A doctoral student recreated a tiny piece of the universe in a bottle to investigate the chemistry that led to life on Earth.

T o make good decisions on any question the public needs to be well-informed, something not so easily accomplished in America’s schools. That is a key point made by Michael Kent, a recently retired ...

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

A 13-atom molecule containing sulfur has been discovered in interstellar space for the first time, providing insight into the origins of the chemistry of life.

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 ...

How can animate life be formed from inanimate matter? It’s one of the most fascinating enigmas in science because, without this crucial first step, called abiogenesis, there would be no life on Earth.

The complex building blocks of life can form spontaneously in space, a new lab experiment shows.

In many submerged regions, murky mud shelters strange life-forms that seem to be the key to one of the biggest mysteries of life on Earth. These creatures belong to a domain of life called the archaea ...

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 ...