News

Georgia Tech biochemist Loren Williams was recently named co-leader of NASA’s new consortium to tackle origin of life: Did life on Earth originate in Darwin’s warm little pond, on a sunbaked shore, or where hot waters vent into the deep ocean? And could a similar emergence have played out on other bodies in our solar system or planets far beyond? These questions lie at the center of research in NASA’s new Prebiotic Chemistry and Early Earth Environments (PCE3) Consortium. One of five cross-divisional research coordination networks with the NASA Astrobiology Program, PCE3 aims to identify planetary conditions that might give rise to life’s chemistry. One goal of PCE3 is to guide future NASA missions targeting discovery of habitable worlds. Aaron Read More ›

The explosion lasted only about 20 million years, their research shows, and the subsequent 520 million years featured more even rates of change: At (or shortly before) the start of the Cambrian Period (541 million years ago), modern animals evolved. They rapidly diversified into all the major groups (phyla) of animals we see today, such as jellyfish and corals, segmented worms (such as earthworms), molluscs (such as snails), arthropods (such as crabs), and even vertebrates (backboned animals, which eventually included ourselves)… If modern animals first evolved at the very beginning of the Cambrian, then their global adaptive radiation took a mere 20 million years. While this is still substantial, it represents only 0.5% of the 3.5-billion-year history of life on Read More ›