NASA's Perseverance rover snaps a selfie with the "Cheyava Falls" rock that has inspired discussions about potential life ...

In September 2025, NASA announced that its Perseverance rover had discovered a potential biosignature, which is a substance or structure that might have a biological origin. A new paper, published in ...

Analysis of a space rock that landed on a frozen Michigan lake revealed a rich array of extraterrestrial organic compounds. Learn how the meteorite might have been incorporated into life on Earth.

A pair of stubborn molecules, prized because they can survive deep time, just passed an important Mars test by failing a very ...

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are essential airborne signals or odors that enable plants to communicate with other organisms and plants across short and long distances. A key aspect of this ...

Saturn’s moon Enceladus ejects a plume of ice grains and gases originating from a subsurface ocean via fractures near its south pole. The chemical characterization of organic material in such ice ...

VOCs, or volatile organic compounds, are compounds that contain carbon atoms and that, at room temperature, easily evaporate. Too small to see and virtually omnipresent both indoors and out, they can ...

Elemental analysis offers scientists a method of determining the elements present in an organic compound, and in what quantity. Various fields of science rely on this type of analysis for research, ...