Elon Musk says SpaceX’s Starship could become one of the most important milestones in the evolution of life, arguing the fully reusable rocket could make humanity multi-planetary.

Yet modern biology has revealed that cells are preternaturally sophisticated assemblages — literally automated, miniaturized factories. How could the evidence have been overwhelming but now orthodoxy ...

Chris Impey receives funding from the National Science Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. We have only one example of biology forming in the universe – life on Earth. But what if life ...

Paleontologists who study earth’s ancient fossil record might not seem to be the obvious choice when asking about the prevalence of intelligent life in the cosmos. But paleontology, the study of ...

For decades, scientists assumed that life on Earth emerged through a chain of highly improbable flukes. But a new theory suggests it may have instead arrived just in time. When you purchase through ...

We have only one example of biology forming in the universe—life on Earth. But what if life can form in other ways? How do you look for alien life when you don’t know what alien life might look like?

A study presents a striking example of cooperative organization among cells as a potential force in the evolution of multicellular life. The study is based on the fluid dynamics of cooperative feeding ...

There are "costs of life" that mechanical physics cannot calculate. A clear example is the energy required to keep specific ...

Fossilized skeletons and shells clearly show how evolution and extinction unfolded over the past half a billion years, but a new analysis extends the chart of life to nearly 2 billion years ago. The ...

Giant DNA viruses that infect eukaryotic cells are thought to have played a role in the evolution of life, according to the ...