While life on Earth is relatively new, geologically speaking, the ingredients that combined to form it might be much older than once thought. According to research published in ACS Central Science, the simplest amino acid, ...
Astrobiology
Nov 29, 2023
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2
The universe is more than 13 billion years old and space is often depicted as a vast, empty vacuum. Other than planets and stars, there's nothing there, right? Actually, space is littered with complex, carbon-based molecules. ...
Astrobiology
Oct 24, 2023
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18
Two prominent origin-of-life chemists have published a new hypothesis for how the first sugars—which were necessary for life to evolve—arose on the early Earth.
Biochemistry
Apr 13, 2023
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83
One-hundred fifty years ago, Charles Darwin speculated that life likely originated in a warm little pond. There, Darwin supposed, chemical reactions and the odd lightning strike might have led to chains of amino acids that, ...
Evolution
Dec 21, 2022
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476
In 1952, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey made sparks fly in a gas-filled flask meant to reflect the composition of Earth's atmosphere around 3.8 billion years ago. Their results suggested that lightning could have led to prebiotic ...
Earth Sciences
Apr 11, 2022
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106
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 ...
Astrobiology
Feb 6, 2019
2
299
All living beings need cells and energy to replicate. Without these fundamental building blocks, living organisms on Earth would not be able to reproduce and would simply not exist.
Astronomy
Sep 27, 2018
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172
Life as we know it originated roughly 3.5 to 4 billion years ago in the form of a prebiotic ("before life") soup of organic molecules that somehow began to replicate themselves and pass along a genetic formula. Or so goes ...
Biochemistry
Feb 6, 2018
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194
The phosphate ion is almost insoluble and is one of the most inactive of Earth's most abundant phosphate minerals. So how could phosphate have originally been incorporated into ribonucleotides, the building blocks of RNA, ...
Biochemistry
Aug 18, 2016
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600
On the early Earth, light came not only from the sun but also from the incessant bombardment of fireball meteorites continually striking the planet. Now, the recent work of University of South Florida (USF) associate professor ...
Biochemistry
Dec 16, 2015
2
682
