Liquid water is essential for life as we know it, ie carbon-based life. Although other
compound-solvent pairs that could exist in very specific physical environments could be …

The conditions, timing, and setting for the origin of life on Earth and whether life exists
elsewhere in our solar system and beyond represent some of the most fundamental …

As the search for Earth-like exoplanets gathers pace, in order to understand them, we need
comprehensive theories for how planetary atmospheres form and evolve. Written by two well …

Focusing on a range of features that are central to the constitution of action, this article is an
empirically based theoretical contribution to the field of research attempting to understand …

Life is the harnessing of chemical energy in such a way that the energy-harnessing device
makes a copy of itself. This paper outlines an energetically feasible path from a particular …

Critical to the origin of life are the ingredients of life, of course, but also the physical and
chemical conditions in which prebiotic chemical reactions can take place. These factors …

Soil is composed of a mosaic of different rocks and minerals, usually considered as an inert
substrata for microbial colonization. However, recent findings suggest that minerals, in soils …

1953 was a banner year for biological chemistry: The double helix structure of DNA was
published by Watson and Crick, Sanger's group announced the first amino acid sequence of …

Life is believed to have originated on Earth∼ 4.4–3.5 Ga ago, via processes in which
organic compounds supplied by the environment self-organized, in some geochemical …

While grounded in the hard sciences of physics, chemistry, geology, and astronomy, as well
as well-accepted principles in the life sciences, astrobiology remains the most speculative of …