Jack Szostak is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and one of the recipients of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Is the existence of life on Earth a lucky fluke or an ...

What are the origins of life? How did things go from non-living to living? From something that could not reproduce to something that could? One person who has exhaustively investigated this subject is ...

Although biology is the study of life, even biologists don't agree on what 'life' actually is. While scientists have proposed hundreds of ways to define it, none have been widely accepted. And for the ...

In Paul Murray’s novel Skippy Dies, there’s a point where the main character, Howard, has an existential crisis. “‘It’s just not how I expected my life would be,’” he says. “‘What did you expect?’” a ...

In a new book, physicist Sara Walker argues that assembly theory can explain what life is, and even help scientists create new forms of it. Sara Walker, a physicist at Arizona State University, says ...

Reflecting on the past, through writing or conversation, can help us better appreciate where we are — and where we’re going. By Emily Laber-Warren Jodi Wellman was devastated when her mother died of a ...