Before sunlight ever reached the planet, another force may have sparked life—electricity. Deep beneath the ocean floor, ...

Fungi’s evolutionary roots stretch far deeper than once believed — up to 1.4 billion years ago, long before plants or animals ...

When the first spark of life emerged on a young, ocean-covered Earth some four billion years ago, it didn’t happen at once. The process was slow and drawn out over eons, with lifeless chemicals slowly ...

Crucial for marine life and the global economy, coral reefs are the planet's first major environmental system to cross a ...

Researchers use lipid biomarkers to uncover how organisms survive in extreme ecosystems. A surprising variety of life exists within the ocean floor, much of it made up of microbes, tiny organisms ...

In Jezero Crater’s Bright Angel formation, Perseverance has found rocks rich in organic molecules and minerals linked to microbial metabolism. Their arrangement hints at redox reactions that resemble ...

In a peer-reviewed analysis, scientists quantify amino acids before and after our “ last universal common ancestor .” The ...

Gravity is the unseen force that shapes the universe, yet we rarely give it much thought. First explained by Sir Isaac Newton, it is the pull that draws objects toward one another based on their mass ...

We often wonder whether there are aliens on other planets but what if we ourselves are aliens on the planet we call home? Panspermia, the “controversial” theory that life “began elsewhere in space” ...

Mars is an inhospitable desert planet. Billions of years ago, things were different. In Jezero Crater, for example, fed by a ...

An international team of researchers has published a report on how Mars samples should be handled from a scientific point of ...