When the first spark of life emerged on a young, ocean-covered Earth some four billion years ago, it didn’t happen at once. The process was slow and drawn out over eons, with lifeless chemicals slowly ...

Billions of years ago, Earth’s atmosphere was hostile, with barely any oxygen and toxic conditions for life. Researchers from the Earth-Life Science Institute studied Japan’s iron-rich hot springs, ...

Earth was not always the blue-green world we know today: the early Earth's oxygen levels were about a million times lower than we now experience. There were no forests and no animals. For ancient ...

Scientists have traced the origins of complex life to the breakup of the supercontinent Nuna 1.5 billion years ago. This tectonic shift reduced volcanic carbon emissions, expanded shallow seas, and ...

AFTER THE second world war, Leo Szilard, a pioneering nuclear physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project, decided to move into biology instead: life; not death. But there was a problem. As a ...