Astronomers have found that both the core of our Milky Way and the earliest proto-galaxies in the universe share a surprising ...

Astronomers have spotted an unexpected chemical heavyweight drifting through deep space - and it may offer new clues about how life gets started. Detected near the center of the Milky Way, the ...

A new NASA analysis concludes that it is "reasonable to hypothesize" that living things could have formed the odd organic ...

Scientists have many theories about how Earth's raw materials turned into living cells, but a new proposal is particularly slimy. In a recent paper, an international team argues that life may have ...

In living organisms today, complex molecules like RNA and DNA are constructed with the help of enzymes. So how did these molecules form before life (and enzymes) existed? Why did some molecules end up ...

A team of scientists just discovered the longest organic molecules yet seen on Mars, the fourth planet from the Sun and and a tantalizing venue for humankind’s search for life beyond Earth. Mars today ...

Scientists may be one step closer in their hunt for signs of past life on Mars after the Curiosity rover's latest find.

What made ribose the sugar of choice for life's code? Scientists at Scripps Research may have cracked a major part of this mystery. Their experiments show that ribose binds more readily and ...

A complex form of carbon crucial for life on Earth has been spotted outside the solar system for the first time. Its presence helps show how the compounds needed for life could come from space. The ...

A self-portrait of NASA’s Curiosity rover taken on June 15, 2018, when a Martian dust storm had reduced sunlight and visibility at the rover’s location in Gale Crater. (Image: NASA) A study published ...

Tremendous progress in the field of prebiotic chemistry has shown how simple compounds available on ancient Earth could have given rise to the molecular building blocks of life 1. The current ...

In 2025, scientists reported the discovery of long-chain organic molecules called alkanes in the ancient mudstones of Mars. Now, in a new study, a team led by Alexander Pavlov of NASA's Goddard Space ...