While humanity’s past is firmly grounded on our home planet, the humans of the future may live on the moon, Mars, or interstellar ships bound for distant worlds. To prepare …

Nearly every group has its extreme outliers. Where does fundamentalism come from? How does the most powerful organ in the known universe, the human brain, make emotionally driven decisions that …

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.

At present, our brains are mostly dependent on all the stuff below the neck to turn thought into action. But advances in neuroscience are making it easier than ever to hook machines up to minds.

What are scientists looking for when searching for alien life? A lot, it turns out: the search for extraterrestrials requires the help from astronomers, planetary scientists, chemists, computer scientists, and geneticists, just to name a few. But are we barking up the wrong carbon-based tree?

The nature of time is an age-old conundrum for physicists, philosophers, biologists and theologians. The Newtonian picture of time—a kind of cosmic clock that ticks off time in a manner that applies identically to everyone and everything—tightly aligns with our experience. But with special and general relativity, Einstein showed the fallacy inherent in experience.

Can the spooky world of quantum physics explain bird navigation, photosynthesis and even our delicate sense of smell? Clues are mounting that the rules governing the subatomic realm may play an unexpectedly pivotal role in the visible world.

The World Science Festival’s Pioneers in Science program gives high school students from around the globe rare and intimate access to some of the world’s most renowned scientists in a …