{"id":600,"date":"2016-06-30T14:51:08","date_gmt":"2016-06-30T14:51:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/genotopia.peachpuff-wolverine-566518.hostingersite.com\/?p=600"},"modified":"2016-06-30T14:51:08","modified_gmt":"2016-06-30T14:51:08","slug":"wait-theres-a-fly-in-my-soup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/600\/wait-theres-a-fly-in-my-soup\/","title":{"rendered":"Wait, there&#8217;s a fly in my soup"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My new piece in <a href=\"http:\/\/nautil.us\/\">Nautilus Magazine<\/a> is up. It&#8217;s\u00a0on some exciting research going on at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jpl.nasa.gov\/\">NASA&#8217;s\u00a0Jet Propulsion Lab<\/a> in Pasadena, on the origin of life. Most of us grew up with the &#8220;primordial soup.&#8221; Forget all that&#8211;hydrothermal vents are where it&#8217;s at.\u00a0No one knows how life\u00a0<em>really<\/em> started, of course, but this theory is pretty\u00a0persuasive, because it obeys one of the central laws of the universe: entropy, the tendency for energy to go &#8220;downhill.&#8221; Take a look.\u00a0<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" src=\"http:\/\/static.nautil.us\/9624_264939da0c6ae8ee7e5fc5b434a4024e.png\" width=\"434\" height=\"465\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Also, Nautilus Editor-in-Chief Michael Segal did an <a href=\"http:\/\/nautil.us\/issue\/37\/currents\/ingenious-nathaniel-comfort\">interview with me<\/a> that&#8217;s now online. It&#8217;s a wide-ranging conversation, in which we talked about the history of science as a discipline, women in science, the Nobel Prize, and more. And it&#8217;s broken into nice, bite-sized pieces, perfect for brief lunch breaks and short attention spans.<\/p>\n<p>Enjoy!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My new piece in Nautilus Magazine is up. It&#8217;s\u00a0on some exciting research going on at NASA&#8217;s\u00a0Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, on the origin of life. Most of us grew up with the &#8220;primordial soup.&#8221; Forget all that&#8211;hydrothermal vents are where it&#8217;s at.\u00a0No one knows how life\u00a0really started, of course, but this theory is pretty\u00a0persuasive, because &#8230; <a title=\"Wait, there&#8217;s a fly in my soup\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/600\/wait-theres-a-fly-in-my-soup\/\" aria-label=\"Read more about Wait, there&#8217;s a fly in my soup\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[423,422,420,421,132],"class_list":["post-600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-entropy","tag-hydrothermal-vents","tag-nc-articles","tag-origin-of-life","tag-writing"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v27.4 (Yoast SEO v27.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Wait, there&#039;s a fly in my soup - Genotopia<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/600\/wait-theres-a-fly-in-my-soup\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Wait, there&#039;s a fly in my soup\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"My new piece in Nautilus Magazine is up. It&#8217;s\u00a0on some exciting research going on at NASA&#8217;s\u00a0Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, on the origin of life. Most of us grew up with the &#8220;primordial soup.&#8221; Forget all that&#8211;hydrothermal vents are where it&#8217;s at.\u00a0No one knows how life\u00a0really started, of course, but this theory is pretty\u00a0persuasive, because ... 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From 1997 to 2002, he was on the history faculty at The George Washington University, where he also served as Deputy Director of the Center for History of Recent Science. The Center\u2019s director and founder was Horace Freeland Judson (The Eighth Day of Creation), who, along with John McPhee and Monty Python, Comfort considers among his biggest writing influences. Comfort\u2019s books include The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine (Yale, 2012), The Tangled Field: Barbara McClintock\u2019s Search for the Patterns of Genetic Control (Harvard, 2001), and the edited volume, The Panda\u2019s Black Box: Opening Up the Intelligent Design Debate (Johns Hopkins, 2007). In addition to scholarly articles, he has written for Natural History, the New York Times Book Review, National Public Radio, Nature, Science, New Scientist, The Believer, and other publications. Should he expire tomorrow, he would be survived, in decreasing size order, by a son, a wife, a daughter, a dog, a cat, another cat, and still another cat.\",\"sameAs\":[\"http:\\\/\\\/genotopia.peachpuff-wolverine-566518.hostingersite.com\"],\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/scienceblog.com\\\/genotopia\\\/author\\\/genotopia\\\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO Premium plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Wait, there's a fly in my soup - Genotopia","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/600\/wait-theres-a-fly-in-my-soup\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Wait, there's a fly in my soup","og_description":"My new piece in Nautilus Magazine is up. It&#8217;s\u00a0on some exciting research going on at NASA&#8217;s\u00a0Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, on the origin of life. 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From 1997 to 2002, he was on the history faculty at The George Washington University, where he also served as Deputy Director of the Center for History of Recent Science. The Center\u2019s director and founder was Horace Freeland Judson (The Eighth Day of Creation), who, along with John McPhee and Monty Python, Comfort considers among his biggest writing influences. Comfort\u2019s books include The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine (Yale, 2012), The Tangled Field: Barbara McClintock\u2019s Search for the Patterns of Genetic Control (Harvard, 2001), and the edited volume, The Panda\u2019s Black Box: Opening Up the Intelligent Design Debate (Johns Hopkins, 2007). In addition to scholarly articles, he has written for Natural History, the New York Times Book Review, National Public Radio, Nature, Science, New Scientist, The Believer, and other publications. Should he expire tomorrow, he would be survived, in decreasing size order, by a son, a wife, a daughter, a dog, a cat, another cat, and still another cat.","sameAs":["http:\/\/genotopia.peachpuff-wolverine-566518.hostingersite.com"],"url":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/author\/genotopia\/"}]}},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pgtNP1-9G","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=600"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}