Our last paper on mineral self-organization, life detection and origin of life has just been published in Science Advances: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/3/e1602285.full.
This work is one of the dreams of my life as a scientist. For at least 20 years, I have identified the rare and remote places on the planet where there are silica-rich alkaline waters with which I could do the experiments to produce biomorphs. Thus far, without the help of Prometheus, I had not been able to do it so. On this Californian water source, next to the Ney stream, there is water at pH 12 with a concentration of silica of more than 4 grams per litre. If you put a solution or a particle of metal salt, then silica gardens grow. If you used a slightly diluted solution, then barium carbonate and mesocrystals of calcium carbonate grow.
There are many articles in the press commenting on this work. There is one that explains it very well: http://cen.acs.org/articles/95/i13/Geochemical-precipitates-fool-fossil-hunters.html.