There are 20 amino acids that create the proteins required for life on our planet — and scientists have now found exactly 14 of them on an asteroid millions of miles away. The asteroid in question, ...

A complex form of carbon crucial for life on Earth has been spotted outside the solar system for the first time. Its presence helps show how the compounds needed for life could come from space. The ...

Astronomers have detected signs of complex organic molecules, the precursors to the building blocks of life as we know it, in a planet-forming disk around a distant star. The findings imply that the ...

Consider your hands. They are essentially identical in every respect bar one: They are mirror images of each other. Many of the molecules of life, such as proteins and DNA, have the same property.

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a team of astronomers led by Abubakar Fadul from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) has discovered complex organic ...

Life evolved from simple geochemical processes present on the early Earth. However, the details of this transformation remain a mystery. In this study, researchers modeled the emergence of metabolic ...

Scientists are considering what limits to potentially place on mirror-image cell research. Kateryna Kon / Science Photo Library via Getty Images Scientists have been voicing concerns over the creation ...

In living organisms today, complex molecules like RNA and DNA are constructed with the help of enzymes. So how did these molecules form before life (and enzymes) existed? Why did some molecules end up ...