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 ...

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 ...

A central question of astrobiology concerns the origin and distribution of life in the Universe. For this reason, astrobiology can be considered to fall within the science called transitional biology.

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 ...

What is life? Like most great questions, this one is easy to ask but difficult to answer. Scientists have been trying for centuries, and philosophers have done so for millennia. Today our knowledge is ...

Although biology is the study of life, even biologists don't agree on what 'life' actually is. While scientists have proposed hundreds of ways to define it, none have been widely accepted. And for the ...

Afew months into the pandemic, my girlfriend and I made a horrifying discovery in our bedroom. A mossy, bone-white substance was — and we could imagine no other word for it — growing along the inner ...

Life on Earth is composed of a handful of essential elements from the periodic table. Recently, one group of researchers claimed that this ingredient list should be expanded, having found a bacteria ...

Challenge your mind right now. Come up with a brief, meaningful, and defensible definition of life. Try it. How hard can it be? You know life when you see it, right? You are life. So put that search ...

This story is a collaboration between Science Friday and KHN. It was written by Sarah Varney. Credit: Eric Harkleroad, KHN illustration; Getty Images; Unsplash. As life-preserving medical technology ...