Scientists have shown that the building blocks of proteins can form naturally in deep space. This means the raw ingredients for life may exist long before planets are formed.

A pair of new studies suggest that key steps toward life’s chemistry may begin long before planets exist. Experiments ...

How can fission-powered propulsion help advance deep space exploration, specifically to the outer planets like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th ...

Some 2.5 million years ago, viruses in Lake Tanganyika experienced an unexplained explosion in diversity. A new study analyzing iron-60 found in the lakebed suggests that the explosion of a ‘nearby’ ...

In April, scientists captured global attention by announcing they’d found a molecule in a faraway planet’s atmosphere that could signal life there. But a new analysis by University of Chicago ...

Imagine if Earth's history had a mystery novel, and one of its biggest unsolved puzzles was: Where did all the nitrogen go? Scientists have long known that our planet's rocky outer layers—the ...