The Dawn of Life in a $5 Toaster Oven - Issue 27: Dark Matter
▻http://nautil.us/issue/27/dark-matter/the-dawn-of-life-in-a-5-toaster-oven
God might just as well have begun with a toaster oven. A few years ago at a yard sale, Nicholas Hud spotted a good candidate: A vintage General Electric model, chrome-plated with wood-grain panels, nestled in an old yellowed box, practically unused. The perfect appliance 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. Today the contraption sits atop a workbench in Hud’s laboratory at the Georgia (...)