In previous posts on how extraterrestrial life could be, we talked about many extreme environments where living...

In the previous post on Alien Life we talked about the Pozas Azules ponds in México, with chemical compositions resembling the oceans of...

Beyond the solar system there is life of some kind. It exists, experts agree, on at least a small minority of Earthlike planets that...

Grypania spiralis Multicellular organisms appeared possibly 2.2 billion years ago (1-5). At first, they were little more than colonies of...

Snowball Earth, Lynn Margulis and Endosymbiosis / Tierra en bola de nieve, Lynn Margulis y Endosimbiosis. Fictional Snowball Earth /...

(Versión en español más abajo). Earth’s biosphere, the part of our planet where life is present, extends from the atmosphere’s higher...

The new and expanded English edition of my eBook is now available on Amazon. This is the first English edition (second global edition) of...

Messieurs, c'est les microbes qui auront le dernier mot. (Gentlemen, it is the microbes who will have the last word; Caballeros, los...

(Versión en español más abajo) Francis Crick and James Watson, as theoreticians and model builders, with the little-known and even less...

(Spanish version below) Paleontologist Peter Ward and geophysicist Joseph Kirschvink have suggested that the epoch of greatest species...

(Spanish version below) Possibly life has evolved so much on our planet during the last four billion years that it is impossible for us...

Geological time spiral / Espiral del tiempo geológico The ability of some molecules to self-reproduce has been observed using computer...

Charles & William Darwin For a biologist there is probably no other scientific figure of greater relevance than Charles Darwin. Although...

On the subject of the evolution of intelligence, one of the topics of my eBook. Jane Goodall, the renowned primatologist, was the first...

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. Charles Darwin, 1859.

The physical and chemical characteristics of water are very special and largely affect the properties of life. For those who have seen...

Our sun floods the solar system with energy and it is not convenient to be too close, like Mercury, nor too far, like the asteroid belt...

As Albert Szent-Györgyi said (see post "Water"), we come from water. If we look at an image of our planet's south pole as seen from space...

Life was born in water and is carrying on in water. Water is life’s mater and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water....

The atmospheric layer that separates us from the vacuum of space seems worryingly thin and makes us feel fragile when we see it in...