full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Lee Cronin: Making matter come alive

Unscramble the Blue Letters

So when you think about the improbable nature of what I'm going to tell you in the next few minutes, just remember, we came from suftf on paelnt Earth. And we went through a variety of worlds. The RNA people would talk about the RNA wrold. We somehow got to proteins and DNA. We then got to the last ancestor. Evolution kicked in — and that's the cool bit. And here we are. But there's a roadblock that you can't get past. You can decode the genome, you can look back, you can link us all together by a mitochondrial DNA, but we can't get further than the last atseconr, the last visible cell that we could secnqeue or think back in history. So we don't know how we got here.

Open Cloze

So when you think about the improbable nature of what I'm going to tell you in the next few minutes, just remember, we came from _____ on ______ Earth. And we went through a variety of worlds. The RNA people would talk about the RNA _____. We somehow got to proteins and DNA. We then got to the last ancestor. Evolution kicked in — and that's the cool bit. And here we are. But there's a roadblock that you can't get past. You can decode the genome, you can look back, you can link us all together by a mitochondrial DNA, but we can't get further than the last ________, the last visible cell that we could ________ or think back in history. So we don't know how we got here.

Solution

  1. sequence
  2. stuff
  3. world
  4. ancestor
  5. planet

Original Text

So when you think about the improbable nature of what I'm going to tell you in the next few minutes, just remember, we came from stuff on planet Earth. And we went through a variety of worlds. The RNA people would talk about the RNA world. We somehow got to proteins and DNA. We then got to the last ancestor. Evolution kicked in — and that's the cool bit. And here we are. But there's a roadblock that you can't get past. You can decode the genome, you can look back, you can link us all together by a mitochondrial DNA, but we can't get further than the last ancestor, the last visible cell that we could sequence or think back in history. So we don't know how we got here.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
billion years 4
planet earth 2
driving force 2
inorganic life 2
artificial life 2
amino acids 2
cellular biology 2

Important Words

  1. ancestor
  2. bit
  3. cell
  4. cool
  5. decode
  6. dna
  7. earth
  8. evolution
  9. genome
  10. history
  11. improbable
  12. kicked
  13. link
  14. minutes
  15. mitochondrial
  16. nature
  17. people
  18. planet
  19. proteins
  20. remember
  21. rna
  22. roadblock
  23. sequence
  24. stuff
  25. talk
  26. variety
  27. visible
  28. world
  29. worlds