First Life: Discovering the Connections between Stars, Cells, and How Life Began
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Narrated by:
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Mike Lenz
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By:
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David Deamer
About this listen
This pathbreaking book explores how life can begin, taking us from cosmic clouds of stardust, to volcanoes on Earth, to the modern chemistry laboratory. Seeking to understand life's connection to the stars, David Deamer introduces astrobiology, a new scientific discipline that studies the origin and evolution of life on Earth and relates it to the birth and death of stars, planet formation, interfaces between minerals, water, and atmosphere, and the physics and chemistry of carbon compounds.
Deamer argues that life began as systems of molecules that assembled into membrane-bound packages. These in turn provided an essential compartment in which more complex molecules assumed new functions required for the origin of life and the beginning of evolution. Deamer takes us from the vivid and unpromising chaos of the Earth four billion years ago up to the present and his own laboratory, where he contemplates the prospects for generating synthetic life.
Engaging and accessible, First Life describes the scientific story of astrobiology while presenting a fascinating hypothesis to explain the origin of life.
The book is published by University of California Press.
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In Arrival of the Fittest, renowned evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner draws on over 15 years of research to present the missing piece in Darwin's theory. Using experimental and computational technologies that were heretofore unimagined, he has found that adaptations are not just driven by chance, but by a set of laws that allow nature to discover new molecules and mechanisms in a fraction of the time that random variation would take.
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Robustness makes for an interesting life and book
- By Gary on 11-29-14
By: Andreas Wagner
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The Story of Earth
- The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet
- By: Robert M. Hazen
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 9 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Earth evolves. From first atom to molecule, mineral to magma, granite crust to single cell to verdant living landscape, ours is a planet constantly in flux. In this radical new approach to Earth’s biography, senior Carnegie Institution researcher and national best-selling author Robert M. Hazen reveals how the co-evolution of the geosphere and biosphere - of rocks and living matter - has shaped our planet into the only one of its kind in the Solar System, if not the entire cosmos.
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Makes minerals interesting
- By Gary on 07-31-12
By: Robert M. Hazen
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Forces of Nature
- By: Professor Brian Cox, Andrew Cohen
- Narrated by: Samuel West
- Length: 7 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Professor Brian Cox uncovers some of the most extraordinary natural events on Earth and in the universe and beyond. From the immensity of the universe and the roundness of Earth to the form of every single snowflake, the forces of nature shape everything we see. Pushed to extremes, the results are astonishing. In seeking to understand the everyday world, the colours, structure, behaviour and history of our home, we develop the knowledge and techniques necessary to step beyond the everyday.
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Complicated in its simplicity
- By Philomath on 06-13-17
By: Professor Brian Cox, and others
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13 Things That Don't Make Sense
- The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time
- By: Michael Brooks
- Narrated by: James Adams
- Length: 8 hrs and 58 mins
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Science starts to get interesting when things don't make sense. Science's best-kept secret is that there are experimental results and reliable data that the most brilliant scientists can neither explain nor dismiss. If history is any precedent, we should look to today's inexplicable results to forecast the future of science. Michael Brooks heads to the scientific frontier to meet 13 modern-day anomalies and discover tomorrow's breakthroughs.
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10 interesting chapters-read epiloge first
- By Stephen on 06-10-09
By: Michael Brooks
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Catching Stardust
- Comets, Asteroids and the Birth of the Solar System
- By: Natalie Starkey
- Narrated by: Alison Campbell
- Length: 9 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Icy, rocky, sometimes dusty, always mysterious – comets and asteroids are among the Solar System's very oldest inhabitants, formed within a swirling cloud of gas and dust in the area of space that eventually hosted the Sun and its planets. Locked within each of these extra-terrestrial objects is the 4.6-billion-year wisdom of Solar System events, and by studying them at close quarters using spacecraft we can coerce them into revealing their closely-guarded secrets. This offers us the chance to answer some fundamental questions about our planet and its inhabitants.
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Chasing star stuff always results in technological advances
- By Richard Duede on 12-30-18
By: Natalie Starkey
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The Cosmic Cocktail
- Three Parts Dark Matter
- By: Katherine Freese
- Narrated by: Tamara Marston
- Length: 9 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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The ordinary atoms that make up the known universe - from our bodies and the air we breathe to the planets and stars - constitute only 5 percent of all matter and energy in the cosmos. The rest is known as dark matter and dark energy, because their precise identities are unknown. The Cosmic Cocktail is the inside story of the epic quest to solve one of the most compelling enigmas of modern science - what is the universe made of? - told by one of today’s foremost pioneers in the study of dark matter.
