Featured series 
Tag: Origins of life
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Nation & World
Life’s Frankenstein monster beginnings
The evolution of the first building blocks on Earth may have been messier than previously thought, likening it to the mishmash creation of Frankenstein’s monster.
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Nation & World
Life, with another ingredient
In a paper published in PNAS, Jack W. Szostak, professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard, along with graduate student Seohyun (Chris) Kim, suggest that RNA could have started with a different set of nucleotide bases. In place of guanine, RNA could have relied on a surrogate, inosine.
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Nation & World
How Earth was watered
Evidence is mounting that Earth’s water arrived during formation, aboard meteorites and small bodies called “planetesimals.”
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Nation & World
Putting humanity in its place
Professor Charles Langmuir worked for 10 years on an update of “How to Build a Habitable Planet,” a textbook published in 1985 by famed geoscientist Wallace Broecker.
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Nation & World
The search for life’s stirrings
As science wrestles with the problem of how life arose on Earth, hindsight shows that seemingly intractable obstacles can have simple, even elegant solutions, said Nobel laureate Jack Szostak.
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Nation & World
Earthly extremes hint to life elsewhere
Scientists are examining single-celled organisms in extreme environments for clues to what life might look like on the myriad planets being discovered in the universe.
