When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. In "One Hand Clapping," Nikolay Kukushkin traces the origin of human consciousness from the ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. All life on Earth can be traced back to a Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA. A study suggests that this organism likely ...

For decades, many scientists have relied on the "hard steps" model to suggest that intelligent life is rare — the improbable result of a series of unlikely evolutionary leaps. But new research by ...

Every organism alive on Earth, from oak trees to octopuses to the bacteria in our gut, belongs to a single extended family. Genetic evidence points back to one ancestral cell, a last common forebear ...

Scientists have spent decades cataloging life on Earth’s surface, from rainforest canopies to ocean trenches. But a growing body of research now shows that a vast, hidden biosphere thrives kilometers ...

Researchers investigating the origin of complex life on Earth might have just made a major breakthrough. The origin of humanity and the planet Earth is probably debated more than whether the chicken ...

Life’s story may stretch further back than scientists once thought. Some genes found in nearly every organism today were already duplicated before all life shared a common ancestor. By tracking these ...

Compared to previous theories, the current research emphasizes the complexity of the biological and chemical processes that brought about life.

A composite view of the Earth constructed by NASA from multiple satellite images Editor at Large Human evolution is a story writ slow. It’s been about 3.8 billion years since life on Earth emerged and ...

From a distance, Biosphere 2 emerges from the cacti and creosote of the Sonoran desert like a gleaming oasis, a colony of glass and bright white structures. Despite being just outside Tucson, Arizona, ...