Features

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.

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.

In the first episode of the new season of ‘The Joy of Why,’ Nobel Laureate Jennifer Doudna discusses how she discovered CRISPR’s genome-editing power, the breakthroughs and hurdles during its explosive growth, and what lies ahead for this groundbreaking technology.

With automated proof-checkers, a problem can be broken up into small chunks, solved bit-by-bit, then reassembled with confidence that every piece is correct. For some, this heralds a new area in mathematical research.

In the 1960s, worm-training experiments and their strange implications captivated the nation. Columnist Claire L. Evans follows the neuroscientists who attempted to recapture the magic.

In holographic theories, physicists may have traced the pliability of space-time to its quantum roots: a measure of quantumness known as “magic.”

In an 1874 paper, Georg Cantor proved that there are different sizes of infinity and changed math forever. A trove of newly unearthed letters shows that it was also an act of plagiarism.