Bacteria, among the oldest of life forms, have lived in seemingly every possible habitat on the planet, from ocean trenches and mountaintops to hot springs and polar ice. Yet, they have left a limited ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Take a deep breath. A flow of air has rushed into your lungs, where the oxygen moves into your bloodstream, fueling metabolic fires in ...

Scientists assumed most forms of life before the Great Oxidation Event didn't metabolize oxygen—but recent research suggests otherwise. Reading time 2 minutes Today, oxygen makes up about 21% of our ...

Researchers mapped enzyme sequences from several thousand modern species onto an evolutionary tree of life. Their findings suggest that, shortly after cyanobacteria evolved the ability to produce ...

Aerobic respiration began hundreds of millions of years earlier than previously thought, a new study suggests. Oxygen is a vital and constant presence on Earth today. But that hasn’t always been the ...

Oxygen is a vital and constant presence on Earth today. But that hasn't always been the case. It wasn't until around 2.3 billion years ago that oxygen became a permanent fixture in the atmosphere, ...

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Proteins possibly used for oxygen sensing in primitive organisms appear to be hemoglobin ancestors. Microbiologist Maqsudul Alam at the University of Hawaii and collaborators at the University of ...