Concha beach in the Spanish city of San Sebastián. It may sound monumental, and it is, but what they have is a small, transparent container, just three liters in size, where they’ve placed a mixture of water, methane, nitrogen, and ammonia, adding electric discharges to simulate the harsh conditions of the primitive Earth. This experiment is a new iteration of the famous 1952 work by Stanley Miller, a 22-year-old American chemist who demonstrated that the basic building blocks of life could be easily created in a primordial soup. García Ruiz, however, has encountered an unexpected development. “Protocells” have also formed in his flask — structures considered to be the precursor to life itself. “It is amazing,” he declares.
The 71-year-old Spanish researcher explains that his experiment lasted barely two weeks. Almost immediately, a thin layer formed on the surface, much like cream on milk, and the once-clear water turned a yellowish brown. The microscope images are perplexing, revealing a multitude of tiny, curvilinear structures that any observer might mistake for living organisms — yet they are not. They are simply self-organized molecules. “We have always approached the origin of life following the biblical text, as though there were a divine breath, a singular moment where everything becomes irreversible. What our study suggests is that it wasn’t like that, but that it is a chemical evolution of millions of years, absolutely random, like subsequent biological evolution, and that it increases in complexity over time. It can lead to self-organized structures and, in some cases, to self-assembled structures, like life,” García Ruiz explains. “These types of proto-worlds must exist on billions of planets throughout the universe. And these proto-worlds may lead to something as complex as life, or to nothing at all. There’s no intelligent design, no divine breath of life, and no fundamental reaction either,” says García Ruiz, a geologist from the Donostia International Physics Center.
In February 1953, a twenty-something Stanley Miller wrote up his groundbreaking results in just a dozen paragraphs and changed the way humanity saw itself. He demonstrated that with three gases, water, and electric discharges, it was possible to create amino acids in a laboratory — molecules that form proteins, the biological machines that constitute living matter.
Juan Manuel García Ruiz’s team replicated Miller’s experiment in 2021, but instead of using the original glass container, they opted for one made of Teflon. Their conclusion made headlines around the world: no building blocks of life emerged in their experiment. Silica — a mineral composed of silicon and oxygen, found in glass — was essential. Last year, a consortium led by García Ruiz received €10 million ($10.4 million) from the European Union to investigate the role of silica in the origin of life.
