Uninformed visitors to Robert Lanza’s home, a wooden building on a 10-acre private island in Clinton, Massachusetts, might assume he was an eccentric antiquarian, obsessed with his trove of prehistoric relics. And, in part, this is true. For the past 20 years Lanza, 58, has lived alone, surrounded by a collection of dinosaur fossils, but …

You’ve laughed and cried. And you may even fall in love and grow old with someone, only to be ripped apart in the end by death and disease. The universe leaves you dead or grieving with a hole in you as big as infinity. Can life really be reduced to the laws of physics, or …

Mounting scientific evidence points to an astounding conclusion about a familiar, everyday (or every night) phenomenon: dreams. The secrets dreams can unlock ultimately derive from the basic fact that reality is a process that involves us—a conscious observer. We assume the everyday world is “out there” in a more real or independent sense than is …

You keep staring at the repair man. His words are starting to sink in. The fabulous and expensive generator you bought a few years ago to keep the lights burning during storms and power failures needs a major repair. “A head gasket?” You echo the phrase he just used, fearing that it has a pricey …

“We patronize [the animals] for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err.” —Henry Beston It’s natural to be people-centric when exploring consciousness. We’re all drawn toward the familiar. But we’re just beginning to understand our own human consciousness, making it surely …

Will kind people be rewarded for their good deeds? Will the wicked be punished? Yes, according to a new interpretation of recent experiments. Although our science is too primitive for us to fully comprehend, there is a direct and proportional price to pay for any act of cruelty or injustice. Science suggests that there are …

Stem Cell Test Tried on Mice Saves Embryo. Technique Could Shift Debate on Humans. Scientists have devised two new techniques to derive embryonic stem cells in mice, one of which avoids the destruction of the embryo, a development that could have the potential to shift the grounds of the longstanding political debate about human stem …

In Star Wars, the bars are bustling with all types of alien creatures. And then, of course, there’s Yoda and Chewbacca. Recently, renowned scientist Stephen Hawking stated that he too believes aliens exist: “To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational.” Hawking thinks we should be cautious about interacting with …