Scientists at the Carnegie Institution for Science used a powerful combination of cutting-edge chemistry and artificial ...

Fossilized remnants of ancient carbon from the heart of South Africa's Mpumalanga province have just yielded the earliest ...

A machine-learning breakthrough could lift the veil on Earth’s early history—and supercharge the search for alien life ...

A new study uncovered fresh chemical evidence of life in rocks more than 3.3 billion years old, along with molecular traces showing that oxygen-producing photosynthesis emerged nearly a billion years ...

A machine-learning-enhanced approach to chemical analysis is drastically expanding the chemical record of life on Earth, and ...

Researchers have discovered chemical traces of life in rocks older than 3.3 billion years, offering a rare look at Earth’s ...

The origin of life on Earth is one of science’s biggest questions, and previous theories have suggested that lightning may have played a role. While previous studies say volcanic or atmospheric ...

Long before dinosaurs munched on leafy greens or photosynthesizing algae soaked up the sun, a lifeless soup of simple molecules floated through the watery and rocky landscape of early planet Earth.

"We are really trying to understand how far we can go, chemically, toward larger biological molecules and what environments are needed to form them." Researchers have created a "fingerprint" of a ...