Scientists now question how life’s building blocks first appeared before LUCA, reshaping our search for life beyond Earth.

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: In a peer-reviewed analysis, scientists quantify amino acids before and after our “last universal common ancestor.” The last universal common ...

Few questions have captivated humankind more than the origin of life on Earth. How did the first living cells come to exist? How did these early protocells develop the structural membranes necessary ...

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

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 ...

Grab-and-go missions to asteroids have provided some of the most scientifically valuable samples since the Apollo missions—and they’re shaking up the search for life beyond Earth. The OSIRIS-REx ...

In a peer-reviewed analysis, scientists quantify amino acids before and after our “last universal common ancestor.” The last universal common ancestor (LUCA) is the single life form that branched into ...

Scientists are making a case for adjusting our understanding of how exactly genes first emerged. For a while, there’s been a consensus about the order in which the building-block amino acids were ...