{"id":868,"date":"2026-07-22T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-22T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/2026\/07\/22\/science-word-of-the-day-abiogenesis\/"},"modified":"2026-07-22T08:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-07-22T08:00:00","slug":"science-word-of-the-day-abiogenesis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/2026\/07\/22\/science-word-of-the-day-abiogenesis\/","title":{"rendered":"Science word of the day: Abiogenesis"},"content":{"rendered":"<article>\n<p><strong>Science word of the day: <\/strong>Abiogenesis<\/p>\n<p><strong>Pronunciation: <\/strong><em>Ay-bye-oh-JEN&#8217;-ih-sis<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>What it means: <\/strong>Abiogenesis is the emergence of life from nonliving matter through chemical processes. Scientists still don&#8217;t know exactly how abiogenesis happened on Earth. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.livescience.com\/13363-7-theories-origin-life.html\"><u>Theories range<\/u><\/a> from lightning strikes that could have scrambled water, methane, ammonia and hydrogen into amino acids and sugars \u202a\u2014\u202c the building blocks of life \u202a\u2014\u202c 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 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pasteur.fr\/en\/institut-pasteur\/history\/middle-years-1862-1877\"><u>microbes could only grow from preexisting microbes<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>How to use it in a sentence: <\/strong>All life on Earth may owe itself to an incident of <em>abiogenesis<\/em> more than <a href=\"https:\/\/naturalhistory.si.edu\/education\/teaching-resources\/life-science\/early-life-earth-animal-origins\"><u>3.7 billion years ago<\/u><\/a>. <\/p>\n<p><strong>Can you crack our science word of the day puzzle, <\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.livescience.com\/chain-science-word-of-the-day-puzzle\"><u><strong>Chain Word<\/strong><\/u><\/a><strong>?<\/strong><\/p>\n<div style=\"min-height: 250px\">\n<div class=\"kwizly-quiz kwizly-W2rM4W\"><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Science word of the day: Abiogenesis Pronunciation: Ay-bye-oh-JEN&#8217;-ih-sis What it means: Abiogenesis is the emergence of life from nonliving matter through chemical processes. Scientists still [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":869,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=868"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/868\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}