This is the kind of article for which I used to subscribe to New Scientist. If only I had the time to read them every week... fascinating stuff.
Indeed... if they still published stuff like this on a regular basis, I'd still be a subscriber.
I think they do still publish stuff like that regularly, I just never find the time to read it.
As of a few years ago, they'd descended into cheap sensationalism -- not quite to the "Is your pet psychic?" level but they seemed to be headed in that direction, with no visible connection between an article's fluff factor and its scientific relevance. That's when I bailed on my print subscription.
I just want to give them points for having the answer to the question in the title be "Yeah, could be". It seems like with so much other science reporting out there, when it ends in a question mark, the answer is more like, "No, not likely. But the article isn't even really about [title], except in some tangential way!"
I subscribed for a while some time back, but I couldn't find an option for an online-only subscription and I started running out of space to put the dead tree versions, so I stopped. Do they have an online-only option?
How about giving the paper version away? (Just leave it in the commuter train or so, if you do not know someone who wants it.)
Presumably this is to some extent experimentally testable, if we can construct lab analogues of the conditions?
Geothermal vents like those described in the article are still around, could the same processes be observed there? Or have microbes (re)colonised them thoroughly?
The article says surrounding chemical conditions are quite different.
Yes, and the article also says, that simulations support the hypothesis so far.
This is a huge step forward if true - as far as I know, how a complex molecule like DNA initially evolved has been one of the great unanswered questions in biology for quite some time.
:) I know someone who got an tattoo of the primordial soup RNA world hypothesis, covering her entire arm. People told her that it could be wrong before she got the tattoo...
I can see the creationists already: where is the transitional form between rock and human?
Give them a mirror.
Their response to this news will be: "Evolutionists have realized that life could not have naturally started on Earth. So their 'logical' explanation is that it started somewhere else! Ha ha! Stupid evolutionists. Lack of evidence is not evidence!"