Yet modern biology has revealed that cells are preternaturally sophisticated assemblages — literally automated, miniaturized factories. How could the evidence have been overwhelming but now orthodoxy ...

Paleontologists who study earth’s ancient fossil record might not seem to be the obvious choice when asking about the prevalence of intelligent life in the cosmos. But paleontology, the study of ...

For decades, scientists assumed that life on Earth emerged through a chain of highly improbable flukes. But a new theory suggests it may have instead arrived just in time. When you purchase through ...

The origins of life on Earth have long fascinated scientists, particularly the nature of the last universal common ancestor (LUCA). LUCA, the root of the evolutionary tree from which Bacteria and ...

Fossilized skeletons and shells clearly show how evolution and extinction unfolded over the past half a billion years, but a new analysis extends the chart of life to nearly 2 billion years ago. The ...

A popular model of evolution concludes that it was incredibly unlikely for humanity to evolve on Earth, and that extraterrestrial intelligence is vanishingly rare. But as experts on the entangled ...

An international collaboration has published groundbreaking research, shedding light on the most significant increase in complexity in the history of life's evolution on Earth: the origin of the ...

Giant DNA viruses that infect eukaryotic cells are thought to have played a role in the evolution of life, according to the ...

One of the stranger forms of life on our planet is the tiny, torpedo-shaped chaetognath, which roams the seas on the hunt for small crustaceans. These predators are named after the chitinous grasping ...