We have only one example of biology forming in the universe – life on Earth. But what if life can form in other ways? How do you look for alien life when you don’t know what alien life might look like ...

Astrobiology faces the fundamental challenge of searching for extraterrestrial life without a universal definition of life or examples beyond Earth, despite the discovery of over 5,000 exoplanets, ...

An international team of researchers has developed a new theoretical framework that bridges physics and biology to provide a unified approach for understanding how complexity and evolution emerge in ...

It may have fewer than many of the other sciences, but biology does have two dozen or so “rules”—broad generalizations about ...

Evolution is a complicated thing. Much of modern evolutionary biology seeks to reconcile the seeming randomness of the forces behind the process — how mutations occur, for example — with the ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1950 the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi was discussing the possibility of intelligent alien life with his colleagues. If alien ...

The analysis of dental remains from Dmanisi in the Republic of Georgia has important implications regarding the balance and ...

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. In 1950 the Italian physicist Enrico ...