(Inside Science) — Experts believe the building blocks of life first bumped into each other about 3.5 billion years ago. This serendipitous collision somehow helped form the first rudimentary cell — and the first life on Earth.
At least, that’s been the predominant theory. Now, a team of scientists from the University of Washington is challenging this idea in a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They propose that membranes might have been the key component that helped congregate the pieces needed to create the first cell.
