Our planet is unique for its ability to sustain abundant life. From studies of the rock record, scientists believe life had already emerged on Earth at least 3.5 billion years ago and probably much ...

Nitrogen, upon which all life on Earth depends, may hold the key for explaining how early life on the planet evolved and how it could evolve on other planets.

New evidence from rocks, molecules and machine learning is forcing scientists to redraw the opening chapters of Earth’s story, pushing the first stirrings of biology far closer to the planet’s violent ...

The origin of the first living molecules on our planet has long been debated. However, recent experiments are revealing new information about the plausible conditions on the early Earth.

More than four billion years ago, Earth was a very different place. Pools of water froze and thawed in cycles, minerals shaped reactions, and molecules bumped into each other by chance. Out of this ...

A giant impact on the early Earth could have brought the building blocks of RNA to our planet, which new research suggests could have quickly formed in the presence of compounds called borates. When ...

Two University of Washington scientists have found a primitive microbe in the ocean off the Pacific Northwest coast that adds further support to the notion that life on Earth began within the deep, ...

New experiments suggest RNA, life’s essential molecule, could have formed naturally on early Earth and even arrived from space, raising intriguing questions about how easily life might begin elsewhere ...

New method reveals chemical signs of early microbial life in ancient Earth rocks, showing photosynthesis evolved much earlier ...

Modern cells are complex chemical entities with cytoskeletons, finely regulated internal and external molecules, and genetic ...

the Earth you walk on today might not be the same planet that was born 4.5 billion years ago. Many scientists believe that in its infancy, Earth collided with another world the size of Mars, and that ...