Why do stories endure across centuries—and what do they reveal about the essence of being human? Brian Greene sits down with Booker Prize–winning author Ian McEwan to explore the timeless …

Consciousness is a terrible curse. Or so says a character in screenwriter/director Charlie Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich. Part theater of the absurd and part neuroscience fiction, the Oscar-winning filmmaker’s work captures the splintering between what we perceive and what we feel as our brains grapple with multiple layers of reality.

Winners of the prestigious 2010 Kavli Prizes—biennial international awards that recognize seminal advances in astrophysics, nanoscience and neuroscience, and include a cash prize of $1 million in each field— were …

With ever more refined techniques for measuring complex brain activity, scientists are challenging the understanding of thought, memory and emotion–what we have traditionally called “the self.”

Dark energy is cosmology’s biggest mystery—an anti-gravitational force that confounds the conventional laws of physics. It makes up more than two-thirds of the cosmos, but science is still grappling to explain what dark energy actually is.

Meet roboticist Heather Knight and explore the interactive robotic experiences she has created, which include a giant Rube Goldberg machine and a wise-cracking robot, Data, who performs a stand-up comedy …