Did lack of comet impacts help life evolve?

sea-maid submitted, created time 2 days 3 hours (www.newscientist.com)

IT SEEMS we got off lightly in the cosmic lottery. Deadly comet impacts may be much rarer in our solar system than in others nearby.

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Scientists develop new method to investigate origin of life

sea-maid submitted, created time 2 months 4 weeks (esciencenews.com)

Scientists at Penn State have developed a new computational method that they say will help them to understand how life began on Earth. The team's method has the potential to trace the evolutionary histories of proteins all the way back to either cells or viruses, thus settling the debate once and for all over which of these life forms came first. "We have just begun to tap the potential power of this method," said Randen Patterson, a Penn State assistant professor of biology and one of the project's leaders

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