Fire Amoeba Breaks Heat Barrier: Does It Redraw the Limits of Complex Life?

The Debate

For decades, biologists operated under a seemingly firm rule: complex life—organisms with nuclei, delicate internal machinery, and DNA tucked neatly inside a membrane—has a hard thermal ceiling. Above a certain temperature, the thinking went, those intricate cellular components unravel. Proteins denature, membranes fall apart, and the whole eukaryotic project becomes unsustainable. But now, a tiny amoeba scooped from a California hot spring is forcing a reexamination of that...