The greatest mass murder in history

Mark Claire
Monday 27 February 2017

After almost 4 years in review, Aubrey’s paper on nitrogen cycling during the GOE was finally published in Nature last week. Although the 7-planet system in Trappist-1 caught most of the headlines in that particular news cycle, we did have one pretty spectacular write up from blogger Diana Crow. For those of you that know Aubrey, Diana has done pretty remarkable job of channeling Dr. Zerkle:

The (Mostly) Untold Story of the Oxygen Revolution

Here is a open source link to the paper. Nature is debuting a new format in which the full source of the paper is available to everyone for reading online, but it is unable to be saved. The official paper is here.

All I really want to add right now is a word of thanks to the reviewers and to congratulate Aubrey for sticking with it. This paper really is a story of persistence. In the review process, we learned of a non-standard contamination process that partially affected some of the original data. Over three years, multiple re-extractions and measurements in three different laboratories were needed to settle on the final interpretation, which was different than the original. For all of those included in the process, thanks for your guidance in getting this awesome work out there. And to anyone reading, a “parental-type” remark in closing – Stick with it! Persistence really does pay off!

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