Science Focus
original post »Humans have created a huge number of myths to account for the presence of life on Earth. It's only recently, however, that researchers have been able to investigate how the conditions on a primordial Earth could have generated molecules critical to life, such as proteins and DNA.
We've made lots of progress when it comes to understanding the chemistry that can create things like the individual bases of RNA, and shown that long RNA molecules can catalyze a variety of chemical reactions. But there's still a gap between the two; specifically, researchers haven't identified conditions that would allow individual RNA bases to condense into long chains that could potentially be catalytic.
Now, researchers have found conditions that would favor the replication and presence of longer nucleic acid sequences. They turn out to be remarkably simple: heat dissipation across an open rock pore. This sort of environment would have likely been widespread in the hot early Earth due to the presence of porous volcanic rock.
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