They say the reaction might have made the building blocks of DNA and RNA, both essential for life.

Still, no single model has yet shown exactly how life began.

The origin of life on Earth has always been a mystery. For many years, scientists have looked to the stars, believing that the building blocks of life that set forth evolution here on our planet came ...

A new study shines a spotlight on sulfur, a chemical element that, while all familiar, has proved surprisingly resistant to scientific efforts in probing its role in the origin of life. Many artists ...

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 ...

One of the major unanswered questions about the origin of life is how droplets of RNA floating around the primordial soup turned into the membrane-protected packets of life we call cells. A new paper ...

New phospholipid discovery brings researchers closer to understanding how primordial cells emerged during origin of life. Roughly 4 billion years ago, Earth was developing conditions suitable for life ...

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 ...

Ten years ago, nobody knew that Asgard archaea even existed. In 2015, however, researchers examining deep-sea sediments discovered gene fragments that indicated a new and previously undiscovered form ...