Learn more about the top theories about how life began on Earth, and how it may not have started from scratch.

Living organisms share an ancestor called the last universal common ancestor, or LUCA. LUCA is estimated to have lived ...

While idea may violate Occam’s razor, “it remains a speculative but logically open alternative,” says biologist Robert Endres ...

The lab-made cosmic dust shows the same infrared signals as the dust found in outer space.

Two separate laboratory breakthroughs have produced RNA molecules that can build copies of themselves or assemble functional structures without any help from proteins or DNA. These results offer the ...

A Sydney Ph.D. student has recreated a tiny piece of the universe inside a bottle in her laboratory, producing cosmic dust from scratch. The results shed new light on how the chemical building blocks ...

How did life start on Earth? The answer is a big scientific mystery scientists are actively investigating. After talking with many scientists,... Did life start on the ocean floor — and what does that ...

Life on Earth is complex and hard to understand, but new research may have finally given us a much-needed glimpse into the patterns that life follows as it spreads across our planet. According to a ...

A team of researchers studied the properties of membranes to understand how these cellular structures influenced the chemistry of life on Earth as it began. How life arose remains a looming question ...

By creating a 'little bit of the Universe in a bottle' in her lab, a PhD student in physics has reverse-engineered the chemical cocktails produced by stars to better understand how cosmic dust might ...