When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Credit: Illustration by Julia Wytrazek / Getty Images The mystery of how life on Earth originated ...

All life on Earth can be traced back to a Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA. A study suggests that this organism likely lived on Earth only 400 million years after its formation. Further ...

How did life start on Earth? The answer is a big scientific mystery scientists are actively investigating. After talking with many scientists, host Regina G. Barber found that an abundance of water on ...

Earth has not always been so hospitable to live. During several ice ages, the planet's surface was almost completely frozen over, creating what has been dubbed "Snowball Earth". Liquid water appears ...

A new study published in July 2025 tackles one of science's most profound mysteries—how did life first emerge from nonliving matter on early Earth? Using cutting edge mathematical approaches, ...

Geophysicists have modeled how Earth’s magnetic field could form even when its core was fully liquid. By removing the effects ...

During Earth's ancient Snowball periods, when the entire planet was wrapped in ice, life may have endured in tiny meltwater ponds on the surface of equatorial glaciers. MIT researchers discovered that ...

The question of when life began on Earth is as old as human culture. “It’s one of these fundamental human questions: When did life appear on Earth?” said Professor Martin Whitehouse of the Swedish ...

It’s one of the most longstanding questions in biology: how did life first arise? Research on the topic abounds, but there’s no one accepted answer. And according to one new paper, the chances that ...

Water is essential when it comes to life on Earth, but how exactly it formed on the planet remains a mystery. Past evaluations have proven that the initial days of Earth were too hot to retain ice. At ...

New research has found that amino acids, the building blocks of life, may have traveled to Earth on interstellar dust grains, ...