The origins of life in the universe have been a topic of scientific inquiry for centuries. Despite significant progress in ...

As director of the Carl Sagan Center for Research at the SETI Institute, astrobiologist Nathalie A. Cabrol's work is focused on answering the question of whether we're alone in the universe. In “The ...

This blog post was inspired by a conversation with my father many years ago, under a canopy of stars on a family camping trip. He spoke about the vastness of the universe, igniting a spark in me that ...

It appears that we live on the knife-edge, where only the narrowest combination of values for the fundamental constants allow life, and especially conscious life, to arise. The fundamental constants ...

One of the most fundamental questions humans face is the question of meaning: what is the purpose of our existence, and how can we find purpose and meaning in this life? Bertrand Russell, the renowned ...

On July 11, 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) returned its first images, penetrating the wall of time to show us the universe a few hundred million years after its formation. In a marvelous ...

A monster galaxy from the early universe shows that the cosmos was rich with oxygen when it was only less than 3% of its present age, astronomers have found. The discovery raises questions about how ...

What is the purpose of life? There are as many answers to this age-old question as there are people, and they run the gamut from hopeful to nihilistic to, well, nonexistent. Here are just a few famous ...

There are so many stars in the universe—hundreds of billions of them in our galaxy alone, which is, in turn, one of some 125 billion galaxies in the observable universe—that it would be surprising if ...

The universe has a way of meddling in our lives to give us the best possible outcome. When it comes to love, we may often experience odd or out-of-the-blue occurrences that can leave us scratching our ...