Oil droplets that creep purposefully through their watery environment, metabolize fuel, sense their surroundings and perhaps even replicate — could these be precursors to life? That's the claim of a chemist with a controversial approach to modelling how Earth's first organisms scraped themselves together.
Theories about how life started range from fortuitous chemistry around hydrothermal vents on the sea floor to the delivery of precursor molecules from outer space. But there is little hope of finding geological evidence for this momentous event: Earth's crust is continuously being recycled, with the oldest known rocks dating to only 3.8 billion years ago. By that point, life was flourishing and relatively complex.
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