The complex building blocks of life can form spontaneously in space, a new lab experiment shows.

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 ...

Modern cells are complex chemical entities with cytoskeletons, finely regulated internal and external molecules, and genetic ...

In many submerged regions, murky mud shelters strange life-forms that seem to be the key to one of the biggest mysteries of life on Earth. These creatures belong to a domain of life called the archaea ...

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 ...

The mystery of why life uses molecules with specific orientations has deepened with a discovery that RNA—a key molecule thought to have potentially held the instructions for life before DNA ...

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 ...