How will life on Earth end? Scientists explore extinction risks from asteroid impacts, gamma-ray bursts, and the Sun’s future transformation.

A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth: 4.6 Billion Years in 12 Pithy Chapters (Pan Macmillan, 2021 / Picador, 2022: Amazon US / Amazon UK), by senior Nature science editor and novelist, Henry ...

Nobody knows how life began on Earth, but some tantalizing clues from an asteroid suggest it might not have started here.

They are some of the most intensely studied species on Earth, and yet there is no comprehensive molecular phylogenetic hypothesis of primate evolutionary history that summarizes the pattern and ...

They’re the building rocks of life. Analysis of debris from the nearly 5 billion-year-old asteroid Bennu suggests the ingredients to life on Earth were present in the early days of our solar ...

Life made the modern Earth as much as the Earth made life, a new book by a philosopher of consciousness argues. That dynamic leaves humans with a unique set of moral questions, Peter Godfrey-S… ...

The essential ingredient for life, water, appeared on both planets around 4.4 billion years ago, new research indicates.

New research suggests that the carbon that serves as the building blocks of life "took the long way around" the galaxy before coming together to make up our bodies here on Earth.

Scientists have detected organic compounds and minerals necessary for life in the samples collected by the OSIRIS-REx mission from a near-Earth asteroid named Bennu.

Few questions in the history of science eclipse the all-important investigation into how life first formed on Earth.

A modest NASA space telescope with grand ambitions will soon launch into an orbit around Earth. Here's why scientists are excited about it.

Newly discovered fossil records hint that mold-like unicellular organisms — the common ancestor to all complex life on our planet — arrived over a billion years earlier than previous estimates.