Philip Ball

C.H. Waddington’s powerful image of embryonic stem cells specializing on a rolling landscape has captivated biologists since the 1950s. Experimental data is finally confirming, and complicating, his visionary ideas.

Today’s computers need safeguards against random energy fluctuations. Thermodynamic computers would put those fluctuations to use.

The idea of ‘biological agency’ — that life devises its own goals and behaves accordingly — complicates our understanding of what it means to be alive. But does it serve a scientific purpose?

Our genetic heritage is not a blueprint or an algorithm, as many biologists have imagined, but something else entirely.

Columnist Philip Ball thinks the phenomenon of decoherence might finally bridge the quantum-classical divide.

New work shows that physical folding of the genome to control genes located far away may have been an early evolutionary development.

“Anomalous” heat flow, which at first appears to violate the second law of thermodynamics, gives physicists a way to detect quantum entanglement without destroying it.

A new suggestion that complexity increases over time, not just in living organisms but in the nonliving world, promises to rewrite notions of time and evolution.

The puzzle of emergence asks how regularities emerge on macro scales out of uncountable constituent parts. A new framework has researchers hopeful that a solution is near.