Life may have emerged from a surprisingly simple network of chemical reactions long before cells or genes existed.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Soda lakes might hold the key to the emergence of life on Earth. These unique environments could have concentrated the phosphorus necessary for the first prebiotic chemical reactions. Phosphorus is a ...

Half a century ago, a quiet theorist working far from the big Western labs proposed a radical answer to one of science’s hardest questions: what, exactly, makes something alive. His framework for how ...

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

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, ...

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 ...