Fossils have a way of rewriting family trees, pulling back the curtain on creatures that feel alien and oddly familiar, like ...

Human intelligence wasn’t a cosmic evolutionary fluke, some scientists say. The case against cosmic loneliness is growing.

But the real truth is that alien life on other planets could be even stranger than floating balloons or amorphous organisms ...

In the oceans and on land, scientists are discovering rare, transitional organisms that bridge the gap between Earth’s simplest cells and today’s complex ones.

Life on Earth may have learned to breathe oxygen long before oxygen filled the skies. MIT researchers traced a key oxygen-processing enzyme back hundreds of millions of years before the Great ...

Now we have the opposite problem: Obama says UFOs are real and the world shrugs.

Survival of the fittest. Nature red in tooth and claw. The common view of natural selection is based solely on the individual: A trait allows an organism to out-compete its rivals and is thus passed ...

A giant virus encodes part of the protein-making toolkit of cells that gives it greater control over its amoeba host, raising questions about how it evolved and how such beings relate to living organi ...

LOS ANGELES - Victor Wembanyama knows he’s the main character. An All-Star starter for the first time, he sticks out even among the NBA’s biggest stars who have ...

Our planet was once a harsh, alien, icy world. Yet this deep freeze may have shaped you, me and all life on Earth ...

Ultimately, the gel-first hypothesis does not claim to provide a definitive answer to the origin of life. Rather, it offers a conceptual framework—one that integrates soft-matter physics, systems ...