In this AI-generated illustration of Earth at the dawn of life, a distant volcano towers over shallow pools of water. It is possible the earliest life forms evolved in such environments. Credit: ...

Tinkers are complexes of amino acid polymers (colored spheres) and DNA flipons (wireframes). Tinkers self-amplify with DNA and peptide strands promoting the synthesis of each other. Early on, tinkers ...

Despite awe-inspiring diversity, nearly every lifeform – from bacteria to blue whales – shares the same genetic code. How and when this code came about has been the subject of much scientific ...

URBANA, Ill. – Genes are the building blocks of life, and the genetic code provides the instructions for the complex processes that make organisms function. But how and why did it come to be the way ...

Mutations are changes in the molecular "letters" that make up the DNA code, the blueprint for all living cells. Some of these changes can have little effect, but others can lead to diseases, including ...

A new theory that explains why the language of our genes is more complex than it needs to be also suggests that the primordial soup where life began on earth was hot and not cold, as many scientists ...

Domestic cats first joined European communities around 2,000 years ago, during the age of Roman power, not in deep prehistory ...

The 2022 Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine has brought fresh attention to paleogenomics, the sequencing of DNA of ancient specimens. Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo won the coveted prize “for his ...

Despite awe-inspiring diversity, nearly every lifeform—from bacteria to blue whales—shares the same genetic code. How and when this code came about has been the subject of much scientific controversy.