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 ...

Definitions of "life" are a dime a dozen. In a paper published back in 2011, University of Haifa biophysicist Edward Trifonov documented 123 of them. But which one is best? Trifonov decided to seek ...

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.

Afew months into the pandemic, my girlfriend and I made a horrifying discovery in our bedroom. A mossy, bone-white substance was — and we could imagine no other word for it — growing along the inner ...

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 ...

What is life? Like most great questions, this one is easy to ask but difficult to answer. Scientists have been trying for centuries, and philosophers have done so for millennia. Today our knowledge 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 ...

A clear, simple definition of life has always been hard to pin down and remains elusive. Most biology lessons say living things must grow, produce energy, and reproduce on their own. But viruses don’t ...

The Gazette offers audio versions of articles using Instaread. Some words may be mispronounced. I didn't catch Dr. Peter Kennedy's column “Child is ‘produced' at beginning of pregnancy” (March 29, ...

This story is a collaboration between Science Friday and KHN. It was written by Sarah Varney. Credit: Eric Harkleroad, KHN illustration; Getty Images; Unsplash. As life-preserving medical technology ...