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 ...

The question of how life appeared on Earth has intrigued generations. Some researchers are now putting forward an unexpected hypothesis: our planet may have been prepared by an intelligence from ...

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 ...

Who were our earliest ancestors? The answer could lie in a special group of single-celled organisms with a cytoskeleton similar to that of complex organisms, such as animals and plants. Ten years ago, ...

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 ...

Oceans churned with lava. Air filled thick with smoke. Asteroids stormed down incessantly. Life during the Hadean Eon four billion years ago was a struggle, and yet that was when it began. 1,2 With no ...

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 ...

Few questions have captivated humankind more than the origin of life on Earth. How did the first living cells come to exist? How did these early protocells develop the structural membranes necessary ...

In a peer-reviewed analysis, scientists quantify amino acids before and after our “last universal common ancestor.” The last universal common ancestor (LUCA) is the single life form that branched into ...

In living organisms today, complex molecules like RNA and DNA are constructed with the help of enzymes. So how did these molecules form before life (and enzymes) existed? Why did some molecules end up ...