Asking a biologist to define 'life' is a bit like looking-up the word 'definition' in a dictionary — it's as if you're questioning their very existence. Biologists like myself don't agree on what life ...

Scientists have debated the definition of life for decades, but they still lack a consensus on the answer. Experts believe that "edge cases" make life difficult to define and blur boundaries across ...

If everything in the world had to be divided into two bins — one for living things and one for nonliving — the task might seem easy. Trees, bacteria and humans are alive; rocks, smartphones and ...

To successfully look for life beyond our own solar system, astrobiologists desperately need a viable definition of life. Even after a century or so of debate, they lack a viable universal definition ...

We asked some wickedly smart people (and one chatbot) for wisdom, stories, and damn good advice. Here's what they told us.

In his new book, “Life’s Edge,” Carl Zimmer asks the modest questions: What is life? How did it begin? And by what criteria can we define things as “living”? On this week’s podcast, Zimmer, a science ...

In 1813, the East India Company’s James Forbes published an explosive story about monkeys. While traveling in India, he had stayed beneath an enormous banyan tree near the Narmada River. One day, a ...

How often do we stop to think about the meaning of life? If you’re like me, probably not much. Even though I may feel a vague sense of anxiety around how my life is unfolding and the inevitability of ...

Case Western Reserve University researchers are moving toward creating robots with superior emotional intelligence. They’re advancing artificial intelligence (AI) to create next-gen personalized ...

As life-preserving medical technology advanced in the second half of the 20th century, doctors and families were faced with a thorny decision, one with weighty legal and moral implications: How should ...