Purple bacteria contain pigments that allow them to use sunlight as their source of energy, hence their color. Small as they are, these microbes can teach us a lot about […]
Origin & Evolution of Life
Posted inHabitable Zones, Origin & Evolution of Life, Plant Biology
Greening of the Earth pushed way back in time
Conventional scientific wisdom has it that plants and other creatures have only lived on land for about 500 million years, and that landscapes of the early Earth were as barren […]
Posted inHabitable Zones, Origin & Evolution of Life
A Stepping-Stone for Oxygen on Earth
For most terrestrial life on Earth, oxygen is necessary for survival. But the planet’s atmosphere did not always contain this life-sustaining substance, and one of science’s greatest mysteries is how […]
Posted inBiosignatures & Paleobiology, Mars, Origin & Evolution of Life
Martian Clay Contains Chemical Implicated in the Origin of Life
Researchers from the University of Hawaii at Manoa NASA Astrobiology Institute (UHNAI) have discovered high concentrations of boron in a Martian meteorite. When present in its oxidized form (borate), boron […]
Posted inBiogeochemical Cycles & Geobiology, Biosignatures & Paleobiology, Origin & Evolution of Life, Press Release
Scientists Find Possible Solution to an Ancient Enigma
The widespread disappearance of stromatolites, the earliest visible manifestation of life on Earth, may have been driven by single-celled organisms called foraminifera. Image: Stromatolites, once widespread in coastal areas, now […]
Posted inAtmospheres, Climate, Weather, Biogeochemical Cycles & Geobiology, Biosignatures & Paleobiology, Origin & Evolution of Life, Press Release, Water/Hycean Worlds & Oceanography
Evidence for Iron-Rich Ancient Ocean Changes View of Earth’s Early History
Over the last half-billion years, the ocean mostly has been full of oxygen and teeming with animal life. But earlier, before animals evolved, oxygen was harder to come by. Now […]
Posted inGaia - Planetary Perspectives, Genomics, Proteomics, Bioinformatics, Nomenclature, Systematics, Natural History, Origin & Evolution of Life, Press Release
Untangling The Tree of Life on Earth
Two recent high-profile phylogenetic studies reached conflicting conclusions about whether snail’s closest relatives are bivalves or an enigmatic group called tusk shells. Vanderbilt phylogeneticists suggest that the cause of this […]
Posted inBiogeochemical Cycles & Geobiology, Biosignatures & Paleobiology, Origin & Evolution of Life, Press Release
Microbial Hunting Found in 1.9 Billion Year Old Fossils
Tiny 1,900 million-year-old fossils from rocks around Lake Superior, Canada, give the first ever snapshot of organisms eating each other and suggest what the ancient Earth would have smelled like. […]
Posted inBiosignatures & Paleobiology, Habitable Zones, Origin & Evolution of Life
Rethinking Early Atmospheric Oxygen on Earth
A research team of biogeochemists at the University of California, Riverside has provided a new view on the relationship between the earliest accumulation of oxygen in the atmosphere, arguably the […]
Posted inArctic / Antarctic / Alpine, Origin & Evolution of Life, Press Release, Water/Hycean Worlds & Oceanography
Brinicles or sea stalactites provide clues to origin of life
Life on Earth may have originated not in warm tropical seas, but with weird tubes of ice — sometimes called “sea stalactites” — that grow downward into cold seawater near […]