In a new book, astrophysicist Mario Livio describes how the existence of life on Earth can be traced back to an RNA-based “protocell.” The following is an excerpt from Is Earth Exceptional?: The Quest ...

In the heart of the oceans, in total darkness, perhaps the key to one of the greatest chapters in our history occurred: the birth of life. Far from the surface and sunlight, improbable chemical ...

A popular model of evolution concludes that it was incredibly unlikely for humanity to evolve on Earth, and that extraterrestrial intelligence is vanishingly rare. But as experts on the entangled ...

Billions of years of evolution have made modern cells incredibly complex. Inside cells are small compartments called organelles that perform specific functions essential for the cell’s survival and ...

An international research team has revised the estimated age of the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) to about 4.2 billion years ago, just 400 million years after Earth formed. Genetic analysis ...

A new study published in July 2025 tackles one of science's most profound mysteries—how did life first emerge from nonliving matter on early Earth? Using cutting edge mathematical approaches, ...

To celebrate the groundbreaking research of 2025 Drake Award recipients Dr. David Deamer and Dr. John Baross, the SETI Institute commissioned bioartist Dr. Jennifer Willet to create a unique artwork ...

In a peer-reviewed analysis, scientists quantify amino acids before and after our “last universal common ancestor.” The last universal common ancestor (LUCA) is the single life form that branched into ...

Two of the most intriguing questions in science are: How did life on Earth begin? and Is there life elsewhere in the universe? Given the enormous interest in these questions, you might expect that the ...

Oceans churned with lava. Air filled thick with smoke. Asteroids stormed down incessantly. Life during the Hadean Eon four billion years ago was a struggle, and yet that was when it began. 1,2 With no ...

In an important new paper forthcoming in the June issue of The Quarterly Review of Biology, Robert Shapiro (New York University) argues against the widely held theory that the origin of life began ...