In 2023, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft collected samples of 4.6-billion-year-old rocks from an asteroid called Bennu and brought them back to Earth. They found amino acids, the building blocks of ...

Scientists have taken a big step towards figuring out where building blocks of life such as amino acids and amines form in space. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate ...

The universe might have far more amino acids lying around than we realized, which gives life itself far more chances to begin ...

As a scientist, lab work can sometimes get monotonous. But in 2017, while a Ph.D. student of paleobiology at the University of Bristol in the U.K., I heard a gleeful exclamation from across the room.

Dust from asteroid Bennu is revealing a surprising origin story for life’s building blocks. New research suggests some amino acids formed in frozen ice exposed to radiation, not warm liquid water as ...

While life on Earth is relatively new, geologically speaking, the ingredients that combined to form it might be much older than once thought. According to research published in ACS Central Science, ...

A new study posits that interstellar cloud conditions may have played a significant role on the presence of key building blocks of life in the solar system. A new study led by Southwest Research ...

Two papers describing the discovery appear in the current issue of the journal Science. Prior to this, scientists had believed that there were only 21 natural amino acids — the key building blocks of ...

This research was supported by the University of Bristol Bob Savage Memorial Fund and the Leverhulme Trust (PLP-2012-116). As a scientist, lab work can sometimes get monotonous. But in 2017, while a ...

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.) Evan Thomas Saitta, University of Chicago (THE CONVERSATION) As a scientist, lab work ...