Life on Earth rests on a knife-edge of chemistry that could easily have tipped the other way. As geochemists reconstruct the planet’s birth, they are finding that a narrow band of oxygen conditions ...

The new plot twist is that in order to keep enough nitrogen and phosphorus near its surface, a planet has to start out with ...

Ancient enzymes show life’s nitrogen signal stayed unchanged for billions of years, helping scientists read early Earth.

New research from ETH Zurich challenges the long-held “follow the water” rule in the search for extraterrestrial life.

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.

I think about oxygen a lot more than I used to. This is because I am studying a chemical defense that turns ordinary oxygen, the same old stuff we obtain from breathing air – the same stuff that is ...

The people at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History were nice enough to give a couple members of the Chemistry in Pictures team a behind-the-scenes look at their mineral ...

The aim of the book “Oxygen atom transfer reactions” is to outline some recent developments in the studies of oxygen atom transfer mechanisms in catalytic oxidation reactions based on several ...

Chemists, when they are designing or building new molecules, can be thought of as architects and builders. An organic chemist can plan a blueprint for a new molecule, and synthesize it with precision ...