Long before oceans teemed with life, Earth endured relentless violence. Asteroids slammed into its surface again and again, ...

When the sun dies, it will become hundreds of times its current size and engulf the innermost planets. Earth may escape this ...

For decades, many scientists have relied on the "hard steps" model to suggest that intelligent life is rare — the improbable result of a series of unlikely evolutionary leaps. But new research by ...

For a long time, Earth’s ending seemed settled. In about five billion years, the sun will swell into a giant, the inner Solar ...

Two astronauts in full spacesuits with backpacks on a space walk with tethers, facing each other with hands out. The astronauts are in front of planet earth and some distant stars are also visible.

The emergence of the first biopolymers and their building blocks on the early Earth is considered a key moment in the origin of life (OoL), but how life began on the prebiotic Earth from a pile of ...

Researchers propose that tiny mineral nanoparticles may have been the hidden engines that transformed Earth’s early chemistry into the first building blocks of life. By acting as natural catalysts and ...

When the sun dies, it will become hundreds of times its current size and engulf the innermost planets. Earth may escape this ...

All life on Earth can be traced back to a Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA. A study suggests that this organism likely lived on Earth only 400 million years after its formation. Further ...

“Using a bombardment history model to infer the cumulative effects of recurring impacts, we estimate that the upper 5-mile (8-kilometer) shell of the Earth’s crust likely was highly permeable 4.3 ...

Our understanding of the coevolution of Earth’s surface environment and the biosphere is built on 50+ years of data collection and interpretation. Given the addition of data, and reinterpretations of ...

A collaborative team of scientists has discovered that life on Earth over three billion years ago relied on the metal molybdenum, which was incredibly scarce in the environment at the time. The study, ...