The tiny pantheon known as the Asgard archaea bear traits that hint at how plants, animals and fungi emerged on Earth.

In a new book, astrophysicist Mario Livio describes how the existence of life on Earth can be traced back to an RNA-based “protocell.” The following is an excerpt from Is Earth Exceptional?: The Quest ...

Life may have emerged from a surprisingly simple network of chemical reactions long before cells or genes existed.

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 ...

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.

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 ...

Half a century ago, a quiet theorist working far from the big Western labs proposed a radical answer to one of science’s ...

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 ...

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 ...

Earth’s chemical energy powered early life through ‘the most revolutionary idea in biology since Darwin’ For 80 years it has been accepted that early life began in a ‘primordial soup’ of organic ...

University of Alberta geochemists have discovered a missing piece to one of the great mysteries of science—the origin of life on Earth. That fateful spark is believed to have occurred on the ocean's ...