It's highly unlikely life started organically on Earth, one expert suggests. But an extraterrestrial intervention might ...

The mystery of how life on Earth originated , and whether it exists elsewhere in the universe, are "the raison d’être of space exploration", said Louis Friedman, co-founder of the Planetary Society.

A forgotten biochemist’s radical model for the emergence of life is making a surprising comeback—half a century after it was ...

The earliest days of Earth held secrets that scientists are still trying to uncover. One of the greatest mysteries is how life began. A key part of the answer lies in a rare element: phosphorus. This ...

LUCA, or the last universal common ancestor, links all living organisms today and remains central to the mystery of how life ...

Unlocking the basic science of microbes, especially those that live in extreme environments, could help us find life elsewhere in the universe.

The findings show that the common ancestor of the extant fungi was about 1.4 to 900 million years ago. That is far earlier ...

The question of when life began on Earth is as old as human culture. “It's one of these fundamental human questions: When did life appear on Earth?” said Professor Martin Whitehouse of the Swedish ...

From a distance, Biosphere 2 emerges from the cacti and creosote of the Sonoran desert like a gleaming oasis, a colony of ...

Geologist Michael Ackerson holds a sample from Canada's Acasta Gneiss formation, home to some of the oldest rocks on the planet. Michael Ackerson We know Earth is old. Scientists estimate that our ...

The odds that the universe is bursting with life seem to be getting better all the time. Astronomers recently announced that there could be an astonishing 20 billion Earthlike planets in the Milky Way ...

A Florida biochemist claims to have evidence that life began on Mars and eventually arrived on Earth by way of a meteor. In his own words, that would mean that—yes—"we are actually all Martians." ...