Living organisms need nitrogen as a central building block for protein formation, for example. However, although our atmosphere contains plenty of nitrogen, neither humans nor the vast majority of ...

How did life begin on Earth? While scientists have theories, they don't yet fully understand the precise chemical steps that led to biology, or when the first primitive life forms appeared. But what ...

New research announced by NASA on Tuesday details a bevy of exciting discoveries from asteroid dust that could provide clues to how life developed in our neck of the cosmos, including the sugars ...

RNA, which is one of life's most crucial molecules dealing with the synthesis of proteins, could be common in the universe, according to a new experiment that shows how RNA could easily have formed on ...

Between a rock and a green place: Michelle Gehringer studies fossilized life on early Earth to learn more about the evolution of (oxygenic) photosynthesis - the process that makes the oxygen we breath ...

How did life begin? An international team of researchers from Japan, Malaysia, the UK, and Germany suggest that the answer may lie in sticky, surface-bound gels that existed long before the first ...