For decades, many scientists have relied on the "hard steps" model to suggest that intelligent life is rare — the improbable result of a series of unlikely evolutionary leaps. But new research by ...

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AFTER THE second world war, Leo Szilard, a pioneering nuclear physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project, decided to move into biology instead: life; not death. But there was a problem. As a ...

Life on Earth has made several “great leaps” in its evolutionary history: from unicellularity to multicellularity, from sea to land, and from land into the skies. What if the next one lies beyond our ...

For decades, scientists have been baffled by two enormous, enigmatic structures buried deep inside Earth with features so vast and unusual that they defy conventional models of planetary evolution.

"Consciousness," although challenging to define, can be thought of as a first-person awareness of one's surroundings and oneself. You sense the world through your eyes, nose, ears and hands, and track ...