Imagine you could watch a group of strangers act out your innermost private feelings and relationships with family members – with intense and uncanny accuracy. That’s what happened when I found myself ...

The origin of life is one big chemical Catch-22. It always has been. To get life started, you need a genetic molecule—something like RNA or DNA. That’s needed to store information about how to ...

Some philosophers think that there is a hard problem of consciousness: No matter how much scientists learns about neural processes, they can never explain why all this processing is accompanied by ...

In a new book, astrophysicist Mario Livio describes how the existence of life on Earth can be traced back to an RNA-based “protocell.” The following is an excerpt from Is Earth Exceptional?: The Quest ...