Art and literature have often depicted the creation of life with big, dramatic moments — often involving electricity.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein got zapped into action. Michelangelo’s God (after six REALLY busy days) seemed to send an invisible but palpable spark into Adam’s extended finger, waking him into existence on the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling.
The same is true for one scientific theory of life’s creation on Earth.
The theory states that a lightning bolt struck the ocean, triggering a chemical chain reaction that transformed inorganic compounds into organic ones. That scenario, called the Miller-Urey hypothesis, arose from a 1952 experiment showing that a mixture of water and inorganic molecules could produce organic ones after electricity was applied to the mix.
Now, a new experiment demonstrates that life could have formed through much smaller and less dramatic electrochemical interactions, according to a paper in Science Advances.
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