The worst news you will hear today (where are they?)
Tremendous progress in the field of prebiotic chemistry has shown how simple compounds available on ancient Earth could have given rise to the molecular building blocks of life1. The current challenge is to work out how these building blocks could have assembled into functional polymers, such as peptides and nucleic acids, in the absence of biological systems. Prebiotic peptide assembly from amino acids is particularly difficult to establish, given that the intricate biological machinery used today to synthesize peptides obscures the origins of the process. Writing in Nature, Singh et al.2 report chemistry that could plausibly have facilitated a key step of peptide synthesis during the prebiotic era.
Here is the link. Here is WaPo coverage.