Life’s alphabet on asteroid Ryugu

2:41>> [music] >> So today we are going to start off with my favorite subject, aliens, as many of you longtime listeners know. Uh but what's interesting about this is the recipe for life may not be uniquely terrestrial. And we found all five letters of the genetic code floating around in deep space with our first astrobiology story. Yeah. Um, this was super interesting to me because the Japanese space agency, JAXA, put out this paper showing that all five of the nucleotides that we know and love here

3:21on Earth with all of life, there's four in DNA, A, T, G, and C. And then there's one that RNA uses. It uses the U uricil instead of thamine that's used in DNA. They found all five on an asteroid. This isn't the first time that this has happened, but the fact that it's happened over and over is, I think, a very big deal. And um it's it's hugely