Science word of the day: Abiogenesis

Pronunciation: Ay-bye-oh-JEN'-ih-sis

What it means: Abiogenesis is the emergence of life from nonliving matter through chemical processes. Scientists still don't know exactly how abiogenesis happened on Earth. Theories range from lightning strikes that could have scrambled water, methane, ammonia and hydrogen into amino acids and sugars ‪—‬ the building blocks of life ‪—‬ to chemical reactions at deep-sea vents. Abiogenesis is not the same as spontaneous generation, which held that living organisms such as maggots formed directly from decaying matter. It was a compelling idea for anyone who had watched meat rot, but Louis Pasteur, inventor of pasteurization, disproved it in the 1860s by showing that microbes could only grow from preexisting microbes.

How to use it in a sentence: All life on Earth may owe itself to an incident of abiogenesis more than 3.7 billion years ago.

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