The building blocks of life could have their beginnings in the tiny icy grains that make up the gas and dust found between the stars, and those icy grains could be the key to understanding how life can arise on planets. With help from students, researchers have discovered an important pair of prebiotic molecules in the …

In Prometheus, we saw a mysterious alien seeding the Earth with DNA. This act of fertilizing a planet with life from space is called panspermia. And in this music video from director Tom Walsh and the band Swimming, you can see a breathtaking short story of panspermia that feels far more satisfying than the one in…

Is there (or was there ever) life on Mars? In this great little video — produced by the folks over at thinkrtv — Dr. Ashwin Vasvada, NASA's Deputy Project Scientist for the Mars Curiosity mission, presents three theories surrounding life on the Red Planet, and describes how rovers like Curiosity are helping us paint …

In the opening scene of Ridley Scott's Prometheus, an alien Engineer is seen seeding the Earth with life — an interesting suggestion as to how life emerged on this planet.

We know a lot about the history of life on Earth, but how it began is still one of our greatest scientific mysteries. One hypothesis is that life actually originated on another planet, and many scientists today take the idea quite seriously. Though it sounds like the plot from recent scifi movie Prometheus, it's an…

Exogenesis is the theory that the building blocks for life came from elsewhere in the universe. The trouble is it doesn't explain where those building blocks came from in the first place. But new calculations suggest one intriguing source: Earth.

Many of you have probably heard about asteroid 2005 YU55, the massive rocky body that tomorrow night will collide with Earth in a ball of flames pass the planet safely, albeit closer than any asteroid in the last 35 years.

We've often found trace evidence of DNA on meteorites, but it wasn't clear whether these DNA pieces originated in space, or were accidental byproducts of contamination by scientists. Now we have our best evidence yet that they actually come from space.

The argument that life on Earth may have been seeded from the stars just received a major boost, as scientists have found the building blocks of life inside a meteorite that landed in British Columbia in 2000.

Meteors may have seeded the planet with life-giving ammonia.