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 ...

A 13-atom molecule containing sulfur has been discovered in interstellar space for the first time, providing insight into the origins of the chemistry of life.

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, ...

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

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 ...

The chemical foundations of life could be found in the frigid pockets of molecular clouds that exist in the space between ...

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 ...

What made ribose the sugar of choice for life's code? Scientists at Scripps Research may have cracked a major part of this mystery. Their experiments show that ribose binds more readily and ...

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.