[Editor's note: The Archaea are extremophiles and other unusual microbes that are so different from bacteria that Carl Woese of the University of Illinois assigned them their own domain on the ...

Most of us know that if extraterrestrial life is found anytime soon, it won't look like the little green men we associate with UFOs and kitschy sci-fi stories. Based on where the building blocks for ...

They tend to be found where tectonic plates meet, in volcanically active areas. Typically they are archaea, originally thought to be a form of bacteria but, since the 1970s, known to be a distinct ...

Among them, unusual creatures that microbiologists call extremophiles ... the team found many new life-forms within Archaea, a vast and anomalous domain distinct from bacteria.