Life’s ‘basic building blocks’ found in asteroid samples

PARIS: Pristine samples of the asteroid Bennu transported to Earth contain the “basic building blocks” for life, shedding new light on the perennial question of how life began on our planet.

The revelation, in two studies published Wednesday, is the result of work on just 120 grams of material — about the weight of a banana — collected from Bennu by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft in…