D I A M O N D S

Frozen with fear

Hydrogenated diamonds are just diamonds with an outer coating of hydrogen atoms, but they are not something you'll find in your local jewelry shop. In fact, the only hydrogenated diamonds currently known are all made in the lab.

"In nature, diamond hydrogenation is likely to occur in or in the vicinity of volcanoes known to emit a variety of hot gases including hydrogen," Sommer said. The early Earth had so much volcanic activity that he thinks it is highly probable that hydrogenated diamonds existed back then.

Sommer and his collaborators previously showed that hydrogenated diamond is very hydrophobic, or "water fearing" — meaning it pushes water away. When hydrogenated diamond is wetted, the water molecules line up on the surface as if they were frozen into a crystal layer (an analogy might be static electricity making all the hairs on your head point out).

Surprisingly, these crystal water layers do not disappear when the hydrogenated diamond is fully immersed in water. Because this is the only natural material known to exhibit this behavior, Sommer's team proposes that small organic molecules in the primordial soup landed on hydrogenated diamond and were helped by its robust crystal water layers into linking together to form proteins and DNA.

Support for this idea comes from a recent study that found that certain nucleobases (the building blocks of DNA and RNA) form an organized pattern on the surface of graphite, which is chemically similar to diamond.

Hydrogenated diamond should be a better organizing platform than graphite, Sommer said. This is because the crystal layers that form on it are not static; they change with temperature and light intensity. The resulting fluctuations could have helped drive the development of novel molecules in the primordial soup.