America is in the thick of a tick boom. Health departments logged 89,240 confirmed or probable Lyme disease cases in 2023, the highest on record. Strip away ...

In 2006, a small, little-known company named Space Exploration Technologies Corporation — SpaceX, for short — won a NASA contract to ferry cargo and supplies to the International Space Station.

These space rocks, which landed on Earth billions of years ago, contain nucleobases—key components of DNA and RNA. This supports the panspermia theory, which proposes that life’s ingredients ...

Life on Earth relies on molecular building blocks to make DNA and proteins. Scientists have long wondered how prevalent these precursors were at the birth of our solar system. A sample of dust and ...

Material retrieved from the asteroid Bennu by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft shows that all the basic building blocks of life were astonishingly widespread in the early solar system ...

Samples returned from an asteroid contain a surprising abundance of the basic ingredients of life. They were discovered to be rich in carbon, nitrogen and ammonia, with over 30 kinds of amino acids ...

Launched in 2016, the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer, or OSIRIS-REx for short, traveled to the asteroid – about 200 million miles away from ...

A NASA spacecraft brought samples from the asteroid Bennu back to Earth in 2023. The first in-depth analyses of that material have revealed organic molecules, including building blocks of life.

The research published in Nature Astronomy by NASA’s scientists revealed the Bennu asteroid sample contained 14 of the 20 amino acids used to make proteins by life on Earth, including the five ...

“This all supports the theory that asteroids like Bennu were among the sources that delivered water and chemical building blocks for life to Earth before life started here,” said Nicky Fox ...

A pair of new research papers that were shared at a NASA press conference on Wednesday highlight recent discoveries that many of the chemical building blocks for life, like amino acids, the ...