Did Life On Earth Come From a Poison Meteor?
Cyanide isn’t just the last resort for the captured spies of Hollywood film. It’s also a crucial component of the early chemistry of life. And now, new research finds that cyanide might have ridden to Earth on meteorites. Samples of a particular group of primitive meteorites — including a large one that fell near Murchison, Australia, in 1969 — all contain cyanide, bound in a stable configuration with iron and carbon monoxide. These same sorts of structures are found in enzymes called hydrogenases in modern bacteria and archaea, which could suggest that early life either borrowed from meteorites or that … Read more