Molecular Infertility: New Long Story Short on RNA Replication and Life’s Origin

atheists, biology, boiling water, cancer, cellular replication, Charles Darwin, enzymes, Evolution, Evolution News, Intelligent Design, Long Story Short, magnesium, metabolism, mutations, nucleotide monomers, nucleotides, origin of life, replication, Richard Dawkins, RNA, RNA world, RNA-Peptide World, RNAse E, self-replicators, Spiegelman’s Monster, Tomonori Totani
You might think that such severe impediments to prebiotic RNA formation would be enough to discourage fanciful proposals of RNA replication. Source
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An Astronomer Considers the Origin of Life, with Sobering Results

abiogenesis, astronomers, biologists, biology, calculation, Chemistry, Drake equation, Erlenmeyer flask, Evolution, Fischer Scientific, inflation, inflationary universe, metaphysics, meteorites, monomers, Nature (journal), nucleotides, origin of life, Physics, Earth & Space, reagents, RNA molecules, RNA world, silver atom, snowflakes, Tomonori Totani, tooth fairy, universe, University of Tokyo
Live Science reports: Is life a gamble? Scientist models universe to find out Scientists suspect that the complex life that slithers and crawls through every nook and cranny on Earth emerged from a random shuffling of non-living matter that ultimately spit out the building blocks of life. Even so, the details to support the idea are lacking. But researchers recently got creative in figuring out the probability of life actually emerging spontaneously from such inorganic matter — a process called abiogenesis. In the study, Tomonori Totani, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Tokyo, modeled the microscopic world of molecules across the epic scale of the entire universe to see if abiogenesis is a likely candidate for the origin of life. He was essentially looking at whether there were…
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