"Consciousness," although challenging to define, can be thought of as a first-person awareness of one's surroundings and ...

The timeline of terrestrial evolution holds surprises. While scientists thought complex life required oxygen, a recent ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

As Earth formed, new geologic processes, especially those related to the interaction of hot fluids with rock during igneous activity and plate tectonics, gave birth to over 1500 new mineral species (4 ...

According to a new concept, it was a novel molecular species composed out of RNA and peptides that set in motion the evolution of life into more complex forms. According to a new concept by LMU ...

The Cambrian explosion was an extraordinary phenomenon in the evolution of life on the planet that led to the emergence of many animal phyla and the diversification of species. During this period, ...

A biochemist, building on the pillars of evolutionary theory and drawing on cutting-edge research into the link between energy and genes, argues that the evolution of multicellular life was the result ...