Research partly conducted at the Advanced Photon Source helped scientists discover the composition of Earth’s first atmosphere. What they found raises questions about the origin of life on Earth. A ...

In 1952, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey made sparks fly in a gas-filled flask meant to reflect the composition of Earth's atmosphere around 3.8 billion years ago. Their results suggested that ...

A new University of Colorado at Boulder study indicates Earth in its infancy probably had substantial quantities of hydrogen in its atmosphere, a surprising finding that may alter the way many ...

There aren’t a lot of individual experiments that have ended up being staples of high school textbooks, but Stanley Miller and Harold Urey did one of them. Miller and Urey are the people who sealed up ...

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When Earth was young, its surface was probably covered in a magma ocean, and the gases rising from that seething sea may have provided it with an atmosphere nearly identical to the toxic one present ...

Researchers recreated conditions from billions of years ago and found that Earth’s young atmosphere could make key molecules linked to life. These sulfur-rich compounds, including certain amino acids, ...

Organic haze in the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon, Titan, is similar to haze in early Earth’s air — haze that may have helped nourish life on our planet– according to a NASA Astrobiology Institute study ...

Early Mars may have been a warm version of modern Titan and at least as promising a site for the origin of life as early Earth was, if not more promising. The data constraining the model is the ...

“The so-called ‘faint young Sun paradox’ has long been a topic of debate because its resolution bears important ramifications for the basic factors structuring climate regulation and the long-term ...

A new analysis of 2.5-billion-year-old rocks from Australia finds that volcanic eruptions may have stimulated population surges of marine microorganisms, creating the first puffs of oxygen into the ...