Eric James Beyer is a science writer whose work explores the intersections of technology, the natural world, and human identity. He has written for Interesting Engineering, The Bosphorus Review ...

A new argument explores how the growth of disorder could cause massive objects to move toward one another. Physicists are ...

Manu Prakash works on the world’s most urgent problems and seemingly frivolous questions at the same time. They add up to a philosophy he calls “recreational biology.” Inside Manu Prakash are two ...

It can be tempting to assume that your intuitions about three-dimensional space carry over to higher-dimensional realms. After all, adding another dimension simply creates a new direction to move ...

A growing body of work suggests that cell metabolism — the chemical reactions that provide energy and building materials — plays a vital, overlooked role in the first steps of life. Each of us starts ...

Under the sea ice during the Arctic’s pitch-black polar night, cells power photosynthesis on the lowest light levels ever observed in nature. Most of life’s engines run on sunlight. Photons filter ...

Is the universe infinite, Aristotle asked in 350 BCE, “or is this an impossibility? The decision … is … all-important to our search for the truth.” The Greek ...

Learning a language can’t be that hard — every baby in the world manages to do it in a few years. Figuring out how the process works is another story. Linguists have devised elaborate theories to ...

Exactly 200 years ago, a French engineer introduced an idea that would quantify the universe’s inexorable slide into decay. But entropy, as it’s currently understood, is less a fact about the world ...

Yizhi “Patrick” Cai is coordinating a global effort to write a complete synthetic yeast genome. If he succeeds, the resulting cell will be the artificial life most closely related to humans to date.

Detecting a graviton — the hypothetical particle thought to carry the force of gravity — is the ultimate physics experiment. Conventional wisdom, however, says it can’t be done. According to one ...