This course will cover the main theories about the origins life, including the formation of basic biological molecules.

We will be exploring the science behind making ice cream and learning about the different ways it is made before trying out some experiments of our own. Due to time constraints we will be using liquid nitrogen to freeze the ice cream. Come hungry!

All of the complex and intricately connected components of a cell - like lipids providing compartments, proteins carrying out cellular operations, and DNA storing genetic information - arise through simple chemistry. In this course, we'll go back billions of years to see how the earliest versions of life-like things could have emerged from nothing but the available chemicals and environments of a young Earth. We'll survey basic biochemical molecules and consider how they might have been made and used by the first cell, the ancestor to all living things.