Scientists Solved the 150 Year-Old Mystery of Why Most of Your Molecules Are Right-Handed

Scientists Found the Secret of Life’s Direction wildpixel - Getty Images (wildpixel - Getty Images) Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: Chirality is a property that makes it impossible to superimpose an object perfectly on its mirror image, and chiral molecules are known as enantiomers. Enantiomers that favor one “hand” or the other tend to dominate in the ingredients of life, but why that’s so has largely remained a mystery. Now, scientists think that the spin of electrons inside a molecule makes the right- or left-handed version more efficient, which may have impacted the formation of RNA billions of years ago.

Scientists Solved the 150 Year-Old Mystery of Why Most of Your Molecules Are Right-Handed. Hold your hands out in front of you, both palms facing the same way. For most people, it would be safe to say that your hands are pretty good mirror images of each other—identical, but flipped over a central vertical axis. Now, move your hands together, without flipping them, so that one rests on top of the other. While your middle three fingers might line up pretty well, your pinkies and thumbs are not going to have anything to perfectly map to. Even though your hands are mirror images of each other, when you superimpose them one over the other, they don’t perfectly line up. This property is called chirality, and in addition to making it possible for you to make weird-looking shadow puppets, it’s often observed in quantum physics. Specifically, chi...