Earth is the only known planet to host life, a fact that has long intrigued scientists. While Venus and Mars present extreme ...

Oxygen, essential to our existence, took nearly a billion years to appear in significant quantities on Earth, despite the ...

Scientist have concluded water did not arrive as early during Earth's formation as previously thought, an insight that bears directly on the question of when life originated on the planet. The finding ...

Surface-bound gels may have offered the structure and chemistry needed for life to take hold on Earth—and possibly elsewhere.

Abiotic chemistry in Earth’s atmosphere could have generated biologically important organosulfur molecules as life was ...

"We are really trying to understand how far we can go, chemically, toward larger biological molecules and what environments are needed to form them." Researchers have created a "fingerprint" of a ...

Scientists have shown that Earth’s basic chemistry solidified within just three million years of the Solar System’s formation. Initially, the planet was barren and inhospitable, missing water and ...

Life on Earth relies on molecular building blocks to make DNA and proteins. Scientists have long wondered how prevalent these precursors were at the birth of our solar system. A sample of dust and ...

What can volcanism on the early Earth teach us about the formation of life on our planet? This is what a recent study published in Nature Communications hopes to address as an international team of ...

Polyester microdroplets, possible precursors to life, were formed from alpha-hydroxy acids (αHAs) in early Earth-like conditions even at low reaction volume, low reactant concentrations, and/or high ...

We have long struggled to determine how the first living organisms on Earth came together. Now, surprising evidence hints ...