Rocks. Science. Life.

GCSEs 2026 are rapidly approaching! I'm currently working as a TA in a school in West London, and with our year 11s having their last day at school tomorrow (at the time of writing this) I'm all too aware of the prospect of revision and exams that looms over them. That being said, GCSEs are not all doom and gloom. They are an opportunity to show off everything you have learnt in the past 2 or 3 years, and also a last chance to do many subjects that you won't study beyond this

Now that I have graduated and lost the free access to journals, reading lists from my lectures, and general academic buzz and osmosis of knowledge that comes with being in a university building, I am finding that its much harder to stay up to date with the going on of the scientific world. Nonetheless, I think it's so so important to stay in the loop. Knowledge is power and just as you're always told to stay up to date with the political or social news of the world, staying u

Anyone that knows me, or has read any of this blog, knows that the origins of life on Earth, and the subsequent impacts for the potential for the origins of life on other planets, is somewhat of my Roman Empire. So naturally, when I came across an article on this study from the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge I was intrigued to know more. The paper, "A small polymerase ribozyme that can synthesise itself and its complimentary strand (Gianni et al., 2026)", w