The science fiction dream: Landing on an asteroid… and actually daoing it Picture this: Touching down on an asteroid was pure ...

A 3-D thermal model identifies a ~ 4.33 Ga temporal “sweet spot” for life’s origin, when decreased bombardment enabled mild hydrothermal niches to support RNA World chemistry and stable biomolecule ...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: In a peer-reviewed analysis, scientists quantify amino acids before and after our “last universal common ancestor.” The last universal common ...

A popular model of evolution concludes that it was incredibly unlikely for humanity to evolve on Earth, and that extraterrestrial intelligence is vanishingly rare. But as experts on the entangled ...

A scrappy science project led to a significant discovery: two new species of a rare organism that could elucidate a fundamental transition in the history of life on our planet.

No time machine exists that can take us back to find out how life started on our planet. Instead, chemists have been trying to build a plausible chemical scenario that could explain its origin. The ...

Where did the energy come from to power the chemical origin of life, and how did phosphate come to be the universal energy ...

A recent paper in Nature Communications from researchers at UCLA and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, offers new insight into the mystery of life. Previous experiments focused on existing molecular ...

The geological time scale, established by scientists in the mid-19th century and agreed upon internationally, breaks down the eternity of our planet's history into more manageable units than years.

When a bone grows, our bodies’ proteins help provide the structure. When a muscle tears, proteins help rebuild it. When we fight an infection, transport oxygen in our blood or send messages to a cell, ...

When and where did life on Earth begin? What ingredients does the recipe for life require? Is there life out there beyond the stars, and if so, did it arise in the same way? Or are we alone in the ...