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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

In this Back To School episode we consider the "List of Life": the criteria that define what it is to be a living thing. Some are easy calls: A... What makes 'life' so hard to define? A developmental ...

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 ...

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 ...