Researchers in the field of synthetic biology are still a long way from being able to assemble living cells from scratch in the laboratory. But according to biochemist David Deamer of the University ...

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The origin of life on Earth becomes even more fascinating and complex as we peer into the mysterious world of viruses. Said to have existed since living cells first appeared, these microscopic ...

How can we know what life on Earth looked like more than three billion years ago, when rocks from that era are so rare and ...

A team from the University of Illinois has uncovered surprising evolutionary links between the genetic code and tiny protein fragments called dipeptides. By analyzing billions of dipeptide sequences ...

Genes are the building blocks of life, and the genetic code provides the instructions for the complex processes that make organisms function. But how and why did it come to be the way it is? A recent ...

Daniel Brady Mills receives funding from the German Research Foundation. Jason Wright works for Penn State University, where his research in the search for life in the universe is supported by ...

A biochemist, building on the pillars of evolutionary theory and drawing on cutting-edge research into the link between energy and genes, argues that the evolution of multicellular life was the result ...

In a new book, astrophysicist Mario Livio describes how the existence of life on Earth can be traced back to an RNA-based “protocell.” The following is an excerpt from Is Earth Exceptional?: The Quest ...