Living organisms share an ancestor called the last universal common ancestor, or LUCA. LUCA is estimated to have lived ...

Scientists now believe life began long before LUCA. Older organisms, now vanished, passed on vital genetic tools. These 'pre-LUCA' ancestors developed complex biological functions. LUCA inherited ...

Despite rare earth elements' importance in manufacturing cell phones, magnets and a host of other consumer and commercial ...

A cancer treatment has been reformulated into a simple injection after its key components behaved differently in near-weightlessness than they ever do on Earth. The new treatment could be effective in ...

Human intelligence wasn’t a cosmic evolutionary fluke, some scientists say. The case against cosmic loneliness is growing.

Scientists think they’ve found a way to investigate the creation of cell membranes and DNA genomes that gave rise to the last universal common ancestor.

Life on Earth may have learned to breathe oxygen long before oxygen filled the skies. MIT researchers traced a key ...

Life’s story may stretch further back than scientists once thought. Some genes found in nearly every organism today were already duplicated before all life shared a common ancestor. By tracking these ...

The new plot twist is that in order to keep enough nitrogen and phosphorus near its surface, a planet has to start out with ...

Researchers discover how much inner-ear damage it takes to affect balance, showing why small declines can trigger major symptoms.

New research suggests complex life on Earth emerged billions of years before previous estimates. The research also suggests ...

Tiny zircon crystals are revealing that Earth’s earliest history may have included surprisingly complex tectonic activity.