origins of life

Nearly four billion years ago, the Earth was pummeled by asteroids -- some as large as the state of Kansas -- during an episode known as the "Late Heavy Bombardment." Now, scientists believe that bombardment phase may have jump-started early microbial life. The results also lend support to the possibility of extreme microbial life on other planets like Mars, and perhaps even on Earth-like planets in other solar systems that may have undergone similar bombardment phases.

[ Read Full Story ]

Much like the way cosmologists and physicists theorize about the origins of the universe by making extrapolations about the past with data from today, so too do evolutionary biologists about the origins of life. And a new study funded by the National Science Foundation has turned up a surprising result about one of the earliest origins. The relatively simple sponge has long been thought to have been the first divergence on the animal tree of life. But by feeding a tremendous amount of data on fossils and living organisms into a high-powered computational model, the authors of the study discovered an even earlier split: that of the comb jelly.

[ Read Full Story ]