Global warming may reroute evolution

(PhysOrg.com) -- Rising carbon dioxide levels associated with global warming may affect interactions between plants and the insects that eat them, altering the course of plant evolution, research at the University of Michigan ...

Bricks to build an Earth found in every planetary system

Earth-like planets orbiting other stars in the Milky Way are three times more likely to have the same type of minerals as Earth than astronomers had previously thought. In fact, conditions for making the building blocks of ...

Powerful supercomputer peers into the origin of life

(PhysOrg.com) -- Supercomputer simulations at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory are helping scientists unravel how nucleic acids could have contributed to the origins of life.

Study finds new moves in protein's evolution

Highlighting an important but unexplored area of evolution, scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have found evidence that, over hundreds of millions of years, an essential protein has evolved chiefly by changing ...

What is life? New answers to an age-old question in astrobiology

Biologists have been unable to agree on a definition of the complex phenomenon known as "life." In a special collection of essays in Astrobiology, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., leaders in the fields ...

The chemical evolution of DNA and RNA on early Earth

RNA was probably the first informational molecule. Now, chemists from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich have demonstrated that alternation of wet and dry conditions could have sufficed to drive the prebiotic ...

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