From Nautilus, by Johnny Bontemps, The Dawn of Life in a $5 Toaster Oven:
“… A vintage General Electric model… for cooking up the chemical precursors of life, he thought. He bought it for $5.
At home in his basement, with the help of his college-age son, he cut a rectangular hole in the oven’s backside, through which an automated sliding table (recycled from an old document scanner) could move a tray of experiments in and out. He then attached a syringe pump to some inkjet printer parts, and rigged the system to periodically drip water onto the tray … in Hud’s laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he directs the Center for Chemical Evolution, a multi-university consortium funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation. …
It simulates the cycles of cool and hot, and wet and dry, that Hud suspects jump-started this evolutionary process, millions of years before the first cellular life forms emerged…
Evolution requires two forces: variation and selection… Polymers can form, break down, and form again with new configurations. That’s variation. … They might fold into shapes that prevent them from breaking apart too quickly, for instance. That’s selection. …
The engine for life and evolution could then be, as Hud says, as simple as “a planet spinning in front of a star…” read full story