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You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Hey, shortwavers.

It's Emily Kwong here.

And John Hamilton.

With a story that kind of picks up where Regina and I left off in November.

So, John, do you remember the episode we did about hydrothermal vents and the origins of life?

Oh, well, could I forget the two of you were getting at this idea that maybe the building blocks for life, you know, nucleotides, amino acids, were created around those super hot vents on the ocean floor.

DNA and RNA, for example, are extremely vulnerable to, like, UV light.

So maybe they first form deep in the ocean where they'd be protected from those rays.

That's amazing.

I mean, sounds plausible to me.

Right? And it left me with so many questions.

Like, where did life go from there?

You know, what's the next chapter, the moment where

that molecular bath gave rise to discrete life forms, to single-celled organisms, prokaryotes,

and eventually to complex multicellular organisms like you and me, eukaryotes? And there's this one

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