In a series of recent animal studies, a handful of deceptively simple molecules have done something that once sounded like ...

A research group has explored how the chemical molecules that could have given rise to life were assembled. Life is a process that originated 3.5 billion years ago. It emerged when the basic ...

Origin-of-life researchers face a deceptively straightforward question: how did simple chemicals produce complex biochemistry? The complexity of this starts to come in when you consider the many ...

An Indian scientist at the University College London has fused two fundamental building blocks of life, ribonucleic acid (RNA) and amino acids, in laboratory experiments that have advanced the decades ...

CORRECTION: On Oct. 21, 2014, this story was corrected to explain that when antibiotics kill bacterial cells, they exert a selection pressure on the microbes to develop resistance. During an infection ...

A team of chemists at the University of Cambridge has developed a powerful new method for adding single carbon atoms to molecules more easily, offering a simple one-step approach that could accelerate ...

Highly reactive complex molecules finding some sort of stability was a necessary step towards life getting started on Earth. Scientists think they've just discovered how these first began to stay ...