Origins of life

The noted mathematician and author Steven Strogatz explains how the conversations with experts in his new Quanta Magazine podcast address his lifelong fascination with timeless mysteries.

The discovery that short peptides can form spontaneously on cosmic dust hints at more of a role for them in the earliest stages of life’s origin, on Earth or elsewhere.

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.