When trying to understand the origins of life on Earth, researchers run into a paradox: while water is an indispensable solvent for all known life forms that exist today, water also inhibits the formation of string-like chains ...
A chemical compound essential to all living things has been synthesized in a lab in conditions that could have occurred on early Earth, suggesting it played a role at the outset of life, finds a new study led by University ...
Biochemistry
Feb 22, 2024
0
101
Charles Darwin proposed that life could have emerged in a "warm little pond" with the right cocktail of chemicals and energy. A study from the University of Washington, published this month in Communications Earth & Environment, ...
Earth Sciences
Jan 22, 2024
0
95
Giant-impact driven redox processes in the atmosphere and magma ocean may have played crucial roles during the evolution of the Earth. However, the absence of rock records from the time or era makes it challenging to understand ...
An interdisciplinary international research team has recently discovered that a massive anomaly deep within the Earth's interior may be a remnant of the collision about 4.5 billion years ago that formed the moon.
Planetary Sciences
Nov 1, 2023
0
1530
Billions of years ago, in the giant disk of dust, gas, and rocky material that orbited our young sun, larger and larger bodies coalesced to eventually give rise to the planets, moons, and asteroids we see today.
Planetary Sciences
Jul 5, 2023
0
3332
Ancient Mars may have had an environment capable of harboring an underground world teeming with microscopic organisms, French scientists reported Monday.
Planetary Sciences
Oct 10, 2022
2
610
Purdue University chemists have uncovered a mechanism for peptide-forming reactions to occur in water—something that has puzzled scientists for decades.
Biochemistry
Oct 3, 2022
2
1557
Four billion years ago, the Earth looked very different than it does today, devoid of life and covered by a vast ocean. Over the course of millions of years, in that primordial soup, life emerged. Researchers have long theorized ...
Biochemistry
Jul 28, 2022
8
2232
Using new analyses, scientists have just found the last two of the five informational units of DNA and RNA that had yet to be discovered in samples from meteorites. While it is unlikely that DNA could be formed in a meteorite, ...
Astrobiology
Apr 26, 2022
6
3791
