Elon Musk says SpaceX’s Starship could become one of the most important milestones in the evolution of life, arguing the fully reusable rocket could make humanity multi-planetary.

Why do you have five fingers? Why not ten, or twenty, or one? Why do so many animals have five fingers? Five seems to be the perfect number for most hands. Oddly, the first vertebrates to come onto ...

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 ...

Yet modern biology has revealed that cells are preternaturally sophisticated assemblages — literally automated, miniaturized factories. How could the evidence have been overwhelming but now orthodoxy ...

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 ...

For decades, scientists assumed that life on Earth emerged through a chain of highly improbable flukes. But a new theory suggests it may have instead arrived just in time. When you purchase through ...

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 ...

Giant DNA viruses that infect eukaryotic cells are thought to have played a role in the evolution of life, according to the ...