Life has found a home on Earth for around 4 billion years. That's a significant fraction of the universe's 13.77 billion-year history. Presumably, if life arose here, it could have appeared anywhere.

Microorganisms were the first forms of life on our planet. The clues are written in 3.5 billion-year-old rocks by geochemical and morphological traces, such as chemical compounds or structures that ...

Biologists are quietly rewriting what it means to be alive, and the human body has become one of their strangest frontiers.

Scientists have simulated the formation of fatty acids, a key component in the assembly of Earth's first cells. The discovery not only offers key insights to the earliest moments of life on the planet ...

Biologists mapping the human body have long assumed that every major kind of microscopic life inside us already had a place ...

"The existence of any vesicles on Titan would demonstrate an increase in order and complexity, which are conditions necessary for the origin of life." When you purchase through links on our site, we ...

Researchers demonstrated how amino acids could spontaneously attach to RNA under early Earth-like conditions using thioesters, providing a long-sought clue to the origins of protein synthesis. This ...

We’ve heard of GMOs, but this is ridiculous. Scientists at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology say they’ve engineered a bacteria whose genetic code is more efficient than ...

Washington, D.C. — Over the last half century, researchers have found that mineral surfaces may have played critical roles organizing, or activating, molecules that would become essential ingredients ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about biodiversity and the hidden quirks of the natural world. A new study claims that Prototaxites, which have defied ...

In 1944, Erwin Schrödinger published a book called What Is Life?. The physicist, famous for his alive-and-dead cat, clearly relished a brainteaser. Today, there is still no good definition. Life is ...

Approximately four billion years ago, the first forms of life emerged on Earth. For eons, biological life consisted of prokaryotic organisms, either early bacteria or archaea. Determining when ...