The question of life's origin on Earth continues to surprise. A new study challenges an old idea: that a chemical reaction called the formose reaction could have created the first sugars necessary for ...

Half a century ago, a quiet theorist working far from the big Western labs proposed a radical answer to one of science’s hardest questions: what, exactly, makes something alive. His framework for how ...

Life’s origin story just became even more mysterious. Using mathematics and information theory, Robert G. Endres of Imperial College London found that the spontaneous emergence of life from nonliving ...

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 ...