Science, Life | featured news

The chemical building blocks that make life possible on Earth may have aged to perfection in asteroids, according to a new study.

MIT scientists have created a sort of genomic fossil that shows that the collective genome of all life underwent an enormous expansion about 3 billion years ago, which they're calling the Archean Expansion. Many of the new genes appearing in the Archean Expansion are oxygen related, and could be the first biological evidence of the Great Oxidation Event, the period in Earth's history when oxygen became so plentiful that many anerobic life forms may have become extinct.

Scientists say mineral deposits created by lightning strikes are full of rare forms of phosphorus that may have been crucial in getting life started billions of years ago.