Providing a perfect setting for life to replicate (Image: University of Delaware/JGI/DOE)

THE precursor of life may have learned how to copy itself thanks to simple convection at the bottom of the ocean. Lab experiments reveal how DNA replication could have occurred in tiny pores around undersea vents.

One of the initial steps towards life was the first molecule capable of copying itself. In the open ocean of early Earth, strands of DNA and loose nucleotides would have been too diluted for replication to occur. So how did they do it?

Inside many undersea hydrothermal vents, magnesium-rich rocks react with …