Over my head

Another indoor morning - dull but dry so far. Mostly Photo Club things - making sure everything was ready for the competition judging tonight. I hate to think I've forgotten something, but you can only recheck so far!
 
This afternoon there was a meeting of the u3a Science Group - I haven't been so far. The subject was ‘LUCA, our Last Universal Common Ancestor.’ The basis of the talk, by an elderly lady in the group with an amazing knowledge, was that new research suggests that all life on earth, from microbes to monkeys, came from one single cell. The audience consisted of 12 scientists and me. Although I thought I had a reasonable grasp of evolution, geology and various other associated subjects I didn’t understand a word of it! So many words and phrases were new to me, such as “total-group Oxyphotobacteria in the Mozaan Group”, “Pongola Supergroup”, “orthologous proteins”, “horizontal gene-transfer-aware phylogenetic reconciliation” and “ signal recognition protein and signal recognition particle receptor”, that I gave up and let it swim right over me! I don’t think I’ll bother to go again!
 
Good to see that most of the large plastic pieces have been picked up from the beach - my Blip today. Hope to see the rest gone soon.
 
Quote of the Day: ‘The origin of life is one of the great outstanding mysteries of science.' - Paul Davies.