Life on earth may have had an icy start

“Cracks in ice could have served as a safe environment — much like a cell — for the first life on Earth to replicate and evolve. A new study adds plausibility to the ‘RNA World’ hypothesis that argues life began with a single stranded molecule capable of self-replication. “I always thought that the idea of an RNA world was exciting, but that RNA was a perverse choice of primordial material because it was hard to imagine chemical conditions under which they could survive on the early earth,” said biologist Philipp Holliger of MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in the United Kingdom, who led a study in Nature Communications Sept. 21.” More…