The tree of life is rooted at the “origin of life.” One model holds that core biochemistry, which includes the genetic code, the ribosome, biopolymer backbones, and amino acid and […]
Mississippi State biologist Matthew W. Brown, the university’s Donald L. Hall Professor of Biology, is part of an international research team whose groundbreaking discovery is featured Nov. 19 in Nature—one […]
The search for life in the Solar System hinges on data from planetary missions. Biosignatures based on molecular identity, isotopic composition, or chiral excess require measurements that current and planned […]
Editor’s note: If we aspire to mount expeditions to new worlds and then embrace the task of characterizing and quantifying whatever life forms we find, the ability to map and […]
Trees get most of the love, but diatoms, a group of photosynthetic microalgae, produce 20% of Earth’s oxygen and are the foundation of aquatic food webs. The prevalence and diversity […]
Astrobiology.com Editor’s note: Recently the Fram2 mission took four astronaut explorers on an orbital path that covered both of our planet’s polar regions. This was the fist human mission to […]
The deep sea, covering approximately 65% of Earth’s surface, has long been considered a biological desert. In this extreme environment—particularly in the hadal zone at depths greater than 6,000 meters—organisms […]
Shortly after an asteroid slammed into Earth 66 million years ago, life for non-avian dinosaurs ended, but the evolutionary story for the early ancestors of birds began.
Editor’s note: When we begin to study the variety iof life forms on other worlds we’ll need to have a way to catalog what we have discovered, make an image […]
The most up-to-date understanding of the flowering plant tree of life is presented in a new study published today in the journal Nature by an international team of 279 scientists, […]
