New paper: Life could be older than Earth itself.

In a nutshell, if you log plot a given era's most advanced life form's genome size as it increases along Earth's history, you get a straight line.  If genome size is analogous to computing power, you get something akin to a Moore's Law relation.  Then if you extrapolate back to one gene (I suppose that's the minimum), it would have been the most complex, and hence the original life form... 9.5 billion years ago.

Hm.  Either Moore's Law really, really doesn't apply here or something extremely unexpected is going on.  Brief article at MIT Tech Review, abstract and full downloadable paper at arxive.

Side note: my father and I used to do a lot of printing for second author's organization, Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory.  Small world.