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 ...

Where did it start? How did it grow complex? Why did it get big? Three moments in Earth’s early history when evolution ...

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 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 ...

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.

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 ...

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, ...

Billions of years of evolution have made modern cells incredibly complex. Inside cells are small compartments called organelles that perform specific functions essential for the cell’s survival and ...

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 ...

The top-down study of life’s origin—via the examination of ancient fossils—doesn’t tell us much about early biochemistry. Fossil cells, molecules, and isotopes are indistinguishable from those of ...