The prebiotic Earth was a harsh and unstable environment, characterized by intense heat, active volcanoes and little atmosphere. How, then, did the molecular building blocks of life first form? Among ...

A pair of new studies suggest that key steps toward life’s chemistry may begin long before planets exist. Experiments simulating interstellar space show that simple amino acids can link into peptides, ...

Researchers demonstrated how amino acids could spontaneously attach to RNA under early Earth-like conditions using thioesters, providing a long-sought clue to the origins of protein synthesis. This ...

A new study published in July 2025 tackles one of science's most profound mysteries—how did life first emerge from nonliving matter on early Earth? Using cutting edge mathematical approaches, ...

We’ve heard of GMOs, but this is ridiculous. Scientists at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology say they’ve engineered a bacteria whose genetic code is more efficient than ...

It’s one of the most longstanding questions in biology: how did life first arise? Research on the topic abounds, but there’s no one accepted answer. And according to one new paper, the chances that ...

Scientists today are quite sure about how long our universe has existed: it’s been 13.8 billion years, give or take 59 million years, since the cosmos burst into being via the big bang. But they’re ...

During the formose reaction, formaldehyde molecules (red) spontaneously and repeatedly react with each other to create larger molecules. Scripps Research scientists show that this reaction does not ...