New evidence from rocks, molecules and machine learning is forcing scientists to redraw the opening chapters of Earth’s story, pushing the first stirrings of biology far closer to the planet’s violent ...

Apollo 17 - NASA, 1972. Geologist-Astronaut Harrison Schmitt worked next to a huge, split boulder at geology Station 6 on the sloping base of North Massif during the third Apollo 17 extravehicular ...

New research suggests that the origins of life may be tied not only to deep-sea hydrothermal vents but also to environments ...

Asteroid impacts may have helped kick-start life on Earth by creating hot, chemical-rich environments ideal for early biology. These impact-generated hydrothermal systems could have lasted thousands ...

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 ...

New research has found that amino acids, the building blocks of life, may have traveled to Earth on interstellar dust grains, potentially helping kickstart biology as we know it. In a recent study ...

Scientists have discovered a hidden partnership between ancient microbes that may explain how complex life first evolved on ...

On the shores of the west coast of Australia lies a window to our past: the stromatolites and microbial mats of Gathaagudu (Shark Bay). To the untrained eye they look like a collection of rocks and ...