Latest Abiogenesis Stories

3-year study offers new evidence about where scientists should be looking A structural biologist at the Florida State University College of Medicine has made discoveries that could lead scientists a step closer to understanding how life first emerged on Earth billions of years ago. Professor Michael Blaber and his team produced data supporting the idea that 10 amino acids believed to exist on Earth around 4 billion years ago were capable of forming foldable proteins in a high-salt...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A research team at the University of Leeds may have solved the question of how objects from space could have kindled life on Earth. Scientists generally accept that some of the important ingredients for life came from meteorites impacting the early Earth. However, they have not been able to explain how that inanimate rock transformed into the building blocks of life. The new study, published in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta,...

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Instead of being hailed as the definitive proof of extraterrestrial life in the form of space algae, a new report from the Journal of Cosmology claiming drawing howls and catcalls from around the scientific community. The report is based on supposed meteorite fragments taken from a fireball that appeared in the evening sky over northern Sri Lanka on Dec. 29, 2012. An analysis of the fragments was performed by Chandra Wickramasinghe,...

NASA [ Watch The Video Cosmic Ice ] Behind locked doors, in a lab built like a bomb shelter, Perry Gerakines makes something ordinary yet truly alien: ice. This isn't the ice of snowflakes or ice cubes. No, this ice needs such intense cold and low pressure to form that the right conditions rarely, if ever, occur naturally on Earth. And when Gerakines makes the ice, he must keep the layer so microscopically thin it is dwarfed by a grain of pollen. These ultrathin layers turn out...

National Radio Astronomy Observatory [ Watch the Video Answering Questions Of Where Prebiotic Molecules Form ] Using new technology at the telescope and in laboratories, researchers have discovered an important pair of prebiotic molecules in interstellar space. The discoveries indicate that some basic chemicals that are key steps on the way to life may have formed on dusty ice grains floating between the stars. The scientists used the National Science Foundation's Green Bank...

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory This week, fizzy ocean water and the alkaline fluid that bubbles up from deep ocean vents are coursing through a structure at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. that is reminiscent of the pillared Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz. Scientists with the NASA Astrobiology Institute's JPL Icy Worlds team have built this series of glass tubes, thin barrels and valves with a laser and a detector system. The set-up mimics the conditions at...

[Watch Video: Paul Davies on the Origins of Life] Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online People have been trying to understand the origins of life on Earth through scientific means since the concept of science began and a pair of Arizona State University researchers suggests in a new report that we’ve been approaching the question incorrectly, almost from the beginning. In a paper titled, "The algorithmic origins of life,” Paul Davies and Sara Walker proposed...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Scientists have questioned how life began on a molecular level for a very long time. And now, an international team of researchers has presented evidence that sheds light on a possible mechanism by which life may have gotten a foothold in the chemical soup that existed early in the Earth's history. Several competing theories have been previously proposed for how life got its start even before the first genes or living cells emerged....

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online In an effort to better understand how life started on Earth, researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California are cooking up icy concoctions of organisms (carbon-bearing molecules) then zapping them with lasers. The JPL crew’s experiments also provide the first direct look at the organic chemistry that takes place in the chilly regions of our solar system, and even chillier reaches between stars....

MOFFETT FIELD, Calif., Sept. 5, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA has awarded five-year grants totaling almost $40 million to five research teams to study the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) The newly selected teams are from the University of Washington; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; University of Wisconsin, Madison; University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; and University...