In a peer-reviewed analysis, scientists quantify amino acids before and after our “last universal common ancestor.” The last universal common ancestor (LUCA) is the single life form that branched into ...

In many submerged regions, murky mud shelters strange life-forms that seem to be the key to one of the biggest mysteries of life on Earth. These creatures belong to a domain of life called the archaea ...

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 ...

How can animate life be formed from inanimate matter? It’s one of the most fascinating enigmas in science because, without this crucial first step, called abiogenesis, there would be no life on Earth.

In the 11th century in Cairo, the foundations for modern science were laid through the detention of an innocent man. The mathematician Abu Ali al-Hasan Ibn al-Haytham had been tasked with regulating ...