#Microlightning

[thelovebudllc]

'Microlightning' Between Water Droplets May Have Sparked Life, Research Finds

Waves crashing against the rocks sprays water into the air at a beach in Greece. a_Taiga / iStock / Getty Images Plus Why you can trust us Founded in 2005 as an Ohio-based environmental newspaper, EcoWatch is a digital platform dedicated to publishing quality, science-based content on environmental issues, causes, and solutions. Stanford University researchers have discovered that small bursts…

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CNN 3/29/2025

ScienceLife• 5 min read

Scientists redid an experiment that showed how life on Earth could have started. They found a new possibility

By Mindy Weisberger, CNN

Updated: 8:53 AM EDT, Fri March 28, 2025

Source: CNN

“It’s alive! IT’S ALIVE!”

In the 1931 movie “Frankenstein,” Dr. Henry Frankenstein howling his triumph was an electrifying moment in more ways than one. As massive bolts of lightning and energy crackled, Frankenstein’s monster stirred on a laboratory table, its corpse brought to life by the power of electricity.

Electrical energy may also have sparked the beginnings of life on Earth billions of years ago, though with a bit less scenery-chewing than that classic film scene.

Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, and the oldest direct fossil evidence of ancient life — stromatolites, or microscopic organisms preserved in layers known as microbial mats — is about 3.5 billion years old. However, some scientists suspect life originated even earlier, emerging from accumulated organic molecules in primitive bodies of water, a mixture sometimes referred to as primordial soup.

But where did that organic material come from in the first place? Researchers decades ago proposed that lightning caused chemical reactions in ancient Earth’s oceans and spontaneously produced the organic molecules.

Now, new research published March 14 in the journal Science Advances suggests that fizzes of barely visible “microlightning,” generated between charged droplets of water mist, could have been potent enough to cook up amino acids from inorganic material. Amino acids — organic molecules that combine to form proteins — are life’s most basic building blocks and would have been the first step toward the evolution of life.

“It’s recognized that an energetic catalyst was almost certainly required to facilitate some of the reactions on early Earth that led to the origin of life,” said astrobiologist and geobiologist Dr. Amy J. Williams, an associate professor in the department of geosciences at the University of Florida. For animo acids to form, they need nitrogen atoms that can bond with carbon. Freeing up atoms from nitrogen gas requires severing powerful molecular bonds and takes an enormous amount of energy, according to Williams, who was not involved in the research.

“Lightning, or in this case, microlightning, has the energy to break molecular bonds and therefore facilitate the generation of new molecules that are critical to the origin of life on Earth,” Williams told CNN in an email.

Mist and microlightning

To recreate a scenario that may have produced Earth’s first organic molecules, researchers built upon experiments from 1953 when American chemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey concocted a gas mixture mimicking the atmosphere of ancient Earth. Miller and Urey combined ammonia (NH3), methane (CH4), hydrogen (H2) and water, enclosed their “atmosphere” inside a glass sphere and jolted it with electricity, producing simple amino acids containing carbon and nitrogen. The Miller-Urey experiment, as it is now known, supported the scientific theory of abiogenesis: that life could emerge from nonliving molecules.

For the new study, scientists revisited the 1953 experiments but directed their attention toward electrical activity on a smaller scale, said senior study author Dr. Richard Zare, the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor of Natural Science and professor of chemistry at Stanford University in California. Zare and his colleagues looked at electricity exchange between charged water droplets measuring between 1 micron and 20 microns in diameter. (The width of a human hair is 100 microns.)

“The big droplets are positively charged. The little droplets are negatively charged,” Zare told CNN. “When droplets that have opposite charges are close together, electrons can jump from the negatively charged droplet to the positively charged droplet.”

The researchers mixed ammonia, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen in a glass bulb, then sprayed the gases with water mist, using a high-speed camera to capture faint flashes of microlightning in the vapor. When they examined the bulb’s contents, they found organic molecules with carbon-nitrogen bonds. These included the amino acid glycine and uracil, a nucleotide base in RNA.

“We discovered no new chemistry; we have actually reproduced all the chemistry that Miller and Urey did in 1953,” Zare said. Nor did the team discover new physics, he added — the experiments were based on known principles of electrostatics.

“What we have done, for the first time, is we have seen that little droplets, when they’re formed from water, actually emit light and get this spark,” Zare said. “That’s new. And that spark causes all types of chemical transformations.”

Water and life

Lightning is a dramatic display of electrical power, but it is also sporadic and unpredictable. Even on a volatile Earth billions of years ago, lightning may have been too infrequent to produce amino acids in quantities sufficient for life — a fact that has cast doubt on such theories in the past, Zare said.

