"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: All life on Earth can be traced back to a Last ...

All life on Earth can be traced back to a Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA. A study suggests that this organism likely lived on Earth only 400 million years after its formation. Further ...

the Earth you walk on today might not be the same planet that was born 4.5 billion years ago. Many scientists believe that in its infancy, Earth collided with another world the size of Mars, and that ...

The question of when life began on Earth is as old as human culture. “It’s one of these fundamental human questions: When did life appear on Earth?” said Professor Martin Whitehouse of the Swedish ...

Select an option below to continue reading this premium story. Already a Honolulu Star-Advertiser subscriber? Log in now to continue reading. The exact sequence of events behind eukaryogenesis is ...

From a distance, Biosphere 2 emerges from the cacti and creosote of the Sonoran desert like a gleaming oasis, a colony of glass and bright white structures. Despite being just outside Tucson, Arizona, ...

New research from Japan's iron-rich hot springs shows how early microbes may have harnessed iron and oxygen during the Great Oxygenation Event. Some 2.3 billion years ago, the Earth would have been ...

During Earth's ancient Snowball periods, when the entire planet was wrapped in ice, life may have endured in tiny meltwater ponds on the surface of equatorial glaciers. MIT researchers discovered that ...

Earth is so far the only known planet on which life exists—with liquid water and a stable atmosphere. However, the conditions were not conducive to life when it formed. The gas-dust cloud from which ...

Plants, plankton and sea spray all release elements that help the atmospheric blankets form Max G. Levy The view from a research aircraft that scientists use to collect data from high in Earth’s ...

Amid growing debates about the benefits and risks of studying looking-glass versions of life’s building blocks, there is an urgent need to bridge divergent views. Prohibiting the creation of molecules ...