Are we closing in on life’s cradle? What is claimed to be the oldest evidence of life on Earth yet found backs the idea that the first microbes originated around hydrothermal vents on the seafloor – but the work is already proving controversial. Image: Matthew Dodd
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Did life begin in the freezer? Early Earth may not have been as hot and hellish as we thought. In fact, it may have become a snowball around the time life first emerged. Image: Maarten de Wit
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Did life have hellish origins? Carbon with an organic-like signature has been discovered sealed within a crystal that formed during an interval of Earth’s history named after Hades, the underworld of Greek mythology. The find predates other evidence of life by 300 million years. Image: Image Editor
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Where did life take its first, oxygen-rich breath? An important clue has been discovered at the bottom of an Antarctic lake, in an environment that gives us a sense of the conditions on Earth billions of years ago. Image: eliduke
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It has all the ingredients of a primordial soup. What’s more, the chemicals of life – discovered in a pocket of water that last saw the light of day 1.5 billion years ago – appear to have formed without any influence from biological processes. Image: brewbooks
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Talk about making an impact. One of the meteorites that slammed into the planet early in its history could have kick-started life: the collision may have generated all four of the bases in RNA. Image: NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center
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Water covers around 70 per cent of our planet’s surface. It makes up 60 per cent of our body weight. Without a supply of the stuff, very few living things can survive for long. But, perhaps surprisingly, water is bad news for life. Was it conspicuously absent at the dawn of life on Earth? Image: szeke
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Amyloid plaques, a hallmark of diseases like Alzheimer’s, are bad news for humans – but they could have been drivers of the earliest life on Earth. A new study shows that these amyloid clusters can behave as catalysts, backing a theory that they helped trigger the reactions that sustain life, long before modern enzymes appeared. Image: euthman
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Where on Earth is the cradle of life? The widespread view is that life began in the oceans, in the water that surrounds deep-sea hydrothermal vents. But that story is being challenged by new evidence that life began on land, which is deepening a rift between origin-of-life biologists. Image: Anna S. Karyagina
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