LIFE may have begun not in the sea but in tiny water droplets drifting high
in the sky. Thrown up by ocean waves, these droplets could have provided just
the conditions needed for complex molecules to form.
This radical theory, proposed by an international team of researchers at the
Royal Meteorological Society’s millennium conference in Cambridge this week,
could explain long-standing mysteries about the origin of life, such as how
cells got their membranes and how simple organic molecules became concentrated
enough to join together to form large, complex ones.
The theory arose when Adrian Tuck of the National Oceanic…
