According to the RNA world hypothesis, life began when RNA molecules evolved the ability to make more copies of themselves. Now we have discovered an RNA molecule that is almost capable of this – it ...

One of the greatest mysteries of our planet is how a soup of lifeless chemicals transformed into the first living cell. There are several competing theories about where this happened, from frozen ...

Chemists have demonstrated how RNA (ribonucleic acid) might have replicated itself on early Earth -- a key process in the origin of life. Chemists at UCL and the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology ...

Scientists are consistently one-upping each other when it comes to finding the oldest molecules from fossils. The race even includes the notoriously fragile RNA. “It’s groundbreaking,” said Oliver ...

While great strides have been made in exploring the world of RNA, mysteries remain—and one approach to solving them is to look at what exactly a strand of RNA is doing in a cell in real time. At a ...

Researchers have sequenced the oldest RNA ever recovered, taken from a woolly mammoth frozen for nearly 40,000 years. The RNA reveals which genes were active in its tissues, offering a rare glimpse ...

We’re celebrating 180 years of Scientific American. Explore our legacy of discovery and look ahead to the future. In 1957, just four years after Francis Crick and other scientists solved the riddle of ...

With AI, it's now possible for researchers to predict the three-dimensional structures of proteins directly from their amino-acid sequences. But what biologists really want to predict, says Columbia ...

In 2010, tusk hunters scouring a riverbank near Siberia’s Arctic coast discovered the mummy of a juvenile mammoth. The animal, nicknamed “Yuka” after the nearby village of Yukagir, had been frozen for ...