New research suggests “microlightning” exchanges among water droplets in Earth’s early atmosphere may have sparked the ...

When chemistry graduate student Stanley Miller first heard University of Chicago professor and Nobel laureate Harold Urey's idea that organic compounds, such as amino acids, arose in a reducing ...

The origin of life on Earth stands as one of the great mysteries of science. Various answers have been proposed, all of which remain unverified. To find out if we are alone in the galaxy, we will need ...

Caption Miller-Urey experiments study the abiotic synthesis of organic compounds by creating an environment similar to that of the early earth. An electric discharge is applied to a mixture of ...

The process is similar to how lightning forms ... make all the organic molecules observed previously in the Miller-Urey experiment, and we propose that this is a new mechanism for the prebiotic ...