The chemistry of life’s emergence, the way merely organic, carbon-containing molecules begin linking up into large, self-replicating molecules like DNA and form life, remains a mystery, but scientists ...

A new study explores how complex chemical mixtures change under shifting environmental conditions, shedding light on the prebiotic processes that may have led to life on Earth. In the Painted Desert ...

A team of researchers studied the properties of membranes to understand how these cellular structures influenced the chemistry of life on Earth as it began. How life arose remains a looming question ...

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Metabolism is the "beating heart of the cell". New research from ELSI retraces the history of metabolism from the primordial Earth to the modern day (left to right). The history of compound discovery ...

Several studies in recent years have found amino acids, some of the molecules that make up cell membranes, and other key pieces of the chemistry of life floating on grains of interstellar dust. But a ...

In a different reality, space might smell like almonds. After all, scientists surveying the chemicals in the cosmos have found benzonitrile; just a bit of the compound would fill your nostrils with a ...

For decades, astronomers treated starlight and dust as a simple conveyor belt, a steady wind that carried the raw ingredients ...

OF recent years much attention has been given to plant- or phyto-chemistry, if we may judge from the number of books which have been published on the subject. The origin of this attention can be ...

A new study explores how complex chemical mixtures change under shifting environmental conditions, shedding light on the prebiotic processes that may have led to life. By exposing organic molecules to ...