Learn more about the top theories about how life began on Earth, and how it may not have started from scratch.

Two separate laboratory breakthroughs have produced RNA molecules that can build copies of themselves or assemble functional structures without any help from proteins or DNA. These results offer the ...

Scientists have made a bold leap in the search for life’s origins, offering a fresh look at how chemistry might have crossed over into biology. At the center of this progress are coacervate ...

The mystery of how life on Earth originated , and whether it exists elsewhere in the universe, are "the raison d’être of space exploration", said Louis Friedman, co-founder of the Planetary Society.

Before life began on Earth, the environment likely contained a massive number of chemicals that reacted with each other more or less randomly, and it is unclear how the complexity of cells could have ...

Geophysicists have modeled how Earth’s magnetic field could form even when its core was fully liquid. By removing the effects of viscosity in their simulation, they revealed a self-sustaining dynamo ...