Our knowledge of the birth, life, and death of the first generation of stars is far from complete. In principle, we can recover their initial mass function and explosion energy by studying the chemistry of the rare environments that may have been exclusively enriched by the nucleosynthesis of metal-free stars. Two highly promising environments include: (1) the most metal-poor stars in the Galactic halo, and (2) the lowest metallicity damped Lyman-alpha systems (from which the metal-poor stars likely condensed). In this talk, I will present new measurements of the physical properties (e.g. density, temperature) of the most metal-poor damped Lyman-alpha systems currently known in the Universe (1/1000 of solar metallicity), and discuss the implications of these findings for the formation of the second stars. I will also present the results from a new suite of model calculations that follow the detailed evolution of the first stars. These minihalo models use the latest nucleosynthesis calculations of massive metal-free stars, and provide a new perspective on the formation of carbon-enhanced metal-poor stars.