It’s one of life’s most profound and puzzling mysteries: how on earth did life get started from simple, inanimate matter?
We’ve known for some time that it must have been sparked by a chemical reaction, but it’s never been clear what triggered it, and from where the energy required for those reactions was drawn.
Now, researchers at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU), Germany, say they’ve found the smoking gun. The secret ingredient that fuelled the origins of life is the modern era’s cleanest, greenest energy carrier: hydrogen gas (H2).