At the bottom of a frigid Antarctic lake, a thin layer of green slime is generating a little oasis of oxygen, a team including UC Davis researchers has found. It’s […]
Origin & Evolution of Life
Posted inOrigin & Evolution of Life, Press Release, Water/Hycean Worlds & Oceanography
Evidence of Ancient Life Discovered in Mantle Rocks Deep Below the Seafloor
Ancient rocks harbored microbial life deep below the seafloor, reports a team of scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), Virginia Tech, and the University of Bremen. This new […]
Posted inFossils & Paleontology, Origin & Evolution of Life, Press Release
Earliest Evidence of Reproduction in a Complex Organism
A new study of 565 million-year-old fossils has identified how some of the first complex organisms on Earth possibly some of the first animals to exist reproduced, revealing the origins […]
Posted inAstrobiology (general), Astrochemistry, Extremeophiles and Extreme Environments, Origin & Evolution of Life, Press Release
Space Kombucha in the Search for Life and Its Origin
You might know it as a drink for hipsters or as an ancient brew drunk for centuries in Eurasia, but the culture that ferments sugary tea into Kombucha is going […]
Posted inGenomics, Proteomics, Bioinformatics, Origin & Evolution of Life, Press Release
Bleach a Possible Key to Life on Earth
Hydrogen peroxide — commonly used as hair bleach — may have provided the energy source for the development of life on Earth, two applied mathematicians have found. The heat from […]
Posted inOrigin & Evolution of Life, Press Release
Finding the Origins of Life in a Drying Puddle
Anyone who’s ever noticed a water puddle drying in the sun has seen an environment that may have driven the type of chemical reactions that scientists believe were critical to […]
Posted inAstrochemistry, Origin & Evolution of Life, Press Release
Meteoritic Abundances of Nucleobases and Potential Reaction Pathways
Carbonaceous chondrites are a class of meteorite known for having a high content of water and organics. In this study, abundances of the nucleobases, i.e., the building blocks of RNA […]
Posted inAstrochemistry, Origin & Evolution of Life, Press Release, Water/Hycean Worlds & Oceanography
Water Was Plentiful in the Early Universe
Astronomers have long held that water — two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom — was a relative latecomer to the universe. They believed that any element heavier than helium […]
Posted inGenomics, Proteomics, Bioinformatics, Origin & Evolution of Life, Press Release
Missing Link in the Evolution of Complex Cells Discovered
Together with colleagues from Uppsala University in Sweden and the University of Vienna in Austria, Steffen Leth Jrgensen from the Centre for Geobiology at the University of Bergen (UiB) has […]
Posted inAstrochemistry, Origin & Evolution of Life
A Hot Start to the Origin of Life?
DNA is synonymous with life, but where did it originate? One way to answer this question is to try to recreate the conditions that formed DNA’s molecular precursors. These precursors […]