A Columbia researcher argues that everything from stress to aging comes down to how energy moves through your body.

Some sci-fi aliens are wildly implausible. Others aren’t so far-fetched.

Sixty years ago, a little-known philosopher challenged how science understands life. His perspective is finding new relevance in the age of artificial intelligence.

“Can we push these cells to do something other than what they normally do?" asks developmental biologist Michael Levin. "Can they build something completely different?”

It's deceptively tricky to distinguish living systems from non-living systems. Physics may be key to solving the problem.

Physicists have increasingly begun to view life as information-processing "states of matter" that require special consideration.

33 years ago, the theoretical biologist Robert Rosen offered an answer to the question "Is life computable?"

Scientists agree that eons ago, a bacterium took up residence inside another cell and became its powerhouse, the mitochondrion. But there are competing theories about the birth of other organelles such as the nucleus and endoplasmic reticulum.

We don’t need to think about what life is made of but rather what it does.

The best answer we have is, "Life is matter with intentionality."

As cells divide, they must copy all of their chromosomes once and only once, or chaos would ensue. How do they do it? Key controls happen well before replication even starts.

All biological systems are wildly disordered. Yet somehow, that disorder enables plant photosynthesis to be nearly 100% efficient.

Only recently have scientists directly witnessed this most pivotal of events in biology.

Life is the only physical system that actively uses information.

Reframing life in terms of death reveals some of the biggest philosophical problems with how we think about living systems.

The emergence of life in the universe is as certain as the emergence of matter, gravity, and the stars. Life is the universe developing a memory, and our chemical detection system could find it.

Symmetrical objects are less complex than non-symmetrical ones. Perhaps evolution acts as an algorithm with a bias toward simplicity.

A gigantic bacterium evolved differently than fundamental models of biology would have predicted. Simply put, these bacteria shouldn't exist.

∆G = ∆H - T∆S is one of the most abstract formulas in science, but it is also one of the most important. Without it, life cannot exist.