New research from Japan's iron-rich hot springs shows how early microbes may have harnessed iron and oxygen during the Great Oxygenation Event.

This theory was the brainchild of Francis Crick (yes, the one who helped identify DNA) and Leslie Orgel, the originator of ...

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, ...

Early Earth lacked life’s essentials until a collision with Theia added them. This chance event made life possible. After the Solar System formed, it took no more than three million years for the ...

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, ...

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Scientists have shown that Earth’s basic chemistry solidified within just three million years of the Solar System’s formation ...

The question of when life began on Earth is as old as human culture. “It's one of these fundamental human questions: When did life appear on Earth?” said Professor Martin Whitehouse of the Swedish ...

Earth is so far the only known planet on which life exists—with liquid water and a stable atmosphere. However, the conditions were not conducive to life when it formed. The gas-dust cloud from which ...

For now, life thrives on our oxygen-rich planet. But Earth's atmosphere won't always be so welcoming. In fact, scientists predict that Earth will eventually undergo a drastic atmospheric shift—one ...

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