EARLY microbes may have used lightning to cook their dinner.
When lightning strikes sand or sediment, it can fuse the particles together. A new analysis of these glassy remnants, or fulgurites, suggests that lightning fries the nutrient phosphorus into a more digestible form.
Most phosphorus on Earth exists as oxidised phosphate, but many microbes prefer a rarer, partially oxidised phosphorus – phosphite. Matthew Pasek and Kristin Block of the University of Arizona in Tucson used an MRI scanner on 10 and found that five contained phosphite.
They suggest the high energy of a lightning strike strips an oxygen atom from…
