Origins of life

We might have a past faint sun to owe for life’s existence. This has consequences for the possibility of life outside Earth.

A mathematical model shows how a thermodynamic mechanism could have made protocells split in two.

New work suggests that the radiolytic splitting of water supports giant subsurface ecosystems of life on Earth — and could do it elsewhere, too.

The ingredients for reactions ancestral to metabolism could have formed very easily in the primordial soup, new work suggests.

To recognize strange extraterrestrial life and solve biological mysteries on this planet, scientists are searching for an objective definition for life’s basic units.

Cosmic rays may have given right-handed genetic helixes an evolutionary edge at the beginning of life’s history.

Newly discovered worlds of microbes far beneath the ocean floor, inside old basaltic rocks, could point to a greater likelihood of life elsewhere in the universe.

Origin-of-life researchers have usually studied the potential of pure starting materials, but messy mixtures of chemicals may kick-start life more effectively.

New studies revise ideas about the symbiosis that gave mitochondria to cells and about whether the last common ancestor of all eukaryotes was one cell or many.