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How Life (and Death) Spring From Disorder
Life was long thought to obey its own set of rules. But as simple systems show signs of lifelike behavior, scientists are arguing about whether this apparent complexity is all a consequence of thermodynamics.
Droplets That ‘Come to Life’
Life might have originated in droplets that behave surprisingly like living cells.
Dividing Droplets Could Explain Life’s Origin
Researchers have discovered that simple “chemically active” droplets grow to the size of cells and spontaneously divide, suggesting they might have evolved into the first living cells.
How Many Half-Lives Do You Have?
Gaining an intuition about half-life requires some unintuitive thinking.
In the Deep, a Drive to Find Dark Matter
Elena Aprile now leads the world’s most sensitive dark-matter search. But before she could build her first detector, she had to make herself out of titanium.
Grand Unification Dream Kept at Bay
Physicists have failed to find disintegrating protons, throwing into limbo the beloved theory that the forces of nature were unified at the beginning of time.
On a Hunt for a Ghost of a Particle
Janet Conrad has a plan to catch the sterile neutrino — an elusive particle, possibly glimpsed by a number of experiments, that would upend what we know about the subatomic world.
Solution: ‘Hanging Far Out Over the Edge’
A simple and elegant way to stack identical flat objects so that they project over an edge as far as possible.
Quantum Gravity’s Time Problem
The effort to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity means reconciling totally different notions of time.