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

Mist and microlightning
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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.”

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Of course, he said yes to coming back to the series, which eventually required him to live in Italy for a few months for filming.
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During production, White revealed to Gries that Greg is “very sinister.” That became rather irrefutable by the season’s climax, which saw Tanya’s demise orchestrated by her now-husband.

Come Season 3, Gries had to rewrite Greg’s backstory again, this time drawing from some unlikely sources for inspiration, like HBO docuseries “The Jinx,” about late convicted killer Robert Durst, and the case involving the man who came to be known as the Tinder Swindler.

Gries said he was struck by Durst’s “kind of seemingly even keel personality,” which served as a model for where Greg was headed, someone “who doesn’t really show a great deal of emotion, doesn’t seem to get too angry, just gets a little bit irritated and is dangerous.”

“There’s a bridled rage underneath. And those kind of people I find – at least with respect to Gary, Greg, Gary – fascinating,” he said.

And yet, while searching for an empathetic way back to portraying his character, Gries kept wondering if there was anything still redeeming about Greg.
An important “wake up moment” came during a decisive conversation he had with White just before filming in Thailand, in which the show’s creator said of Greg, in no uncertain terms: “He’s a psychopath.”

“And that was it. It was like, ‘back to the drawing board.’ And it really did help me,” Gries said.

The penultimate episode of the series will air on Sunday, an evening that thanks to “Lotus” and other shows has again become a night of appointment viewing amid a general move away from binge watching. Gries said he appreciates the shift.

“We’re a society that in a weird way doesn’t understand the beauty of waiting. The beauty of the space between the notes,” he shared. “If I binged (‘White Lotus’ I’d feel like I just ate too many chocolates. It just wouldn’t be the same. You need to process this.”

“The White Lotus” airs Sundays at 9 p.m. EDT on HBO, with the episode available to stream on Max. HBO and Max, like CNN, are owned by the same parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery.

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