The tiny pantheon known as the Asgard archaea bear traits that hint at how plants, animals and fungi emerged on Earth.

Scientists have long puzzled over the origins of eukaryotes, the domain of life defined by cells with a membrane-bound nucleus, which includes all animals, plants, fungi, and insects. If they unravel ...

A new study finds that at least one Archaea has surprisingly flexibility when interpreting genetic code, which goes against a ...

An artist’s depiction of an Asgard archaeon, based on cryo-electron tomography data: the cell body and appendages feature thread-like skeletal structures, similar to those found in complex cells with ...

Sperm and egg cells, or gametes, are unusual. Egg cells are some of the largest cell types, and sperm are some of the smallest. In humans, these haploid cells come together to form diploid cells. It's ...

Scientists have been trying to learn more about archaea since these microbes were discovered in the 1970s. Their DNA is not contained in a nucleus, so they are a type of prokaryote, and were initially ...

Nancy Shute talks about life’s complexities, from its evolution on Earth as a single cell to complex human behavior.

An international scientific team has redefined our understanding of archaea, a microbial ancestor to humans from two billion years ago, by showing how they use hydrogen gas. The findings, published in ...

When you get infected with a virus, some of the first weapons your body deploys to fight it were passed down to us from our microbial ancestors billions of years ago. According to new research from ...

Scientists have found further evidence to support the idea that the primary two domains of life, the Archaea and Bacteria, are separated by a long phylogenetic tree branch and therefore distantly ...