In an $80 motel room, a discovery to shed light on the origins of life

Researchers discovered a new species of Paulinella in an $80 motel room, using cheap equipment during Trump-era funding freezes.

The team, brought together partly by despair over Trump administration freezes to federal science funding, used an $80 motel room as a field lab. They discovered a new species of Paulinella, a type of single-celled organism with scales, identifiable by the clockwise or counterclockwise overlap of its scales. The species was found in a sediment sample. This is one of only a handful of documented instances of this genus.