Life on Earth may exist thanks to an incredible stroke of luck — a chemical sweet spot that most planets miss during their ...

Life on Earth rests on a knife-edge of chemistry that could easily have tipped the other way. As geochemists reconstruct the planet’s birth, they are finding that a narrow band of oxygen conditions ...

The new plot twist is that in order to keep enough nitrogen and phosphorus near its surface, a planet has to start out with ...

Earth’s habitability may trace back to a precise chemical balance during its formation, one that kept life-critical elements from disappearing into the core or drifting into space.

New method reveals chemical signs of early microbial life in ancient Earth rocks, showing photosynthesis evolved much earlier than believed.

Fossilized remnants of ancient carbon from the heart of South Africa's Mpumalanga province have just yielded the earliest chemical evidence yet of life on Earth. According to a new analysis using ...

At the University of Sydney, a Ph.D. student has recreated a tiny slice of outer space and used it to make cosmic dust from ...

Ancient enzymes show life’s nitrogen signal stayed unchanged for billions of years, helping scientists read early Earth.