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 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 ...

A chemical compound essential to all living things has been synthesized in a lab in conditions that could have occurred on early Earth, suggesting it played a role at the outset of life. A chemical ...

In a new book, physicist Sara Walker argues that assembly theory can explain what life is, and even help scientists create new forms of it. Sara Walker, a physicist at Arizona State University, says ...

Deep inside Earth, far below the crust and oceans, lie vast hidden regions that many geophysicists suspect could have shaped ...

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 ...

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, ...

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Scientists have long been fascinated with the origin of life on Earth, namely the transition from simple pre-biotic organic molecules to living cell systems. How did these chemical reactions come ...

The origin of life on Earth is still enigmatic, but we are slowly unraveling the steps involved and the necessary ingredients. Scientists believe life arose in a primordial soup of organic chemicals ...

Leading theories suggest that the first energy used by life was either from the sun or from geothermal heat and chemistry at the bottom of the ocean. When you purchase through links on our site, we ...