Life on Earth began up to 4.5 billion years ago as carbon-rich meteors bombarded the planet and leached the essential elements into “warm little ponds”, according to new research. It was in this nutrient-rich broth that the first self-replicating molecules, with the first genetic code for life, were born.

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Precise “chemical surgery” has been performed on human embryos to remove disease in a world first, Chinese researchers have told the BBC.

The team at Sun Yat-sen University used a technique called base editing to correct a single error out of the three billion “letters” of our genetic code. They altered lab-made embryos to remove the disease beta-thalassemia. The embryos were not implanted.

Image copyright: THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY, MCKENZIE ARCHIVE

What would you put on your list of the great scientific breakthroughs of the 20th Century? General relativity? Quantum mechanics? Something to do with genetics, perhaps?

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Three scientists who unravelled how our bodies tell time have won the 2017 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine. The body clock – or circadian rhythm – is the reason we want to sleep at night, but it also drives huge changes in behaviour and body function. The US scientists Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael Young will share the prize.

When Slayer meets lukewarmer: We meet by chance in the atrium of a luxury hotel – and why not, as nowadays we’re flush with all the cash we Climate Skeptics are paid by Big Oil.

New Antarctic study shows  hydrogen chloride and sulphur dioxide emitted by Erebus volcano are a significant factor in ozone depletion.  Erebus volcanic gases reach the ozone layer via cyclones and the polar vortex.  High Erebus volcanic activity in the early 1980s resulted in the ozone hole area increase.

Are the hundreds of polar bears spending the summer on Wrangel Island in the Chukchi Sea starving and desperate for any scrap of food? Hardly!

Nasa’s Kepler space observatory has found three new exoplanets orbiting a star close to our solar system. The newly-discovered entities were found orbiting a K-type of dwarf star called GJ 9827, located some 100 light years away from Earth and have been classified as ‘super-Earth’ planetary bodies.

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Humans are used to being outdone by computers when it comes to recalling facts, but they still have the upper hand in an argument. For now. It has long been the case that machines can beat us in games of strategy like chess.

The amount of Arctic summer melt is down nearly 10% over the past decade, with 2017 being the lowest.

Confidence is rising in two key aspects of healthy climate scepticism. First, climate models have run “hot” and been wrong in predicting the speed and extent of warming. Second, the extended slowdown in the rate of warming since the turn of the century was real.  —Graham Lloyd, The Australian, 23 September 2017

On Twitter, physical scientist Ned Nikolov informs us of a 2015 paper that “finds NO trend in global Tropical Cyclone Activity between the decade 1965-1974 and the present. Hence, warming has NOT affected hurricane activity for the past 45 yrs!”

Satellites show that the troposphere has not warmed since 1997. The warming reported by NASA (red line below) has nothing to do with reality.

The recent spate of hurricanes has inevitably attracted attention and spawned wildly inaccurate headlines, such as “a 1000 year event”, “the most powerful Atlantic storm on record”, “storm of the century”, and even “most deadly storm in history”.