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Thank you. and quote, Science Podcast to receive special offers. Welcome to the Science Podcast for August 19, 2016.

I'm Sarah Crespi.

In this week's show, Kelly Servic discusses a new problem in reproducibility,

mouse microbiomes.

And Jessica Bodie is here with a roundup of stories from our daily news site.

Now we have Jessica Bodie, an intern for our daily news site.

She's here to talk about some recent online stories.

First up, we have a story on the

beginning of the alphabet soup. DNA codes for RNA. RNA codes for proteins. That's how the

genetic code works these days. But in the past, way back about 4 billion years ago, things were

a little different, more like RNA does it all. Why is RNA likely

the first biomolecule, Jess? Yeah, so as we know, life is pretty much made possible by that

combination of RNA, DNA, and proteins today. But RNA also has characteristics of both DNA

and proteins.

So it stores information just like DNA does, but it can also act like a protein as well by speeding up chemical reactions.

And a lot of essential enzymes are also made up of RNA like ribosomes, which actually build proteins.

...