Approximately four billion years ago, the first forms of life emerged on Earth. For eons, biological life consisted of prokaryotic organisms, either early bacteria or archaea. Determining when ...

In 1944, Erwin Schrödinger published a book called What Is Life?. The physicist, famous for his alive-and-dead cat, clearly relished a brainteaser. Today, there is still no good definition. Life is ...

I keep coming back to the same unsettling thought: we may have just stumbled onto a form of life that does not fit any category biologists currently recognize. The discovery is forcing researchers to ...

The origin of life on Earth becomes even more fascinating and complex as we peer into the mysterious world of viruses. Said to have existed since living cells first appeared, these microscopic ...

Here’s what you will learn when you read this story: Abiogenesis—the emergence of life from nonliving organics—is the leading theory regarding how life spawned on Earth, but it is being questioned.