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

The Biosphere 2 facility, specifically its Landscape Evolution Observatory (LEO), serves as a research platform to investigate how life transforms landscapes, ranging from local environments to ...

Imagine a landscape so barren it resembles Mars itself, where some weather stations have never recorded a single drop of rain in their entire operational history. This isn't science fiction – it's the ...

Interstellar dust like that seen in the Carina Nebula may have supplied some of Earth's amino acids. Earlier studies have revealed high concentrations of these organic materials in asteroids and ...

Select an option below to continue reading this premium story. Already a Honolulu Star-Advertiser subscriber? Log in now to continue reading. The exact sequence of events behind eukaryogenesis is ...

Fungi live in all corners of the world. They live in soil, float in the air, and thrive in oceans. They recycle nutrients, form alliances with plants, and sometimes infect them with disease. Though ...

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

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

Microbes high in Earth’s stratosphere produce pigments to protect them from UV light – so similar molecules could be ...

Biosphere 2's latest mission: Learning how life first emerged on Earth, and how to make barren worlds habitable by Scott Saleska, Chris Impey, Ghiwa Makke, The Conversation edited by Gaby Clark, ...