Topic
Research into how Earth's biology began roughly four billion years ago, including the status of the last universal common ancestor.
Texas A&M researchers report in PNAS that thymine, compared with uracil, tends to direct UV damage into a more reversible form. That gives a candidate reason DNA took up the more UV-prone base, and the authors word it as a possibility.
Reality
UNSW researchers found that ribose raised the boron released from an Indian hydrothermal crust by about 60%, ScienceAlert reported. The team proposes that this boron in turn keeps ribose from degrading to tar, a link the reported experiments do not directly measure.
Reality
Heinrich Heine University Dusseldorf biologists found that vent palladium uses phosphite to turn AMP into ADP, doing the job of a microbial enzyme. That gives the vent-origin theory an enzyme-free route to phosphate energy, though the reaction stops at ADP, one step short of ATP.
Reality
Ribose, the fragile RNA sugar found in meteorites, helped borate minerals dissolve and stay dissolved in lab tests reported in Scientific Reports. Borate shields ribose from breakdown, so the sugar may have helped keep its own protector in solution on early Earth.
Reality
Bill Martin's group argues in Science Advances that the last universal common ancestor was vent chemistry, not a cell, and that bacteria and archaea became alive separately.
Reality