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

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 ...

Life on Earth may have learned to breathe oxygen long before oxygen filled the skies. MIT researchers traced a key oxygen-processing enzyme back hundreds of millions of years before the Great ...

In the oceans and on land, scientists are discovering rare, transitional organisms that bridge the gap between Earth’s simplest cells and today’s complex ones.

Oxygen is everywhere on Earth today. But that hasn’t always been the case. Scientists think oxygen only became a lasting part ...

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 ...

As lunar missions ramp up with the goal of establishing a permanent human presence on the Moon, scientists are facing an ...

As the climate crisis becomes a part of daily life with unprecedented heat waves and cold snaps, technology to effectively remove greenhouse gases is emerging as a critical global challenge. In ...

Oxygen fills the air today, but for most of Earth’s early history it barely existed. Scientists say the atmosphere did not hold steady oxygen until about 2.

Aerobic respiration began hundreds of millions of years earlier than previously thought, a new study suggests.

You're likely familiar with cleaning with bleach, but you might not know there is actually a gentler, less pungent form of bleach. Oxygen bleach is a laundry and household cleaning product made famous ...