This is Scientific Americans' 60-Second Science. I am Sarah Vitac.

The question of how life came to be has captivated humans for millennia. The prevailing theory

now is that on a highly volatile early earth, lightning struck mineral-rich waters, and

that the energy from lightning strikes turned those minerals into the building blocks of life.

It compounds like amino acids, leaving behind something we often refer to as the primordial

soup. The wide acceptance of this theory is in large part due to the very famous Miller-Yuri

experiment. You surely encountered this in a science textbook at some point, but to refresh

your memory, in 1952, Stanley Miller and Harold Yuri simulated the conditions of early earth

by sealing water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen in a glass flask. Then, they applied electrical

sparks to the mixture. Miraculously, amino acids came into existence amid the roiling mixture.

It was a big deal. But recently, a team of researchers realized that, much like the first

primordial soup, sitting in a bowl of earth, the lab experiments container played an underappreciated

role. That perhaps, it was also critical to the creation of organic building blocks inside

their laboratory life's soup. I talked to someone from the team.

I am Rafele Saladino from the University of Tusha in Italy.

Then, much like today, when a researcher goes to start an experiment, often one of the

first things they do is reach for their glassware. Well, today, actually, we use a lot of plastic

as well. But, 20 years ago, in the lab, only glass contained because, in the mind of the

researcher, glass is in there. He said inert, meaning that it doesn't react with the chemicals

you put inside it. But, in reality, that is not necessarily always the case. Most of the time glass

is pretty inert. When you're baking with pyrex, which is made of burcilicic glass, the same type

of glass most labware is made out of, the cookware isn't going into your brownies. But when you're

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