Mars rovers like Perseverance and Curiosity have been making headlines with their discoveries of organic matter on the Red Planet. These findings are pivotal as they may hold clues to past life and the planet’s history. Understanding why these ...

Non-uniform distribution of charges on the surface of iron oxides attracts diverse types of organic compounds through mechanisms with different binding energies. While scientists have long known that iron oxide minerals help lock away enormous amounts of ...

NASA's Perseverance rover has detected evidence of organic compounds in a huge 28-mile-wide crater on Mars for the first time. The discovery, which was published in the journal Nature, has implications in the search for potential biosignatures—or signs ...

A common iron mineral hiding in soil turns out to be far better at trapping carbon than scientists realized. Its surface isn’t uniform — it’s a nanoscale patchwork of positive and negative charges that can grab many different organic molecules.

Chemists studying how life started often focus on how modern biopolymers like peptides and nucleic acids contributed, but modern biopolymers don't form easily without help from living organisms. A possible solution to this paradox is that life started ...