Waxing until | a giant was;
Thence are our kindred | come all together,--
So it is | they are savage forever."
"She licked the ice-blocks, which were salty; and the first day that she licked the blocks, there came forth from the blocks in the evening a man's hair; the second day, a man's head; the third day the whole man was there
For decades, those studying the origin of life have imagined that it emerged in balmy conditions from primordial soups, tropical ponds, even boiling volcanic vents. Miller and a few other scientists began to suspect that life began not in warmth but in ice—at temperatures that few living things can now survive. The very laws of chemistry may have favored ice, says Bada, now at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. “We’ve been arguing for a long time,†he says, “that cold conditions make much more sense, chemically, than warm conditions.â€
. Tests later confirmed Miller's and Bada’s hunch. Over a quarter-century, the frozen ammonia-cyanide blend had coalesced into the molecules of life: nucleobases, the building blocks of RNA and DNA, and amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. The vial’s contents would support a new account of how life began on Earth and would arouse both surprise and skepticism around the world.
http://discovermagazine.com/2008/feb/di ... lve-in-ice
I love stuff like this.
