Learn more about the top theories about how life began on Earth, and how it may not have started from scratch.

Scientists think they’ve found a way to investigate the creation of cell membranes and DNA genomes that gave rise to the last ...

Life on Earth may exist thanks to an incredible stroke of luck — a chemical sweet spot that most planets miss during their ...

Life on Earth rests on a knife-edge of chemistry that could easily have tipped the other way. As geochemists reconstruct the planet’s birth, they are finding that a narrow band of oxygen conditions ...

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 ...

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 ...

A new study analyzes three asteroid and two meteorite samples to see if space rocks smacking into Earth could’ve helped ...

IMAGE: An artistic representation of the potentially habitable planet Kepler 422-b (left), compared with Earth (right). CREDIT: Ph03nix1986 / Wikimedia Commons. Today, we have found over 4000 ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about biodiversity and the hidden quirks of the natural world. We’ve pieced together a remarkably detailed timeline of ...

New method reveals chemical signs of early microbial life in ancient Earth rocks, showing photosynthesis evolved much earlier than believed.