A team at the University of Minnesota says it has assembled the first fully synthetic cell from non-living components — a potentially landmark step in synthetic biology.
Minnesota researchers claim to have assembled a synthetic cell entirely from non-living components.
The work would be the first of its kind, going beyond approaches that modify existing biological cells.
The results have not yet passed full independent verification.
Researchers at the Southwest Research Institute argue that massive collisions during Earth's earliest eras created the chemical and thermal conditions necessary for life to emerge.
SwRI researchers argue asteroid bombardments generated conditions favorable to life.
Impacts would have created hydrothermal basins and released key chemical compounds.
The study adds new evidence to the ongoing debate over the origin of life on Earth.
In roughly five billion years, the Sun will swell into a red giant. Whether Earth gets swallowed or drifts to safety depends on competing forces that science has not yet resolved.
The Sun will expand into a red giant in about five billion years, growing hundreds of times larger.
Earth might drift to a wider orbit if the Sun sheds mass faster than tidal forces pull the planet inward.
Even a surviving Earth would be a sterile, airless rock long before this cosmic endgame.
A fossil collected by the British Antarctic Survey in the 1980s sat unidentified for decades — until modern analysis confirmed it belonged to a dinosaur.
A bone collected 40 years ago by the British Antarctic Survey has been identified as a dinosaur fossil.
The fragment had remained unexamined in a storage drawer for four decades.
Antarctica is now the last continent where dinosaur presence has been physically confirmed.