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 ...

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 ...

In a peer-reviewed analysis, scientists quantify amino acids before and after our “last universal common ancestor.” The last universal common ancestor (LUCA) is the single life form that branched into ...

Half a century ago, a quiet theorist working far from the big Western labs proposed a radical answer to one of science’s hardest questions: what, exactly, makes something alive. His framework for how ...

In many submerged regions, murky mud shelters strange life-forms that seem to be the key to one of the biggest mysteries of life on Earth. These creatures belong to a domain of life called the archaea ...

Today, when NCERT textbooks assert that Brahmagupta and Bhaskaracharya developed algebra independently and before Arab ...