Data from instruments flown on airplanes during last year’s Leonid meteor shower show that the seeds of life, long suspected to exist in comet dust, could have survived a fiery passage from space to Earth’s ancient atmosphere. A range of findings, reported by an international team of NASA-led scientists, provide support for panspermia, which holds that life on Earth did not spring up spontaneously out of some primordial soup, but was instead seeded from space.