The tiny pantheon known as the Asgard archaea bear traits that hint at how plants, animals and fungi emerged on Earth.

How did the building blocks of life come together to spawn the first organisms? It’s one of the most longstanding questions in biology — and scientists just got a major clue. In a new study published ...

Who were our earliest ancestors? The answer could lie in a special group of single-celled organisms with a cytoskeleton similar to that of complex organisms, such as animals and plants. Ten years ago, ...

One of the most elegant theories about the origins of life on our planet is that it was kick-started by a delivery from outer ...

Few questions have captivated humankind more than the origin of life on Earth. How did the first living cells come to exist? How did these early protocells develop the structural membranes necessary ...

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 ...

Chemists at UCL have shown how two of biology’s most fundamental ingredients, RNA (ribonucleic acid) and amino acids, could have spontaneously joined together at the origin of life four billion years ...

When a bone grows, our bodies’ proteins help provide the structure. When a muscle tears, proteins help rebuild it. When we fight an infection, transport oxygen in our blood or send messages to a cell, ...

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. Imagine an entirely ...

When Frank Drake penned his famous equation in 1961, he gave us a framework to estimate the number of detectable technological civilizations in our galaxy. Beginning with the number of potentially ...