Life on Earth may have learned to breathe oxygen long before oxygen filled the skies. MIT researchers traced a key ...

For decades, scientists have believed that complex life began when two very different microbes joined forces, eventually ...

After feeding mice with high blood sugar a keto diet, which is high in fat and low in carbohydrates, researchers saw the diet ...

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The most widely accepted scientific explanation for the arrival of all complex life on Earth has had an unsolved mystery at its heart. According to the theory, all plants, animals and fungi, known ...

Ancient microbes tied to our earliest ancestors could use oxygen, reshaping ideas about how complex life began on Earth.

For decades, scientists believed that nearly all oxygen on Earth is produced through photosynthesis — a process driven by sunlight and carried out by plants, algae, and cyanobacteria. According to ...

Learn how oxygen’s early rise could have given complex life the energy boost it needed to evolve.

Scientists propose that eukaryotes formed when an Asgard archaeon entered into a close partnership with an alphaproteobacterium. Over time, the two organisms became permanently linked. The ...

New genomic research shows some Asgard archaea, ancestors of plants, animals, and fungi, tolerated and used oxygen. The finding supports the idea that complex life arose after oxygen levels surged and ...