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 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 ...

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 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 ...

The special issue of Astrobiology explores how life may have begun in chemically dynamic environments on land, perhaps similar to the hot springs that can be seen in Yellowstone National Park. For ...

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 ...

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, ...

A recent scientific study is challenging one of the most established ideas about how life first developed on Earth. Researchers from the University of Arizona suggest that the earliest stages of ...

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.

Where did the energy come from to power the chemical origin of life, and how did phosphate come to be the universal energy currency of cells? Biologists from the Institute of Molecular Evolution at ...