Join us for #YourDailyEquation with Brian Greene. Every Mon – Fri at 3pm EDT, Brian Greene will offer brief and breezy discussions of pivotal equations. Even if your math is a …

Neuroscientist André Fenton’s fascination with the human brain led him to study how we interpret the world. Check him out as he leads a group of students through interactive games …

Powerful new genetic tools allow scientists to alter the DNA of any organism—with tests on human embryos already underway. Even more ambitious, synthetic biologists on the verge of creating the genetic material for a living organism from scratch are setting their long-term sites on fashioning a fully synthetic human genome.

Nowadays, the tools for tracing your family tree have advanced far beyond looking back at names in the family Bible or compiling a scrapbook of paper records. Using your genetic information to find long-lost relatives is easier and cheaper than ever before—and scientists are looking to push the technology even further by analyzing our skin and facial features.

We once shared the planet with Neanderthals and other human species. Some of our relatives may have had tools, language and culture. Why did we thrive while they perished?

Thirty-five years ago string theory took physics by storm, promising the coveted unified theory of nature’s forces that Einstein valiantly sought but never found. In the intervening decades, string theory …