Just like oil and water, certain substances in chemistry simply do not mix. At least this was our understanding. It turns out that some of these substances do mix under certain conditions, a discovery that might have a major impact on what we expect to discover on Saturn’s moon Titan and what the conditions on the primordial Earth might have been like before the emergence of life. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

The crucial chemistry discovery in this work is the ability of polar and non-polar substances to mix under very cold conditions. Polar substances have molecules where the electric charge is not equally distributed, so they have a positive side and a negative side. In non-polar substances, the charge is instead

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