Ask a friend what DNA is and, chances are, they have a general idea. Seventy years after scientists discovered the two-stranded helix, DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is widely understood as the keeper of ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. A new study uncovers how amino acids could have linked with RNA under early Earth conditions, shedding light on the origin of life ...

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 ...

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 ...

Biologists have discovered a new type of RNA-splicing regulation that helps to determine which protein-coding exons will be included in messenger RNA transcripts. RNA splicing is a cellular process ...

More than four billion years ago, Earth was a very different place. Pools of water froze and thawed in cycles, minerals shaped reactions, and molecules bumped into each other by chance. Out of this ...