The work, which exploits a natural process where plant cells die on purpose to help the host plant stay healthy, is expected ...

Several key moments in Earth's history help us humans answer the question "How did we get here?" These moments also shed ...

A new study reveals that the aerobic nitrogen cycle in the ocean may have occurred about 100 million years before oxygen began to significantly accumulate in the atmosphere, based on nitrogen isotope ...

If they’re right, complex and intelligent life should be widespread. In this new view, biological evolution appears not as a unique process that gave rise to a qualitatively distinct form of matter — ...

“These single-cell organisms can do things that we assume are limited to more complex organisms,” said Shashank Shekhar, a biophysicist at Emory University in Atlanta who is the lead author of ...

But scientists have found that a more complex organism — a single-celled alga with a nucleus — can do it, too, thanks to a newly identified piece of cellular architecture. They're calling it ...

The clearest picture yet of our “last universal common ancestor” suggests it was a relatively complex organism living 4.2 billion years ago, a time long considered too harsh for life to flourish. If ...

In the blink of a geologic eye (hundreds of millions of years), all the basic biology needed to sustain complex organisms was worked out, and the paths to all modern life, ranging from periwinkles ...

“We have this idea that this was a fairly complex organism, already possibly by the time of like 4.2 billion years ago.” Scientists as far back as biologist Charles Darwin have proposed that ...

"The availability of phosphorus in the environment is thought to be a key component in the evolution of life on Earth, especially in the transition from simple single-cell organisms to complex ...

A new study published in Science Advances reveals a surprising twist in the evolutionary history of complex life. Researchers at Queen Mary University of London have discovered that a single-celled ...

“The first time we think it happened, it gave rise to all complex life.” Endosymbiosis where the host life form becomes fundamental to another organism’s function has only happened three ...