For your consideration .... I tuned into an interview today on "The Beat", a production of Seattle's KUOW 94.9 FM. Normally they talk to writers, musicians ... I once heard a talk with the guy who does the subtitles for the Seattle Opera. But today, they were recycling an interview from April with Dr. Robert Hazen, a Carnegie Institution research scientist and Clarence Robinson Professor of Earth Science at George Mason University. Dr. Hazen is also the author of Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origins. It's an interesting segment that discusses the emergence of life, Hazen's research into deep-sea origins of life on Earth, the interdisciplinary aspects of the search, the nature of scientists behind closed doors, Mars, and there's even a good joke about a religious cult. I offer the following link mostly as a resource for anyone interested; the link below is the one I pulled out of iTunes after launching the .m3u: http://www.kuow.org/MP3Low/MP3/Beat/Beat20070822.mp3 Skip forward to fourteen minutes into the show; the segment lasts about eighteen minutes. The interview strikes me coincidentally, although perhaps whoever decided to run the archived segment read the same bit I picked up from Wired.com: The Wired.com article points to an Institute of Physics press release by the title, "Physicists Discover Inorganic Dust With Lifelike Qualities", which provides the quotes for Keim's entry, and also to a paper from the New Journal of Physics, "From plasma crystals and helical structures towards inorganic living matter". The abstract is reproduced below: Anyway, it will take me a while to read through it, and even longer to understand it, but the whole thing seems rather quite cool. Both links brought to mind the question of how life arose from lifelessness. In Hazen's case, I'm sure of the connection. The NJP article, well, it seems to be yet another milepost on a long and arduous journey, but I could be wrong. At any rate, for your enlightenment, amusement, or, if such is the case, disgust.
