A team of researchers led by Katherine Bermingham from Rutgers University in New Brunswick has discovered that water did not arrive on Earth at such an early stage of its formation as previously assumed. This finding has fundamental implications for determining when and how life could have originated on our planet. The study results, published […]
Life
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Ice Ages Accelerated Evolution After a “Boring Billion Years” of Slow Growth
Ancient species may have evolved more slowly and lasted longer, but the pace of evolution picked up after global ice ages, according to a new study from Virginia Tech. Published in the journal Science, the research traces the rise and fall of ancient life—long before the age of dinosaurs. If we think of the Earth […]
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The Genetic Code Shared by All Living Beings Is the Result of the Survival of One Among Several Primitive Codes
In the vast history of Earth, billions of years ago, an arid landscape dominated by volcanoes and shallow pools may have witnessed the beginning of something extraordinary: life. An illustrative scene generated by artificial intelligence captures this vision, with a primitive coastline serving as the backdrop for the early evolutionary steps that would define the […]
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Scientists Discover that Dark Energy Density in the Universe Determines the Likelihood of Intelligent Life Existing
A recent study led by scientists from Durham University explores a fundamental question in cosmology: How does the density of dark energy affect the likelihood of intelligent life arising in the Universe? To answer this question, the researchers developed a theoretical model inspired by the famous Drake Equation, which examines the ideal conditions for star […]
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Microorganisms discovered living hundreds of meters deep in Greenland 75 million years ago
A recent international study, led by Associate Professor Henrik Drake from Linnaeus University, has uncovered groundbreaking evidence that microorganisms lived deep beneath Greenland’s rocky surface 75 million years ago. This research offers new insights into the history of the “deep biosphere”, a hidden world of life existing far beneath the Earth’s surface. The deep biosphere […]
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Iron Was The First and Only Metal of Life’s Origin
Life as we know it relies on small quantities of metals to perform essential biological functions like breathing, DNA transcription, and energy conversion. Since the earliest forms of life floated in Earth’s primordial oceans, metals have played a crucial role in these processes. Almost half of the enzymes—proteins that drive chemical reactions within cells—require metals […]
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Scientists Reveal how the First Cells on Earth May Have Formed
About 4 billion years ago, Earth started developing the right ingredients for life. Scientists who study how life began wonder what chemicals were present back then. They want to know if the chemistry of early Earth was anything like what living things need today. They do know that spherical blobs of fats called protocells came […]
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NASA’s Perseverance Rover May Have Found Life on Mars
The NASA Perseverance rover has been exploring Mars’ Jezero Crater since 2021, and its latest discovery provides strong evidence that the crater once held a lake billions of years ago. Using its onboard radar instrument called RIMFAX, Perseverance was able to see over 20 meters below the surface and identify distinct layers of sediment deposited […]
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Dinosaurs could exist on other planets, which scientists believe would be easier to detect than modern Earth
Using historical Earth models, Cornell University scientists suggest that dinosaurs or large, complex life could exist on exoplanets with high oxygen levels, guided by identifiable “sunlight fingerprints”.
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Scientists Uncover a Novel Energy Metabolism that Could Sustain Life on Extraterrestrial Planets
Scientists have stumbled upon a groundbreaking discovery that might hold the key to life beyond Earth. Let’s rewind to the late ’80s when a scientist doodled some calculations on paper. This scientist figured out that turning a chemical called phosphite into phosphate could release enough energy to power a tiny organism. Imagine this microorganism being […]
