"Consciousness," although challenging to define, can be thought of as a first-person awareness of one's surroundings and oneself. You sense the world through your eyes, nose, ears and hands, and track ...

An international collaboration has published groundbreaking research, shedding light on the most significant increase in complexity in the history of life's evolution on Earth: the origin of the ...

Humanity may not be extraordinary but rather the natural evolutionary outcome for our planet and likely others, according to a new model for how intelligent life developed on Earth. The model, which ...

Oxygen played a key role in the evolution of complex organisms, according to new research published in BMC Evolutionary Biology. The study shows that the complexity of life forms increased earlier ...

We have only one example of biology forming in the universe – life on Earth. But what if life can form in other ways? How do you look for alien life when you don’t know what alien life might look like ...

Evolution is perhaps the most extraordinary story ever told—a tale spanning billions of years that connects every living thing on Earth through an intricate web of shared ancestry. From the tiniest ...

We know that Darwinian evolution acts on all forms of life, but does evolution act on non-living materials as well? Otto and his team used a system of three different self-replicating molecules, that, ...

Betül Kaçar, associate professor of bacteriology, likes mysteries. And there is, maybe, no larger mystery than the origins and early evolution of life. Now, a team of scientists at the University of ...

When we look at the world around us, we see a wonderous variety of living things—with fins, fronds or feet, living in the deepest ocean or the driest deserts, eating seeds or salmon or sunlight. The ...

Bacteria are the most diverse organisms on Earth, with a number of species that’s difficult to quantify. They’re also incredibly old. Bacteria consist of a single cell. They do not have bones and are ...