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Origin of Life News

December 24, 2024

Top Headlines

 

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 chart shows the relative ups and downs in species ...
While volcanism caused a temporary cold period, the effects had already worn off thousands of years before the meteorite, the ultimate cause of the dinosaur extinction event, ...
Nearly all living organisms use the same genetic code, a complicated mechanism by which genetic information is translated into proteins, the building blocks of life. A new study suggests conventional wisdom about how the code evolved is likely ...
Neanderthal genes make up 1-2% of the genomes of non-Africans. Scientists analyzed the lengths of regions of Neanderthal DNA in 58 ancient Eurasian genomes of early modern humans and determined that the introgressed genes result from interbreeding ...

Latest Headlines

updated 7:55pm EST

Earlier Headlines

 

A study described the three-dimensional architecture of turtle genomes, which fold in a configuration unlike any other animal observed so ...

Chromosphaera perkinsii is a single-celled species discovered in 2017 in marine sediments around Hawaii. The first signs of its presence on Earth have been dated at over a billion years, well before ...

New research has found that, unlike birds, the evolution of bats' wings and legs is tightly coupled, which may have prevented them from filling as many ecological niches as ...

This model reveals how vastly different the atmosphere was on ancient Earth, and how life may have first ...

Geneticists have deciphered the prehistory of aurochs -- the animals that were the focus of some of the most iconic early human art -- by analyzing 38 genomes harvested from bones dating across 50 ...

Paleontologists have identified fossils of an ancient species of bug that spent the past 450 million years covered in fool's gold in central New York. The new species, Lomankus edgecombei, is a ...

A study investigating the complex evolution of two iconic Western Australian landmarks, has traced their transformation over thousands of years and offers a glimpse into their future. Researchers ...

Scientists paint a compelling picture of what happened the day the S2 meteorite crashed into Earth 3.26 billion years ...

Scientists have generated the genome assemblies of two hidden-neck turtles, unpublished until now. The results, which revealed a new three-dimensional structure of the genome within the phylogenetic ...

How can lifeless molecules come together to form a living ...

New research has revealed a connection between ancient viral DNA embedded in the human genome and the genetic risk for two major diseases that affect the central nervous ...

A new study reveals how the duplication of the salivary amylase gene may not only have helped shape human adaptation to starchy foods, but may have occurred as far back as more than 800,000 years ...

Seven of the most common forest trees in Europe have been shown to be able to shelter their genetic diversity from major shifts in environmental conditions. This is despite their ranges having shrunk ...

Researchers have used the chemical fingerprints of zinc contained in meteorites to determine the origin of volatile elements on Earth. The results suggest that without 'unmelted' asteroids, ...

Pockets of microbes have been found living within a sealed fracture in 2-billion-year-old rock. The rock was excavated from the Bushveld Igneous Complex in South Africa, an area known for its rich ...

Scientists successfully extracted and analyzed DNA from ancient cheese samples found alongside the Tarim Basin mummies in China, dating back approximately 3,600 years. The research suggests a new ...

Analyzing fossils can be difficult -- especially when they're so small that they can only be seen with a microscope. Researchers have now come up with a ...

A new, wide-ranging exploration of human remains casts doubt on a long-standing theory in archaeology known as the Kurgan hypothesis -- which, among other claims, suggests that humans first ...

Findings suggest that new genes can form by repurposing fragments of ancestral genes while incorporating entirely new coding regions (the protein-coding parts of the DNA). This innovative concept ...

Lavas from hotspots - -whether erupting in Hawaii, Samoa or Iceland -- likely originate from a worldwide, uniform reservoir in Earth's mantle, according to an evaluation of volcanic ...

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