Water spray, however, would have been more common than lightning. A more likely scenario is that mist-generated microlightning constantly zapped amino acids into existence from pools and puddles, where the molecules could accumulate and form more complex molecules, eventually leading to the evolution of life.

“Microdischarges between obviously charged water microdroplets make all the organic molecules observed previously in the Miller-Urey experiment,” Zare said. “We propose that this is a new mechanism for the prebiotic synthesis of molecules that constitute the building blocks of life.”

However, even with the new findings about microlightning, questions remain about life’s origins, he added. While some scientists support the notion of electrically charged beginnings for life’s earliest building blocks, an alternative abiogenesis hypothesis proposes that Earth’s first amino acids were cooked up around hydrothermal vents on the seafloor, produced by a combination of seawater, hydrogen-rich fluids and extreme pressure.

Yet another hypothesis suggests that organic molecules didn’t originate on Earth at all. Rather, they formed in space and were carried here by comets or fragments of asteroids, a process known as panspermia.

“We still don’t know the answer to this question,” Zare said. “But I think we’re closer to understanding something more about what could have happened.”

Though the details of life’s origins on Earth may never be fully explained, “this study provides another avenue for the formation of molecules crucial to the origin of life,” Williams said. “Water is a ubiquitous aspect of our world, giving rise to the moniker ‘Blue Marble’ to describe the Earth from space. Perhaps the falling of water, the most crucial element that sustains us, also played a greater role in the origin of life on Earth than we previously recognized.”

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Microlightning in water droplets may have sparked life on Earth

Life may not have begun with a dramatic lightning strike into the ocean but from many smaller “microlightning” exchanges among water droplets from crashing waterfalls or breaking waves.

New research from Stanford University shows that water sprayed into a mixture of gases thought to be present in Earth’s early atmosphere can lead to the formation of organic molecules with carbon-nitrogen bonds, including uracil, one of the components of DNA and RNA.

The study, published in the journal Science Advances, adds evidence – and a new angle – to the much-disputed Miller-Urey hypothesis, which argues that life on the planet started from a lightning strike. That theory is based on a 1952 experiment showing that organic compounds could form with application of electricity to a mixture of water and inorganic gases.

In the current study, the researchers found that water spray, which produces small electrical charges, could do that work all by itself, no added electricity necessary.

“Microelectric discharges between oppositely charged water microdroplets make all the organic molecules observed previously in the Miller-Urey experiment, and we propose that this is a new mechanism for the prebiotic synthesis of molecules that constitute the building blocks of life,” said senior author Richard Zare, the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor of Natural Science and professor of chemistry in Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences.

Microlightning’s power and potential

For a couple billion years after its formation, Earth is believed to have had a swirl of chemicals but almost no organic molecules with carbon-nitrogen bonds, which are essential for proteins, enzymes, nucleic acids, chlorophyll, and other compounds that make up living things today.

How these biological components came about has long puzzled scientists, and the Miller-Urey experiment provided one possible explanation: that lightning striking into the ocean and interacting with early planet gases like methane, ammonia, and hydrogen could create these organic molecules. Critics of that theory have pointed out that lightning is too infrequent and the ocean too large and dispersed for this to be a realistic cause.

Zare, along with postdoctoral scholars Yifan Meng and Yu Xia, and graduate student Jinheng Xu, propose another possibility with this research. The team first investigated how droplets of water developed different charges when divided by a spray or splash. They found that larger droplets often carried positive charges, while smaller ones were negative. When the oppositely charged droplets came close to each other, sparks jumped between them. Zare calls this “microlightning,” since the process is related to the way energy is built up and discharged as lightning in clouds. The researchers used high-speed cameras to document the flashes of light, which are hard to detect with the human eye.

Even though the tiny flashes of microlightning may be hard to see, they still carry a lot of energy. The researchers demonstrated that power by sending sprays of room temperature water into a gas mixture containing nitrogen, methane, carbon dioxide, and ammonia gases, which are all thought to be present on early Earth. This resulted in the formation of organic molecules with carbon-nitrogen bonds including hydrogen cyanide, the amino acid glycine, and uracil.

The researchers argue that these findings indicate that it was not necessarily lightning strikes, but the tiny sparks made by crashing waves or waterfalls that jump-started life on this planet.

“On early Earth, there were water sprays all over the place – into crevices or against rocks, and they can accumulate and create this chemical reaction,” Zare said. “I think this overcomes many of the problems people have with the Miller-Urey hypothesis.”

Zare’s research team focuses on investigating the potential power of small bits of water, including how water vapor may help produce ammonia, a key ingredient in fertilizer, and how water droplets spontaneously produce hydrogen peroxide.

