Here is what you’ll learn in this story: Panspermia is the controversial theory that life evolved elsewhere in the universe and—some way or another—made it here, where it developed into the diversity ...

Living organisms share an ancestor called the last universal common ancestor, or LUCA. LUCA is estimated to have lived approximately four billion years ago. All plants, animals, and microbes can trace ...

Earth’s earliest microbes may have built vital chemistry around molybdenum, a metal thought too scarce to matter in ancient ...

On Earth, life thrives in some of the most seemingly inhospitable environments. Single-celled organisms like bacteria teem in the hot springs of Yellowstone National Park, where temperatures reach ...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: All life on Earth can be traced back to a Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA. A study suggests that this organism likely lived on Earth only 400 ...

Scientists are one step closer to understanding the origins of complex life on Earth after shedding new light on a mystery about our microbial ancestors. The key, they suspect, may lie in how simple ...

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 ...

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, ...

There are roughly 2.5 million known species on the planet, but scientists estimate that's only a fraction of the biodiversity on Earth. A new study shows we're finding new species like never before.

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 ...