Early Earth may have reached a sweet spot when cooler crust and widespread hydrothermal systems gave fragile prebiotic chemistry time to persist.

Conditions on early Earth may have become stable enough to sustain the chemistry associated with the origins of life around 4 ...

In the early 1960s, the RNA world hypothesis emerged as an answer to this question. RNA is the single-stranded cousin of DNA, the molecule that contains the genetic information for cellular biology.

Earth is the only life-supporting planet we know of, so it's tempting to use it as a standard in the search for life elsewhere. But the modern Earth can't serve as a basis for evaluating exoplanets ...

Methane could form much more easily, and much more widely, on early Earth than scientists previously realized, according to a recent study in the journal Nature. The chemical compound, made of carbon ...

IMAGE: A new study by CU-Boulder researchers indicates a thick organic haze shrouding Earth several billion years ago was similar to the one now hovering over Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. University ...

Ancient asteroid impacts may have done more than reshape Earth's surface—they could have helped spark life itself. New computer models show the collisions created enormous underground hydrothermal ...

One broken piece of quartz in a physics lab could shed light on the history of life on Earth and the search for other habitable worlds. Today, most life as we know it depends on oxygen. Specifically, ...