It may seem easy to distinguish whether something is alive or not. You are alive, as is your teacher, and the trees you see on your way to school. Your desk and chair are not alive, and neither are ...

Ultimately, the gel-first hypothesis does not claim to provide a definitive answer to the origin of life. Rather, it offers a conceptual framework—one that integrates soft-matter physics, systems ...

New scientific theory based on ancient proteins suggests that genes did not arise as we believed and that life could have started elsewhere.

Three scientists who discovered powerful techniques to decode and even design novel proteins—the building blocks of life—were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry Wednesday. Their work used advanced ...

A doctoral student recreated a tiny piece of the universe in a bottle to investigate the chemistry that led to life on Earth.

Metabolism is the "beating heart of the cell". New research from ELSI retraces the history of metabolism from the primordial Earth to the modern day (left to right). The history of compound discovery ...

A new study explores how complex chemical mixtures change under shifting environmental conditions, shedding light on the prebiotic processes that may have led to life. By exposing organic molecules to ...

Stanley L. Miller, an emeritus professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego whose famous laboratory experiments in 1952 demonstrated how the simple organic ...

Several studies in recent years have found amino acids, some of the molecules that make up cell membranes, and other key pieces of the chemistry of life floating on grains of interstellar dust. But a ...

Scientists have discovered the largest organic molecule containing sulfur — a key ingredient for life — ever identified in interstellar space. The researchers call the discovery a “missing link” in ...