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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

A central question of astrobiology concerns the origin and distribution of life in the Universe. For this reason, astrobiology can be considered to fall within the science called transitional biology.