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June 3, 2025—A spray of water may have sparked all life on Earth. Plus, the mind-bending quantum realm, and a subtle tweak to its genes makes bubonic plague more transmissible. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Scanning electron micrograph of Yersinia pestis on a flea. NIH/NAID/IMAGE.FR/BSIP/Universal Images Group via Getty Images | | Scientists sprayed water microdroplets into a gas mixture containing nitrogen, methane, carbon dioxide and ammonia (the same gases in primordial Earth's atmosphere). They discovered that the energy in the spray was enough to spark the synthesis of organic molecules from the gas mixture. When neutral water is sprayed, oppositely charged microdroplets of water form and release an electrical discharge. This burst of electricity has enough energy to excite, dissociate, or ionize surrounding neutral gas molecules, the researchers say.
Why this is interesting: No one knows exactly how life emerged on Earth around four billion years ago. In the 1950s, scientist Urey Miller showed in a landmark experiment that simulated lightning strikes could prompt the assembly of organic molecules inside a flask filled with Earth's earliest gases. But real lightning strikes infrequently—not electrifying the same place often enough to let prebiotic synthesis unfold: Single molecules called monomers would have needed a repetitive energizing process to give them time to link up in long molecular chains called polymers.
What the experts say: Places with spraying water (in crevices, or around rocks and boulders near water) would have made excellent spots for repeating energetic sparks. Whether in a pond, a lake or a geyser, "these molecules would have accumulated wherever there was wave action or waterfalls," says David Deamer, a biophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. | | Into the Quantum Realm In 2022 three scientists won the Nobel Prize in Physics for proving something astonishing: the universe is not locally real. In other words, particles don't have fixed properties until they are measured. Although it seems to counter everything we perceive, the discovery aligns with a prediction Albert Einstein and his colleagues made almost 100 years ago: Particles spookily influence one another, even across vast distances. Things exist and they also do not. Why this matters: Bizarre quantum dynamics underpin our view of reality: Time travels forward for us, but in the quantum world, it may flow in two directions. Gravity itself may follow quantum rules. Quantum mechanics supports the possibility of alternative universes, but even if they exist, we can't access them (and probably shouldn't anyway, even on our worst days). If many universes do exist, the stars and planets that were able to form in ours could be the best evidence for them. But even how matter exists in the first place is a mystery to physicists. The universe seems stable, but an unlikely shift in the Higgs field, a quantum field that pervades all of space, could trigger a bubble that passes through the universe, annihilating all matter. What the experts say: For corporeal creatures such as humans, grappling with a universe that might not be singular, time that moves in many directions, and matter that both does and does not exist can be mind-bending, to say the least. Two giants in early quantum theory, Werner Heisenberg and John Bell, speculated that because we perceive as we do, the mind, in a sense, defines quantum interactions. Its implications are cosmic, but the quantum realm is definitively a human one. | | - Kids are exposed to just as much misinformation and misleading content (like AI-generated video deepfakes) as are adults, and they need help sorting reliable information from rubbish, writes Evan Orticio, a cognitive scientist and Ph.D. candidate in the Kidd Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. "Children are born skeptics, but they need help translating it in a digital setting," he says. "By around three or four years old, children can choose their sources wisely, and trust people who are accurate, confident and informed. Encouragingly, this discernment may translate to digital informants like computers too." | 4 min read
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Einstein and others speculated about quantum physics more than 100 years ago. And today quantum strangeness is no longer confined to theory. Researchers are entangling objects large enough to see, quantum computers are on the cusp of solving problems no classical machine can touch, and speculative ideas such as vacuum decay and alternative realities are serious science. The quantum era has truly arrived. | | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | | |
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