A giant virus discovered in Japan is adding fuel to the provocative idea that viruses helped create complex life. Named ushikuvirus, it infects amoebae and shows unique traits that connect different ...

Complex cells are thought to be the result of a union between two ancient microorganisms, but scientists have long been ...

Ancient evidence suggests a new twist in how we all got here.

Researchers at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge have discovered a ribozyme that is shockingly small, yet ...

Experiments reveal that unsaturated lipid membranes promote vesicle fusion and DNA retention during freeze–thaw cycles, highlighting icy environments as potential drivers of protocell evolution. Today ...

A doctoral student recreated a tiny piece of the universe in a bottle to investigate the chemistry that led to life on Earth.

Life’s story may stretch further back than scientists once thought. Some genes found in nearly every organism today were already duplicated before all life shared a common ancestor. By tracking these ...

The origin of life on Earth has been mulled over by scientists for centuries. We now know that life’s building blocks are RNA, amino acids, and cells. But if life originated from the primordial ooze ...

The most widely accepted scientific explanation for the arrival of all complex life on Earth has had an unsolved mystery at its heart. According to the theory, all plants, animals and fungi, known ...

AFTER THE second world war, Leo Szilard, a pioneering nuclear physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project, decided to move into biology instead: life; not death. But there was a problem. As a ...