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 ...

An international collaboration between four scientists from Mainz, Valencia, Madrid, and Zurich has published new research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shedding light on the ...

Humanity may not be extraordinary but rather the natural evolutionary outcome for our planet and likely others, according to a new model for how intelligent life developed on Earth. Humanity may not ...

About 700 million years ago, enormous glaciers flowed across the Earth's surface in powerful frozen rivers like "giant ice bulldozers" that pulverized our planet's crust and may have contributed to ...

In a world where evolutionary biology often gets boiled down to simplistic hierarchies of "primitive" and "advanced" species, a new book by University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) biologist ...

Planetary systems such as our solar system take hundreds of millions of years to evolve. Since humanity has only existed for a sliver of that time, astronomers have only observed planetary systems at ...

Eons ago, long before T. rex or any other large multicellular life roamed the planet, life on Earth got stuck. After inventing single-celled organisms and teaching them biochemical tricks such as the ...

Daniel Brady Mills receives funding from the German Research Foundation. Jason Wright works for Penn State University, where his research in the search for life in the universe is supported by ...

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 ...