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

In a new book, astrophysicist Mario Livio describes how the existence of life on Earth can be traced back to an RNA-based “protocell.” The following is an excerpt from Is Earth Exceptional?: The Quest ...

Half a century ago, a quiet theorist working far from the big Western labs proposed a radical answer to one of science’s ...

A new study published in July 2025 tackles one of science's most profound mysteries—how did life first emerge from nonliving matter on early Earth? Using cutting edge mathematical approaches, ...

The origin of life on Earth has been mulled over by scientists for centuries. We now know that life’s building blocks are RNA, amino acids, and cells. But if life originated from the primordial ooze ...

How did the building blocks of life come together to spawn the first organisms? It’s one of the most longstanding questions in biology — and scientists just got a major clue. In a new study published ...

How life evolved is one of the central questions in science and has fascinated humans for centuries. Early Earth was undoubtedly a harsh environment, but we know surprisingly little about the ...

University of Alberta geochemists have discovered a missing piece to one of the great mysteries of science—the origin of life on Earth. That fateful spark is believed to have occurred on the ocean's ...

A team from the University of Illinois has uncovered surprising evolutionary links between the genetic code and tiny protein fragments called dipeptides. By analyzing billions of dipeptide sequences ...

Two of the most intriguing questions in science are: How did life on Earth begin? and Is there life elsewhere in the universe? Given the enormous interest in these questions, you might expect that the ...