Despite decades of research, there's still much scholars don't understand about life's beginnings and early evolution. A UC Riverside paper has opened the door to understanding more and to framing ...

Researchers mapped enzyme sequences from several thousand modern species onto an evolutionary tree of life. Their findings suggest that, shortly after cyanobacteria evolved the ability to produce ...

The atmosphere, the ocean and life on Earth interacted over the past 500-plus million years in ways that improved conditions for early organisms to thrive. Now, an interdisciplinary team of scientists ...

Earth's earliest life forms developed ways to survive the harmful effects of arsenic to cope with dramatic changes in their environment, a new study suggests. The researchers found the complex life ...

Scientists may have discovered a reaction that provides the “missing link” to help explain how early life formed on Earth about 4 billion years ago. All living things contain ribonucleic acid, ...

The origin of life continues to remain a matter of debate. The ribonucleic acid (RNA) world hypothesis proposes that 'ribozymes' which store genetic information and possess catalytic functions may ...

Earth’s earliest microbes may have built vital chemistry around molybdenum, a metal thought too scarce to matter in ancient oceans. By tracing genes across life, researchers now argue those organisms ...

ARLINGTON, Va.– Red-blooded genealogists take note: The discovery in microbes of two oxygen-packing proteins, the earliest known ancestors to hemoglobin, brings scientists closer to identifying the ...

In a study published today in the “International Journal of Astrobiology,” researchers state that a meteorite that fell to Earth over northwestern Canada in January 2000 contains a previously unseen ...

How did life begin on Earth? While scientists have theories, they don’t yet fully understand the precise chemical steps that led to biology, or when the first primitive life forms appeared. But what ...