Modern microbes provide window into ancient ocean

Step into your new, microscopic time machine. Scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder have discovered that a type of single-celled organism living in modern-day oceans may have a lot in common with life forms that ...

'On our way to Mars': NASA rover will look for signs of life

The biggest, most sophisticated Mars rover ever built—a car-size vehicle bristling with cameras, microphones, drills and lasers—blasted off for the red planet Thursday as part of an ambitious, long-range project to bring ...

Tectonic plates started shifting earlier than previously thought

An enduring question in geology is when Earth's tectonic plates began pushing and pulling in a process that helped the planet evolve and shaped its continents into the ones that exist today. Some researchers theorize it happened ...

Spotting alien life: How 'microfossils' can fool scientists

Earth's oldest fossils may be billions of years old—although such claims are highly controversial. These kinds of discoveries usually start with finding what appear to be preserved outlines of microscopic lifeforms that ...

NASA's Mars 2020 will hunt for microscopic fossils

Scientists with NASA's Mars 2020 rover have discovered what may be one of the best places to look for signs of ancient life in Jezero Crater, where the rover will land on Feb. 18, 2021.

Ancient myths reveal early fantasies about artificial life

Thousands of years before machine learning and self-driving cars became reality, the tales of giant bronze robot Talos, artificial woman Pandora and their creator god, Hephaestus, filled the imaginations of people in ancient ...

Looking for LUCA, the last universal common ancestor

Around 4 billion years ago there lived a microbe called LUCA: the Last Universal Common Ancestor. There is evidence that it could have lived a somewhat 'alien' lifestyle, hidden away deep underground in iron-sulfur rich hydrothermal ...

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