A new study used mathematical formulas and demonstrated that it’s highly unlikely life began on Earth. Instead, the researcher points to panspermia, a theory that life or the ingredients for life came ...

“Project Hail Mary,” the movie adaptation to Andy Weir’s 2021 novel about a science teacher attempting to save the Earth from ...

Two separate laboratory breakthroughs have produced RNA molecules that can build copies of themselves or assemble functional structures without any help from proteins or DNA. These results offer the ...

Living organisms share an ancestor called the last universal common ancestor, or LUCA. LUCA is estimated to have lived approximately four billion years ago. All plants, animals, and microbes can trace ...

On Earth, life thrives in some of the most seemingly inhospitable environments. Single-celled organisms like bacteria teem in the hot springs of Yellowstone National Park, where temperatures reach ...

From a distance, Biosphere 2 emerges from the cacti and creosote of the Sonoran desert like a gleaming oasis, a colony of glass and bright white structures. Despite being just outside Tucson, Arizona, ...

The history of the first plant on Earth is not as simple as the identification of a particular species of plants, but it is a ...

Scientists are trying to understand how complex life emerged on Earth about 2 billion years ago. Our microbial ancestors could be the key.

A biochemist, building on the pillars of evolutionary theory and drawing on cutting-edge research into the link between energy and genes, argues that the evolution of multicellular life was the result ...

Here is what you’ll learn in this story: Panspermia is the controversial theory that life evolved elsewhere in the universe and—some way or another—made it here, where it developed into the diversity ...