It's among the most fundamental of questions: What are the origins of life on Earth? A new experiment simulating conditions in deep space reveals that the complex building blocks of life could have been created on icy interplanetary dust and then carried to Earth, jump-starting life here. Chemists from the University of California - Berkeley and the University of Hawaii - Manoa showed that conditions in space are capable of creating complex dipeptides – linked pairs of amino acids – that are essential building blocks shared by all living things. The discovery opens the door to the possibility that these molecules were brought to Earth aboard comets or meteorites, catalyzing the formation of the proteins, enzymes, and sugars that are necessary for life.