I'll try to fit that in.

Ooooo - I just read up on the most recent work on the origin of life, especially Nick Lane and co's theories about deep sea alkaline vents. It's VERY EXCITING - for the first time, imho, we have some empirical evidence from a real-world setting of a route from a non-living chemical environment to life (as opposed to a lot of theoretical conjectures and simplistic test-tube experiments). Can't find a link to the most up to date developments, but here is a summary of the breakthrough paper from Nature in 2012 .  http://www.nature.com/news/how-life-emerged-from-deep-sea-rocks-1.12109