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

Scientists think they’ve found a way to investigate the creation of cell membranes and DNA genomes that gave rise to the last universal common ancestor.

Earth’s oxygen-rich atmosphere, the very thing that allows complex life to exist, may not last forever. Coupled ...

"By following universal paralogs," says Kaçar, "we can connect the earliest steps of life on Earth to the tools of modern ...

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 ...

Life’s story may stretch further back than scientists once thought. Some genes found in nearly every organism today were already duplicated before all life shared a common ancestor. By tracking these ...

The origin of life on Earth is still enigmatic, but we are slowly unraveling the steps involved and the necessary ingredients. Scientists believe life arose in a primordial soup of organic chemicals ...

A new model increases the probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, upending the decades-old “hard steps” theory that intelligent life was an incredibly improbable event on Earth. Are ...

They’re the building rocks of life. Analysis of debris from the nearly 5 billion-year-old asteroid Bennu suggests the ingredients to life on Earth were present in the early days of our solar system, ...