Still, no single model has yet shown exactly how life began.

A popular model of evolution concludes that it was incredibly unlikely for humanity to evolve on Earth, and that extraterrestrial intelligence is vanishingly rare. But as experts on the entangled ...

Ancient evidence suggests a new twist in how we all got here.

To celebrate the groundbreaking research of 2025 Drake Award recipients Dr. David Deamer and Dr. John Baross, the SETI Institute commissioned bioartist Dr. Jennifer Willet to create a unique artwork ...

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 ...

Billions of years of evolution have made modern cells incredibly complex. Inside cells are small compartments called organelles that perform specific functions essential for the cell’s survival and ...

One of the major unanswered questions about the origin of life is how droplets of RNA floating around the primordial soup turned into the membrane-protected packets of life we call cells. A new paper ...

When and where did life on Earth begin? What ingredients does the recipe for life require? Is there life out there beyond the stars, and if so, did it arise in the same way? Or are we alone in the ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Membrane-bound organelles were the textbook standard of how scientists thought cells were ...

In an important new paper forthcoming in the June issue of The Quarterly Review of Biology, Robert Shapiro (New York University) argues against the widely held theory that the origin of life began ...