* Astronomy

Study: Adding UV light helps form "Missing G" of RNA building blocks

For scientists attempting to understand how the building blocks of RNA originated on Earth, guanine -- the G in the four-letter code of life -- has proven to be a particular challenge. While the other three bases of RNA -- adenine (A), cytosine (C) and uracil (U) -- could be created by heating a simple precursor compound in the presence of certain naturally occurring catalysts, guanine had not been observed as a product of the same reactions.
By adding ultraviolet light to a model prebiotic reaction, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Roma, "La Sapienza", have discovered a route by which the missing guanine could have been formed. They also found that the RNA bases may have been easier to form than previously thought -- suggesting that starting life on Earth might not have been so difficult after all.
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Contemporary Work On The Origin Of Life

Work on the origin of life is rapidly entering a phase of significant scientific progress.  I want to discuss at least my view of its contemporary status after a brief historical summary.
I begin with this: It is astonishing, but true, that molecular reproduction in the form of collectively autocatalytic sets of either DNA or RNA or peptides have been made. The most complex, created by Reza Ghadiri at Scripps and his former post-doctoral fellow, Gonen Askanazy, now at Ben Gurion University, consists in nine polypeptides, each 32 amino acids long, that mutually catalyse one another's formation from fragments of each of these nine polypeptides.  Critically, these results demonstrate conclusively that molecular reproduction need not be based on template replicating DNA, RNA.
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Scientists find water-ice and organic material on asteroid

Scientists have for the first time detected water-ice and organic compounds on an asteroid, a discovery which may offer insights into how life started on Earth.
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Title: The Origin of Life from Primordial Planets
Authors: Carl H. Gibson (Univ. Cal. San Diego), Rudolph E. Schild (Harvard), N. C. Wickramasinghe (Cardiff Univ.)

The origin of life and the origin of the universe represent two of the most important problems of science. Both are resolved by hydro-gravitational dynamics (HGD) cosmology (Gibson 1996, Schild 1996, Gibson 2009ab), which predicts frozen primordial hydrogen-helium gas planets in clumps as the dark matter of galaxies. Merging Earth-mass planets formed stars, moons and comets to incubate and cosmically seed the first life. Cometary panspermia (Hoyle and Wickramasinghe 1981, 1982; Wickramasinghe et al. 2009) occurs naturally by HGD mechanisms. Comets and moons are fragments from mergers of stardust covered frozen gas planets in their step-wise growth to star mass. Supernovae from stellar over-accretion of planets produce stardust (C, N, O, P etc.) chemical fertilizer. Planets collect this infected radioactive dust gravitationally, to provide liquid water domains in contact with life nutrients seeded with life prototypes. The first mutating, evolving, life from HGD likely occurred promptly, following the plasma to gas transition 300,000 years after the big bang when high densities of galaxies and a superabundance of hot primordial soup kitchens first overcame enormous odds against spontaneous creation (Wickramasinghe 2010, Joseph 2000). Images from optical, radio, and infrared space telescopes suggest life on Earth was neither first nor inevitable.

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