Comets may have played a major role in bringing life to Earth—and now, researchers have discovered that they may be doing the same thing for other, faraway planets. For a planet to sustain life, it ...

Grab-and-go missions to asteroids have provided some of the most scientifically valuable samples since the Apollo ...

Scientists have found uracil, one of the key building blocks for RNA, on the 200 million-mile-distant asteroid Ryugu When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

The origin of life remains one of science’s greatest mysteries. Samples returned from asteroid Bennu by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission are now offering remarkable new clues. Scientists have identified ...

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 ...

Over the short span of just 300 years, since the invention of modern physics, we have gained a deeper understanding of how our universe works on both small and large scales. Yet, physics is still very ...

For decades, popular science has repeated a simple origin story: everything in our bodies was forged in ancient stars and ...

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 original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Life on other worlds—if it exists—might be so alien as to be unrecognizable. There’s no guarantee that alien biology would use the same ...