EARLY microbes may have used lightning to cook their dinner.
When lightning strikes sand or sediment, it can fuse the particles together. A new analysis of these glassy remnants, or fulgurites, suggests that lightning fries the nutrient phosphorus into a more digestible form.
Most phosphorus on Earth exists as oxidised phosphate, but many microbes prefer a rarer, partially oxidised phosphorus – phosphite. Matthew Pasek and Kristin Block of the University of Arizona in Tucson used an MRI scanner on 10 fulgurites and found that five contained phosphite.
They suggest the high energy of a lightning strike strips an oxygen atom from…
