The problem of how life evolved on Earth has intrigued the minds of many great scientists for centuries. Now, according to an exciting study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of ...

Life on Earth possesses an exceptional ability to self-reproduce, which, even on a simple cellular level, is driven by complex biochemistry. But can self-reproduction exist in a biochemistry-free ...

In the version of the article initially published, in the “Construction of the MSA” section of the Methods, the text “the PDB X-ray structure 1G9B” should have read “the PDB X-ray structure 1U6B” and ...

Robust localization of self-reproducing autocatalytic chemistries is a key step in the realization of heritable and evolvable chemical systems. While autocatalytic chemical reaction networks already ...

In 1949, famed mathematician and physicist John von Neumann delivered a series of addresses at the University of Illinois, where he introduced the concept of the "universal constructor." The theory ...