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 ...

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 ...

New scientific theory based on ancient proteins suggests that genes did not arise as we believed and that life could have started elsewhere.

The mystery of how life on Earth originated , and whether it exists elsewhere in the universe, are "the raison d’être of space exploration", said Louis Friedman, co-founder of the Planetary Society.

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 ...

A giant impact on the early Earth could have brought the building blocks of RNA to our planet, which new research suggests could have quickly formed in the presence of compounds called borates. When ...

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 ...

The question of when life began on Earth is as old as human culture. “It’s one of these fundamental human questions: When did life appear on Earth?” said Professor Martin Whitehouse of the Swedish ...

For decades, experts have tried to explain how simple cells evolved into the complex organisms that make up plants, animals ...