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 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 ...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: In a peer-reviewed analysis, scientists quantify amino acids before and after our “last universal common ancestor.” The last universal common ...

One of the most elegant theories about the origins of life on our planet is that it was kick-started by a delivery from outer space. This idea suggests that prebiotic molecules—the building blocks of ...

Breathe easy. It appears our microbial ancestors used oxygen, too. In December 2025, Brett Baker led a research cruise to collect microbial genomes off the coast of Uruguay. In this photo, Tyler Smith ...

Two of the most intriguing questions in science are: How did life on Earth begin? and Is there life elsewhere in the universe? Given the enormous interest in these questions, you might expect that the ...

In a new book, physicist Sara Walker argues that assembly theory can explain what life is, and even help scientists create new forms of it. Sara Walker, a physicist at Arizona State University, says ...

The origin of life is one of the most fundamental and enduring questions of mankind and one of the three greatest Origin Questions in the natural sciences. Recently, China officially launched its Mars ...

Scientists have uncovered a surprising new picture of human origins that challenges the long-held idea of a single ancestral ...

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