Ancient evidence suggests a new twist in how we all got here.

There is still so much we don't understand about the origin of life on Earth. The definition of life itself is a source of debate among scientists, but most researchers agree on the fundamental ...

A popular model of evolution concludes that it was incredibly unlikely for humanity to evolve on Earth, and that extraterrestrial intelligence is vanishingly rare. But as experts on the entangled ...

There is still so much we don’t understand about the origin of life on Earth. The definition of life itself is a source of debate among scientists, but most researchers agree on the fundamental ...

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 ...

Billions of years of evolution have made modern cells incredibly complex. Inside cells are small compartments called organelles that perform specific functions essential for the cell’s survival and ...

In an important new paper forthcoming in the June issue of The Quarterly Review of Biology, Robert Shapiro (New York University) argues against the widely held theory that the origin of life began ...

We've been looking at nature the wrong way, argues Rowan Hooper. If we stop focusing on the individual, we get a whole new picture of how life on Earth – and elsewhere – may have begun ...

Something written in every biology textbook of the past 70 years may need a rewrite. Not because the science was careless, or the scientists were wrong to try – but because the tools available at the ...

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 ...