DNA from Icelandic lava flows reveals how microbes move into a brand-new habitat, offering insights into early life on Earth ...

All life on Earth comes from one single ancestor. And it's so much older than we thought. All life on Earth can be traced ...

The tiny pantheon known as the Asgard archaea bear traits that hint at how plants, animals and fungi emerged on Earth.

Surface-bound gels may have offered the structure and chemistry needed for life to take hold on Earth—and possibly elsewhere. How did life first take shape? A group of scientists from Japan, Malaysia, ...

Research shows how microbes quickly colonize fresh lava, revealing how life rebuilds itself and offering clues for life on ...

Discover a vast, previously unknown world of microbial life that survives—and even thrives—for hundreds of millions of years in some of the planet's harshest environments. After a grueling descent ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about biodiversity and the hidden quirks of the natural world. We’ve pieced together a remarkably detailed timeline of ...

The nitrogen in the gum was found to be in nitrogen heterocycles, which are the building blocks of nucleobases in DNA and RNA ...

For decades, many scientists have relied on the "hard steps" model to suggest that intelligent life is rare — the improbable result of a series of unlikely evolutionary leaps. But new research by ...

the Earth you walk on today might not be the same planet that was born 4.5 billion years ago. Many scientists believe that in its infancy, Earth collided with another world the size of Mars, and that ...

AFTER THE second world war, Leo Szilard, a pioneering nuclear physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project, decided to move into biology instead: life; not death. But there was a problem. As a ...