A groundbreaking study from the University of Arizona is challenging the long-standing belief about the order in which the essential building blocks of life, amino acids, first appeared. New findings suggest that the widely accepted model for how these vital compounds emerged could be flawed, forcing scientists to reconsider the very foundation of life’s origins.
Plenty of asteroids can survive their fiery plunge through the Earth’s atmosphere. If they’re big enough, they can prove incredibly destructive, like the 60-foot Chelyabinsk meteor that exploded over the southern Ural region in Russia in 2013, releasing a blast equivalent to 30 times the energy of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.
Rows of preserved specimen jars from Charles Darwin’s iconic Galapagos voyage have sat, unopened, in the archives of London’s Natural History Museum (NHM) for 200 years. Now, lasers have given us an unprecedented look inside. Darwin himself is known for penning the now widely-accepted theory of natural selection and evolution, founded in part upon his
Two Americans, a French astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut said Sunday they are eager to blast off Wednesday on a flight to the International Space Station, replacing four crew members who cut their mission short and returned to Earth last month because of a medical issue. Crew 12 commander Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway, European Space
A NASA rover has used its last drop of a special chemical to analyze a Mars sample that may contain organics, the kinds of molecules life uses on Earth. After the Red Planet reemerged from conjunction — a period when NASA doesn’t communicate with spacecraft because Mars is behind the sun from Earth’s point of
Eyeem Mobile Gmbh/Getty Images NASA has been working toward one of its most exciting and ambitious Mars missions – its goal of putting humans on the Red Planet – for years now. The space agency says that its path for humanity’s exploration of the Red Planet began on the
SpaceX successfully sent another batch of Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit on Saturday (Feb. 7), just five days after standing down in the wake of an anomaly during its prior launch. A Falcon 9 rocket carrying the 25 Starlink satellites lifted off at 3:58 p.m. EDT (2058 GMT or 12:58 p.m. PDT local time)
The internet is alive with UFO reports at the moment, the excitement sparked by a comet identified as 3I/ATLAS. Comets are not uncommon visitors to our solar system, but this is a rare type. Its speed, its path and its composition identify it as an object that is not circling within our solar system, but
The nine Merlin 1D engines at the base of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket briefly ignited during a static fire test of the vehicle on Sunday, Feb. 8, 2026. This test was a precursor to the launch of Crew-12 to the International Space Station. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now An early morning rocket engine test at Cape
Beneath Earth’s surface lies a kingdom of undiscovered microscopic life. These “intraterrestrials” survive in some of the harshest conditions on the planet — and scientists are hunting for these microbes. In this excerpt from “Intraterrestrials: Discovering the Strangest Life on Earth” (Princeton University Press, 2025), author Karen G. Lloyd, a microbial biogeochemist at the University