How Could Life Evolve From Cyanide?

How did life arise on Earth? It’s one of the greatest and most ancient mysteries in all of science — and the clues to solving it are all around us. Steven Strogatz speaks with the Nobel Prize-winning biologist Jack Szostak and Betül Kaçar, a paleogeneticist and astrobiologist, to explore our best understanding of how we all got here.

A new finding raises an old question: Where and when did life begin?

Frontiers A Proterozoic microbial origin of extant cyanide