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

Hints of ancient microbes in Martian rocks and a revived theory about our cosmic ancestry are forcing scientists to rethink ...

In a new peer reviewed analysis, scientists quantify amino acids before and after our “last universal common ancestor.” The last universal common ancestor is the single life form that branched into ...

the Earth you walk on today might not be the same planet that was born 4.5 billion years ago. Many scientists believe that in its infancy, Earth collided with another world the size of Mars, and that ...

Young Earth was a blue planet covered in oceans, much like today. But the atmosphere was a lethal cocktail of gases, with no ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about biodiversity and the hidden quirks of the natural world. We’ve pieced together a remarkably detailed timeline of ...

Scientists believe they’ve found evidence that life on Earth is over a billion years older than anyone believed was realistic. New research used machine learning to scan ancient meteorites and fossils ...

In many submerged regions, murky mud shelters strange life-forms that seem to be the key to one of the biggest mysteries of life on Earth. These creatures belong to a domain of life called the archaea ...

Research shows how microbes quickly colonize fresh lava, revealing how life rebuilds itself and offering clues for life on ...

For decades, many scientists have relied on the "hard steps" model to suggest that intelligent life is rare — the improbable result of a series of unlikely evolutionary leaps. But new research by ...

Discover a vast, previously unknown world of microbial life that survives—and even thrives—for hundreds of millions of years in some of the planet's harshest environments. After a grueling descent ...

AFTER THE second world war, Leo Szilard, a pioneering nuclear physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project, decided to move into biology instead: life; not death. But there was a problem. As a ...