Origin of Life

A Scientist Considers Life’s Genesis Through the Physics of Exodus

A review of Jeremy England’s new book, Every Life Is on Fire.

Science

What Alien Life Could Teach Us About Humanity

Have we found extraterrestrial life but not recognized it?

Freethink

DNA Nearly a Billion Years Old Is Being Warped to Figure Out How Life Could Evolve on Other Planets

Betül Kaçar and her team studied what happened when E.coli cells were evolutionarily undone and then had to re-evolve.

SyFy Wire

Searching High and Low for the Origins of Life

Researchers think they’re getting warmer: They’ve created amino acids and primitive membranes by simulating conditions found at scalding vents on the ocean floor.

Knowable Magazine

What Is an Individual? Biology Seeks Clues in Information Theory

To recognize strange extraterrestrial life and solve biological mysteries on this planet, scientists are searching for an objective definition for life’s basic units.

Quanta Magazine

What Is Philosophy of Biology?

Watch the interview series.

Closer To Truth

The Phosphate Problem for the Origin of Life May Be Solved

And it may help us decide whether to search for life on ocean worlds or lake worlds.

Air & Space Magazine

Why Carbon?

Musings on a symphony in C.

Scientific American

The Urgency of Agency

Our consciousness gets in the way of thinking about evolution.

Life, Unbounded, Scientific American

What If Life Did Not Originate on Earth?

The Curiosity rover recently discovered methane on Mars, which could be a sign of life. Gary Ruvkun, a molecular biologist and professor of genetics at Harvard, wants to search for DNA in space.

The New Yorker

A Geologist Offers a Melodic Meditation on One of Earth’s Most Abundant Elements

Although organic chemistry is often described as the science of carbon, Robert Hazen’s latest book, Symphony in C, makes clear that this vital element cannot be contained by such a disciplinary boundary.

Science

New NASA Mission Will Fly Titan’s Frigid Skies to Search for Life’s Beginnings

Dragonfly, a nuclear-powered drone, will visit Saturn’s largest moon in the 2030s.

Scientific American

Life ≠ Alive

A cat is alive, a sofa is not: that much we know. But a sofa is also part of life. Information theory tells us why.

Aeon

The New Physics Needed to Probe the Origins of Life

Stuart Kauffman’s provocative take on emergence and evolution energizes Sara Imari Walker.

Nature

Paul Davies on the Origin of Life and the Evolution of Cancer

Physicist Paul Davies is interested in some of the biggest questions that we can ask. What is life? How did the universe begin? How will it end? And are we alone?

The Life Scientific, BBC Radio 4

Is the Universe Pro-Life?

An old and profound existential question is receiving new interest from the scientific community: Was the emergence of life in the universe an improbable event, or the opposite, an inevitable one?

Quartz

What Is Life?

A podcast about the really, really big questions.

Carl Zimmer

How an Ancient Cataclysm May Have Jump-Started Life on Earth

Its starring role is inferred because it would solve a bevy of mysteries, says Steven Benner, an origin of life researcher at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Alachua, Florida, who organized the Origins of Life Workshop.

Science

Computing the Origin of Life

Life’s origins could one day be explained thanks to computers.

Astrobiology Magazine

Chemists Find a Recipe That May Have Jump-Started Life on Earth

At the Origins of Life Workshop, Thomas Carell reported that he and his colleagues have come up with a simple set of reactions that could have given rise to all four RNA bases.

Science

Looking for the Origins of Life Using Synthetic Biology

An interview with Betul Kacar.

PLOS Synbio Community Blog