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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

What is the meaning of life? Even the best of us couldn't hope to answer that question in a Universe Today article. But there are those who would try to "constrain" it, at least in terms of physics. A ...

We sometimes ask what the meaning of life is, because we experience our daily routines as pointless and repetitive. If we feel listless and apathetic, life often seems to us devoid of purpose. We may ...

What are the physics of life? That is more than just a philosophical question—it has practical implications for our search for life elsewhere in the galaxy. We know what Earth life looks like, on a ...

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 ...

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 ...