Laboratory chemists are now edging closer to the moment when lifeless molecules first organized into the chemistry that would eventually support complex organisms. By recreating key early-Earth ...

Two enormous structures that sit at the border between the Earth's mantle and its core have puzzled scientists for decades.

Scientists at the Carnegie Institution for Science used a powerful combination of cutting-edge chemistry and artificial ...

Scientists have uncovered the oldest chemical traces of life on Earth using a new machine learning method that identifies ...

Scientists have detected some of the oldest signs of life on Earth using a new method that recognizes chemical fingerprints ...

A recent special issue of Philosophical Transactions B takes on one of the biggest mysteries in science: how life first began ...

A new study uncovered fresh chemical evidence of life in rocks more than 3.3 billion years old, along with molecular traces showing that oxygen-producing photosynthesis emerged nearly a billion years ...

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 ...

Chris Impey receives funding from the National Science Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. We have only one example of biology forming in the universe – life on Earth. But what if life ...

The clearest picture yet of our “last universal common ancestor” suggests it was a relatively complex organism living 4.2 billion years ago, a time long considered too harsh for life to flourish. If ...