How did life begin on Earth? While scientists have theories, they don't yet fully understand the precise chemical steps that ...

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 ...

The origin of life on Earth has always been a mystery. For many years, scientists have looked to the stars, believing that the building blocks of life that set forth evolution here on our planet came ...

The origin of life on Earth is still enigmatic, but we are slowly unraveling the steps involved and the necessary ingredients. Scientists believe life arose in a primordial soup of organic chemicals ...

Soda lakes might hold the key to the emergence of life on Earth. These unique environments could have concentrated the phosphorus necessary for the first prebiotic chemical reactions. Phosphorus is a ...

Scientists have made a bold leap in the search for life’s origins, offering a fresh look at how chemistry might have crossed over into biology. At the center of this progress are coacervate ...

A new study shines a spotlight on sulfur, a chemical element that, while all familiar, has proved surprisingly resistant to scientific efforts in probing its role in the origin of life. Many artists ...

A team of scientists has discovered a new abiotic pathway for the formation of peptide chains from amino acids -- a key chemical step in the origin of life. The current study provides strong evidence ...

The transition from simple chemistry to the complex biology of molecules that gave rise to life is a puzzle that scientists ...

When Frank Drake penned his famous equation in 1961, he gave us a framework to estimate the number of detectable technological civilizations in our galaxy. Beginning with the number of potentially ...

MINING FOR RNA: James Ferris's group at Rensselaer re-creates how nucleotides might have joined on ancient mineral surfaces. The RNA world hypothesis has fueled diverse research approaches, drawing ...