RNA World’s Big Picture: Liquid Crystal Self-Assembly

Tuning into RNA world, an international team of scientists has found a mechanism that might explain how bits and pieces of RNA could have joined together to form long RNA sequences, creating the stuff of life, or rather, the stuff of life to come, after a lot of evolution. The trick is, the bits and pieces of RNA would have had to assemble on their own, without the benefit of any living organism’s chemistry.Not a problem, say the scientists. Think of prelife chemistry as a dance of pixels,