Astrobiology Magazine is a NASA-sponsored online popular science magazine. Established in the year 2000, Astrobiology Magazine now has a vast archive of stories covering a broad array of topics. Astrobiology Magazine covers science and nature topics relevant to space, innovation and biology, with an emphasis on the existence, detection and exploration of life in the universe.
Cleaning up the clutter: How proto-biology arose from the prebiotic clutter
Just like the mythical creation stories that depict the formation of the world as the story of order from chaos, the early Earth was home to a chaotic clutter of organic molecules from which, somehow, more complex biological ...
Computing the origin of life
As a principal investigator in the NASA Ames Exobiology Branch, Andrew Pohorille is searching for the origin of life on Earth, yet you won't find him out in the field collecting samples or in a laboratory conducting experiments ...
How life could help atmospheric tides slow a planet's rotation
Resonating oscillations of a planet's atmosphere caused by gravitational tides and heating from its star could prevent a planet's rotation from steadily slowing over time, according to new research by Caleb Scharf, who is ...
Sharing life with the planets next door
How life could be shared between planets in close proximity to one another has received a greater insight thanks to new analytics based on previously known and new calculations. The findings are allowing researchers to understand ...
How geology tells the story of evolutionary bottlenecks and life on Earth
Evidence that catastrophic geological events could have created evolutionary bottlenecks that changed the course of life on Earth may be buried within ancient rocks beneath our feet.
Was life on the early Earth purple?
Early life forms on Earth may have been able to generate metabolic energy from sunlight using a purple-pigmented molecule called retinal that possibly predates the evolution of chlorophyll and photosynthesis. If retinal has ...
Chlorate-rich soil may help us find liquid water on Mars
If liquid water exists on the surface of Mars, it is most likely in the form of a briny mixture with magnesium chlorate salts, according to new experiments based on discoveries previously made by NASA's Phoenix and Viking ...
New study identifies possible ancestors of RNA
Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology may have made headway in helping determine the origin of life by identifying three different molecules that self-assemble to form a molecular structure with features characteristic ...
How phosphorus came in from the cold
Phosphorus, which is vital to life but somewhat rare, condensed inside asteroids in the outer Solar System before moving back towards the sun, where some of it ended up on Earth, according to new research.
Earth's oxygen increased in gradual steps rather than big bursts
A carbon cycle anomaly discovered in carbonate rocks of the Neoproterozoic Hüttenberg Formation of north-eastern Namibia follows a pattern similar to that found right after the Great Oxygenation Event, hinting at new evidence ...