The building blocks of life on Earth may have been fueled by tiny sparks hopping between water droplets. Four billion years ago, Earth was a lifeless world, but a dynamic one. Crashing waves ...

Life may have first emerged on Earth after crashing waterfalls or breaking waves sparked tiny “microlightning” discharges in water droplets, according to a new study. The research, published ...

By isolating solvent background and solute ... More information: Lixue Shi et al, Water structure and electric fields at the interface of oil droplets, Nature (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08702 ...

How? A new hypothesis suggests that tiny sparks of electricity, leaping between water droplets, could have jump-started the ...