On a lonely planet, billions of years ago, a soup of chemicals — in the right place, at the right time, and with the right ...

At its Latin roots, consciousness literally meant “knowing with.” This was a borrowing from an earlier Proto-Indo-European ...

According to neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, it's our feelings, not high-level brain function, that make us human.

Nicolas Rivron, a biologist now based in Austria, spent close to a decade trying to build a model mouse embryo in the lab from scratch. After years of incremental progress and occasional false leads, ...

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a controversial French paleontologist, priest, and theologian, died in April 1955, a few months before a group of eminent scientists — including, notably, Marvin Minsky and ...

As Edward Donnell Ivy remembers it, many of the sickle cell episodes he endured in his 20s were akin to headaches or colds: They hurt, but he could still get up and go. Every so often, though, he ...

On a rare, clear day, one can look due west from the Mount Wilson Observatory, perched at nearly 6,000 feet on the outskirts of Los Angeles, and see the wide basin of the San Fernando Valley. A ...

Other animals may have some capacity to grasp small numbers, but only humans have jumped on the number train and steamed ahead full throttle. As mathematician and author Richard Elwes sees it, it all ...

Ben Hine was 4 years old when his parents split. In his recollection, he remembers that his dad left for work one day and his uncle arrived in a van to pick up Ben and his mother, along with the ...

To the naked eye, Annie Kathuria’s experiments look a bit like tiny tufts of cotton floating in pink Petri dishes. These unassuming orbs are clusters of millions of human brain cells called brain ...

CROSS SECTIONS: Dissecting the contentious and the controversial — with science at the core. Some U.S. politicians are advocating for reform towards a single payer system, such as Medicare for All.

Ahead of an artificial intelligence conference held last April, peer reviewers considered papers written by “Carl” alongside other submissions. What the reviewers did not know was that, unlike other ...