“We usually think of water as so benign, but when it’s divided in the form of little droplets, water is highly reactive,” he said.

[ericvanderburg]

Did Life on Earth Come from 'Microlightning' Between Charged Water Droplets?

http://i.securitythinkingcap.com/TJqxxJ

[rapalixi]

What gave life on Earth its spark? Scientists recreating a decades-old experiment offer a new clue | CNN

[levysoft]

L’acqua è una delle sostanze fondamentali per la vita sulla Terra, ma un recente studio condotto da Yifan Meng, Yu Xia, Jinheng Xu e Richard N. Zare della Stanford University ha rivelato un fenomeno sorprendente: quando l’acqua viene spruzzata, le sue minuscole gocce possono generare scariche elettriche luminose, simili a fulmini in miniatura. Questo fenomeno, che gli scienziati hanno denominato “microlightning” (microlampi), potrebbe aver avuto un ruolo chiave nella formazione delle prime molecole organiche, fornendo un nuovo scenario sulle origini della vita.

Un Fulmine in Ogni Goccia

Sappiamo che l’acqua pura è un cattivo conduttore di elettricità, ma quando viene dispersa in goccioline microscopiche, la situazione cambia. Già nel XIX secolo, il fisico William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) aveva dimostrato che l’acqua in caduta libera poteva generare cariche elettriche, un fenomeno osservabile nei temporali, dove le collisioni tra particelle d’acqua e ghiaccio portano alla formazione di fulmini.

Nel loro studio, Meng, Xia, Xu e Zare hanno scoperto che, quando si spruzza acqua nell’aria, le goccioline si caricano elettricamente: quelle più piccole tendono ad avere una carica negativa, mentre quelle più grandi risultano positive. Quando le gocce opposte si avvicinano abbastanza, si verifica un piccolo lampo di luce causato da una scarica elettrica.

Energia Senza Batterie

Ciò che rende straordinario questo fenomeno è che la luminescenza si manifesta senza bisogno di una tensione elettrica esterna. Gli esperimenti condotti presso Stanford University hanno mostrato che la separazione delle cariche nelle gocce d’acqua è sufficiente a creare un campo elettrico così intenso da eccitare, dissociare o persino ionizzare le molecole di gas circostanti. In pratica, queste scariche hanno energia sufficiente per innescare reazioni chimiche nell’aria intorno alle microgocce d’acqua.

Per verificare l’emissione di luce, i ricercatori hanno costruito un dispositivo in grado di levitare singole gocce d’acqua utilizzando onde sonore. Quando la distanza tra le gocce diminuiva, le loro cariche opposte generavano scintille luminose, catturate da una telecamera ad alta velocità e da sensori di fotoni.

Un Nuovo Percorso per la Chimica della Vita

Uno degli aspetti più affascinanti dello studio riguarda la possibile connessione tra questi microlampi e la formazione delle prime molecole organiche sulla Terra primordiale. Meng e colleghi hanno ricreato un ambiente simile a quello che si presume esistesse miliardi di anni fa, spruzzando microgocce d’acqua in un’atmosfera contenente azoto (N₂), metano (CH₄), anidride carbonica (CO₂) e ammoniaca (NH₃).

Il risultato? La formazione di molecole contenenti legami carbonio-azoto (C–N), tra cui acido cianidrico (HCN), glicina (NH₂CH₂COOH) – un amminoacido essenziale – e persino uracile (C₄H₄N₂O₂), una delle basi azotate dell’RNA. Questo scenario richiama da vicino il celebre esperimento di Miller-Urey del 1953, in cui una scarica elettrica in un’atmosfera primitiva portò alla sintesi di amminoacidi.

Il Mare, Una Centrale Chimica Naturale?

Se questi microlampi si verificano con l’acqua nebulizzata, è plausibile che fenomeni simili avvengano in natura in ambienti ricchi di spruzzi d’acqua, come cascate, onde oceaniche o tempeste. La continua produzione di scariche elettriche potrebbe aver favorito la sintesi di molecole organiche per miliardi di anni, fornendo una fonte di energia costante per le reazioni chimiche necessarie all’evoluzione della vita.

Conclusioni

Lo studio condotto da Meng, Xia, Xu e Zare offre una nuova prospettiva sulla chimica atmosferica e sulle origini della vita. Se i fulmini sono eventi sporadici e imprevedibili, la nebulizzazione dell’acqua è un fenomeno onnipresente sulla Terra. Questo suggerisce che l’energia necessaria per la formazione delle prime molecole organiche potrebbe essere stata disponibile in modo più diffuso di quanto si pensasse finora.

Fonte: ScienceAdvances