One step closer to proving abiogenesis? Scientists create "Near-Living Crystal"

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"Near Living"? Hardly. Crystals are built using pure chemical mechanics. Living cells are not. Why would any serious scientist make such a statement??

Chemical mechanics indeed.

http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage...s-14373960

Drawing on a background in ore geochemistry (many ores are precipitated by hydrothermal vent systems), Russell postulates that alkaline vents, akin to the modern Lost City vent system in the mid-Atlantic (Figure 3), were the ideal incubators for life, providing a steady supply of hydrogen gas, carbon dioxide, mineral catalysts, and a labyrinth of interconnected micropores (natural compartments similar to cells, with filmlike membranes; Lane et al. 2010). Alkaline vents are, in essence, electrochemical reactors that operate in a state far from equilibrium.
But the centerpiece of Russell's conception lies in natural proton gradients. Four billion years ago, alkaline fluids bubbled into what would then have been mildly acidic oceans (CO2 levels were about a thousand times higher than they are today, and CO2 forms carbonic acid in solution, rendering the oceans mildly acidic). Acidity is just a measure of proton concentration, which was about four orders of magnitude (four pH units) higher in the oceans than in vent fluids. That difference gave rise to a natural proton gradient across the vent membranes that had the same polarity (outside positive) and a similar electrochemical potential (about 200 millivolts [mV] across the membrane) as modern cells have.

Russell has long maintained that natural proton gradients played a central role in powering the origin of life. There are, of course, big open questions — not least, how the gradients might have been tapped by the earliest cells, which certainly lacked such sophisticated protein machinery as the ATP synthase. There are a few possible abiotic mechanisms, presently under scrutiny in Russell's lab and elsewhere. But thermodynamic arguments, remarkably, suggest that the only way life could have started at all is if it found a way to tap the proton gradients