The question of how life appeared on Earth has intrigued generations. Some researchers are now putting forward an unexpected hypothesis: our planet may have been prepared by an intelligence ...

Scientists are exploring how RNA might have jump-started life four billion years ago and how it's now advancing drug ...

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 ...

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 ...

A team from the University of Illinois has uncovered surprising evolutionary links between the genetic code and tiny protein ...

Few questions have captivated humankind more than the origin of life on Earth. How did the first living cells come to exist? How did these early protocells develop the structural membranes necessary ...

How life evolved is one of the central questions in science and has fascinated humans for centuries. Early Earth was undoubtedly a harsh environment, but we know surprisingly little about the ...

Genes are the building blocks of life, and the genetic code provides the instructions for the complex processes that make organisms function.

Tremendous progress in the field of prebiotic chemistry has shown how simple compounds available on ancient Earth could have given rise to the molecular building blocks of life 1. The current ...

NASA’s Perseverance rover, in its exploration of Mars, has unearthed potential signs of ancient life within Martian rock. This discovery may represent the most compelling evidence to date of past life ...

In living organisms today, complex molecules like RNA and DNA are constructed with the help of enzymes. So how did these molecules form before life (and enzymes) existed? Why did some molecules end up ...