The transition from non-life to life was very likely aided by an asteroid hitting Earth, prebiotic chemistry, molecular ...

Asking a biologist to define 'life' is a bit like looking-up the word 'definition' in a dictionary — it's as if you're questioning their very existence. Biologists like myself don't agree on what life ...

Scientists have debated the definition of life for decades, but they still lack a consensus on the answer. Experts believe that "edge cases" make life difficult to define and blur boundaries across ...

The CRISPR entry notes both its original function, as an immune defense in bacteria and archaea, and its recent adoption as a gene editing tool. The latter part of the definition raised eyebrows for ...

Definitions of "life" are a dime a dozen. In a paper published back in 2011, University of Haifa biophysicist Edward Trifonov documented 123 of them. But which one is best? Trifonov decided to seek ...

Scientists to this day can’t define what life is. For every definition, there’s an animal, a plant — something that breaks the rules. So how does science answer that? Writer Carl Zimmer joins us to ...