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How Does Touch Lead To Pain Or Pleasure?
Neuroscientist Ishmail Abdus-Saboor discusses efforts to understand how skin contact can be painful or pleasurable, and what touch-obsessed naked mole rats might teach us about human social behavior.
Corals Spin Tiny Vortices to Get Oxygen, but Not if It’s Too Hot
New research is helping biologists understand how an overlooked aspect of coral physiology may affect their fate under climate change.
A New Way That a Cow’s Inner World Shapes Earth’s Atmosphere
An organelle discovered inside a microbe inside a cow’s gut helps explain how livestock burps contribute to warming our planet.
The Organisms That Make Earth’s Harshest Places Home
Extremophiles that thrive in the most unforgiving environments aren’t just biological curiosities. Understanding their resilience has many implications for us.
Martin Picard’s Mitochondrial Theory of Mind
The biologist’s bold “energetic view of life” looks to the body’s strangest organelles as the link between cells, health, and mind and the foundation of our experience of being alive.
Why Am I Left-Handed?
An invisible difference in 10% of humans poses deep mysteries in several fields at once.
Will We Ever Find Alien Civilizations?
Astronomer David Kipping discusses why claims of extraterrestrial life keep dissolving under scrutiny, why we need a more statistically grounded approach to searching for life beyond Earth, and why it’s rational to believe that we may be alone.
Is Life Just Different?
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?
For the First Time, a Cell Built From Scratch Grows and Divides
Scientists built a synthetic cell that combines more lifelike properties than ever before — proof of concept that it’s possible to bring nonliving materials to life, or something close to it, in the lab.