It sounds odd, but cyanide may have been a key ingredient in the origin of life on early Earth, according to a study. Researchers found that a mixture of cyanide and copper, when irradiated with ultraviolet (UV) light, could have produced simple sugars that formed the building blocks of life on our planet. "One story for the origin of life is what we call the RNA world," said Zoe Todd from the Harvard University in the US.

"In order to make something like an RNA nucleotide, you need these sugars. This shows that process was plausible on the early Earth," said Todd, researcher in the study published in the journal Royal Society of Chemistry. A key step in showing that the hypothesis was plausible came in 2012, when scientists in the UK demonstrated that the system could produce simple sugars such as glycolaldehyde and glyceraldehyde.