They say the reaction might have made the building blocks of DNA and RNA, both essential for life.

The origin of life on Earth has always been a mystery. For many years, scientists have looked to the stars, believing that the building blocks of life that set forth evolution here on our planet came ...

Researchers propose that tiny mineral nanoparticles may have been the hidden engines that transformed Earth’s early chemistry ...

See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. Scientists have simulated the formation of fatty acids, a key component ...

Living organisms arose from lifeless chemistry. But how? Perhaps the chemicals that support life as we know it also supported primordial life. If so, primordial life relied on RNA and DNA, as the RNA ...

A 45-nucleotide strand of RNA can now synthesize both its mirror-image complement and a copy of itself, bringing scientists closer than ever to demonstrating how life could have emerged from chemistry ...

That life arose a bit like "Boltzmann brain" - randomly with extremely low probability (e.g suppose that there's soup of random RNAs, and one in 4^200 such molecules is an autocatalyst that will ...