Life on earth
Origins of life: We are getting closer to recreating the bubbling primordial soup
At 158 degrees Fahrenheit (70 degrees Celsius), the vents are a bit hot for a bubble bath but, it turns ...
Dead or alive? The cosmology of viruses
Viruses are an inescapable part of life, especially in a global viral pandemic. Yet ask a roomful of scientists if ...
Recreation of Earth’s ancient hydrothermal vents suggests life could emerge even on ‘hellish worlds’
One theory for how life emerged suggests that it originated in the sea, at alkaline hydrothermal vents. It’s impossible to ...
A different approach to finding alien life: What if ET breathes hydrogen instead of oxygen?
The first time we find evidence of life on a planet orbiting another star (an exoplanet), it is probably going ...
‘Genetic scrambling’ over millions of years makes it difficult to understand Earth’s earliest life
Biologists have long hoped to understand the nature of the earliest living organisms on Earth. If they could, they might ...
Seeking the ‘secret ingredient’ that led to life on Earth. Researchers may have discovered it
Think of the RNA world as a pot of gazpacho. We prepare ingredients and then stir them into a single ...
Visit Mars and bring back alien life? Troubles containing coronavirus should make us wary of bringing microbes to Earth
You know what? Maybe we ought to reconsider this whole thing about looking for life on other worlds. It would ...
Was life on Earth sparked by ‘moon-sized’ impact 4.4 billion years ago?
A cataclysm may have jump-started life on Earth. A new scenario suggests that some 4.47 billion years ago—a mere 60 ...
Recreating the chemical soup that may have sparked life on earth
In the molecular dance that gave birth to life on Earth, RNA appears to be a central player. But the ...
Challenging earth’s oldest fossils: Critics say ‘there’s absolutely nothing biological about them’
Two years ago, researchers from the University of Wollongong in Australia shook the science world by claiming to have discovered ...
