A desert region in northern Mexico sparked the imagination of Prof. Joel Stavans, a physicist who studies the physics of biological processes and is particularly interested in natural bacterial communities. He learned about a unique aquatic environment in the Cuatro Ciénegas Basin—whose name means "four marshes" in Spanish—located in the Mexican state of Coahuila. This area is home to an extraordinary diversity of life forms, including rare microbial communities that thrive in extreme conditions similar to those that existed on Earth during the Precambrian era, some 700 million years ago.