Astronomers have spotted an unexpected chemical heavyweight drifting through deep space - and it may offer new clues about how life gets started. Detected near the center of the Milky Way, the ...

More than four billion years ago, Earth was a very different place. Pools of water froze and thawed in cycles, minerals shaped reactions, and molecules bumped into each other by chance. Out of this ...

Scientists may have discovered a reaction that provides the “missing link” to help explain how early life formed on Earth about 4 billion years ago. All living things contain ribonucleic acid, ...

In the crowded, turbulent heart of the Milky Way, scientists have picked out a fragile pattern of atoms that could help ...

"We used to think that only very simple molecules could be created in these clouds. But we have shown that this is clearly ...

New experiments reveal that protein precursors can form naturally in deep space under extreme cold and radiation. Scientists found that simple amino acids bond into peptides on interstellar dust, long ...

Challenging long-held assumptions, Aarhus University researchers have demonstrated that the protein building blocks essential for life as we know it can form readily in space. This discovery, ...

A complex form of carbon crucial for life on Earth has been spotted outside the solar system for the first time. Its presence helps show how the compounds needed for life could come from space. The ...

In living organisms today, complex molecules like RNA and DNA are constructed with the help of enzymes. So how did these molecules form before life (and enzymes) existed? Why did some molecules end up ...

Tremendous progress in the field of prebiotic chemistry has shown how simple compounds available on ancient Earth could have given rise to the molecular building blocks of life 1. The current ...

WASHINGTON – Stick a shovel in the ground and scoop. That’s about how deep scientists need to go in order to find evidence for ancient life on Mars, if there is any to be found, a new study suggests.