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I was looking for a book about science....
- By Jeff on 03-27-15
By: Katherine Freese
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A Little History of the World
- By: E. H. Gombrich
- Narrated by: Ralph Cosham
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
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E. H. Gombrich's world history, an international best seller now available in English for the first time, is a text dominated not by dates and facts but by the sweep of experience across the centuries, a guide to humanity's achievements, and an acute witness to its frailties.
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an enlightening book; very well read
- By A.B.Oxford on 06-03-06
By: E. H. Gombrich
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What Is Life?
- How Chemistry Becomes Biology
- By: Addy Pross
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
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Seventy years ago, Erwin Schrdinger posed a simple, yet profound, question: What is life?. How could the very existence of such extraordinary chemical systems be understood? This problem has puzzled biologists and physical scientists both before, and ever since. Living things are hugely complex and have unique properties, such as self-maintenance and apparently purposeful behaviour which we do not see in inert matter. So how does chemistry give rise to biology?
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Profound & Life Changing...
- By Daegan Smith on 04-06-15
By: Addy Pross
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Calculating the Cosmos
- How Mathematics Unveils the Universe
- By: Ian Stewart
- Narrated by: Dana Hickox
- Length: 12 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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In Calculating the Cosmos, Ian Stewart presents an exhilarating guide to the cosmos, from our solar system to the entire universe. He describes the architecture of space and time, dark matter and dark energy, how galaxies form, why stars implode, how everything began, and how it's all going to end. He considers parallel universes, the fine-tuning of the cosmos for life, what forms extraterrestrial life might take, and the likelihood of life on Earth being snuffed out by an asteroid.
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Crank alert: rejects modern cosmology
- By James Weisner on 03-20-17
By: Ian Stewart
What listeners say about First Life: Discovering the Connections between Stars, Cells, and How Life Began
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Gary
- 03-30-13
Not for the faint of heart
The book is more of a text book than a popular science book. The author is very good at stating what he's going to tell you, than tells you, and than summarize what he just told you.
I understand chemistry even less than I understand bio-chemistry and the book uses both extensively. He'll explain the terms and often I wouldn't understand any of the technical words for whole pages (minutes) at a time, but I would always understand what his point was.
The book is not for the faint of heart and is by far the most difficult book I have ever listen to because of its complexity. After having listen to it, I really have an understanding of how the universe could have become self aware.
The reader does an excellent job of reading the book in a dry manner as if it were a text book. I have a feeling that the book could be used in a graduate course on the origins of life in a bio-chem or biology graduate course.
The book is definitely worth risking a credit on, but beware it is a difficult listen.
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- Richard
- 12-10-14
Unanswered Questions Superbly Addressed
If you could sum up First Life: Discovering the Connections between Stars, Cells, and How Life Began in three words, what would they be?
Deep time explained.
Who was your favorite character and why?
The favorite character, of course, is the amazing self propagating molecular force of matter which by happenstance was in the right place at the right span of deep time. This deepened my understanding of life as a particular energy state of matter. No doubt it is ubiquitous throughout our endless universe.
Have you listened to any of Michael Lenz’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
I have not listened to him before, but even after going through this book twice I found his narrative style to be pleasing and non distractive.
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
The author breaks away now and then from in depth explanations of biochemistry to take the listener on various journeys. For example, the scientific trek to the Kamchatka Peninsula in search of the perfect thermal spring was particularly interesting.
Any additional comments?
I highly recommend this semi-technical work, which helped me to understand current research into how living matter may have self-organized over time.
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- RSZ
- 10-26-13
Great book on Origins of Life
Would you listen to First Life: Discovering the Connections between Stars, Cells, and How Life Began again? Why?
I would recommend at least a high level high school Bio and Chem background to enjoy this book. I have listened to this book several times and purchased the paper version as well. Each time I get something new out of it. Well written, nicely organized and thought provoking.
What was one of the most memorable moments of First Life: Discovering the Connections between Stars, Cells, and How Life Began?
How life becomes an emergent property of chemistry is one of the great puzzles. Dr. Deamer makes some very plausible hypothesis and presents some of the difficult challenges in a very readable manner.
What about Michael Lenz’s performance did you like?
Nice narration. Does a good job on the difficult task of describing chemical formula.
Any additional comments?
Although he does not spend much of the book addressing the "Creationists". I think he does a good job on addressing their flawed point of view.
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2 people found this helpful