On 18 February next year, a NASA spacecraft will plummet through the Martian atmosphere, fire its retro-rockets to break its fall and then lower a six-wheeled rover named Perseverance to the surface.

Life has found a home on Earth for around 4 billion years. That's a significant fraction of the universe's 13.77 billion-year history. Presumably, if life arose here, it could have appeared anywhere.

How life emerged on Earth is among the most significant mysteries in science. Though it remains an open question in biology, scientists have some pretty promising theories as to how a chemical soup ...

A giant impact on the early Earth could have brought the building blocks of RNA to our planet, which new research suggests could have quickly formed in the presence of compounds called borates. When ...

The origin of life on Earth stands as one of the great mysteries of science. Various answers have been proposed, all of which remain unverified. To find out if we are alone in the galaxy, we will need ...

The first living organisms may have relied on nickel and sulphur to obtain energy and sustain themselves. That is the conclusion of a study that shows how nickel sulphide can transform simple ...