Several facilities in the U.S. and abroad maintain morbid warehouse morgues full of frozen human heads and bodies, waiting for the future. They are part of a story that is ghoulish, darkly humorous, and yet endearingly sincere.

Several facilities in the U.S. and abroad maintain morbid warehouse morgues full of frozen human heads and bodies, waiting for the future. They are part of a story that is ghoulish, darkly humorous, and yet endearingly sincere.

As elite distance swimmer Ben Lecomte approached the edge of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, he started finding more and more of something unexpected — a lot of life.

As elite distance swimmer Ben Lecomte approached the edge of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, he started finding more and more of something unexpected — a lot of life.

The mouse didn't look like much. It had the same red beady eyes and white fur as any other laboratory mouse. Sure, its DNA had been tweaked to make it ideal for testing anti-cancer drugs, but that wasn’t so unusual either.

The Covid pandemic has already turned life as we know it upside down – and no doubt prompted some people to want to leave the planet. Now a leading scientist has warned that viruses may not only be found on Earth, but might occur – should life exist – elsewhere in the universe.

I was raised in a household in which my mother, a divorced old-school feminist, openly hoped for the day when the “racist, angry old white men,” who keep our country in sociopolitical purgatory, would die.

Humans are shaping the evolutionary future of life on Earth.

Wisdom is the ability to discern inner qualities and subtle relationships, then translate them into what others recognise as good judgment. If it comes to us at all, wisdom is the product of reflection, time and experience.

Animal immune systems depend on white blood cells called macrophages that devour and engulf invaders.

In mid-January, a group of computer scientists and biologists from the University of Vermont, Tufts, and Harvard announced that they had created an entirely new life form — xenobots, the world’s first living robots.

Astrangia. Credit: Stephen Cairns et al. An illustrated key to the genera and subgenera of the Recent azooxanthellate Scleractinia (Cnidaria, Anthozoa), with an attached glossary, ZooKeys (2012). DOI: 10.3897/zookeys.227.3612. Creative Commons Attribution 3.

I am honestly not sure whether fish have any concept of bees. I am equally unsure whether bees have any concept of fish. I am even more unsure whether bees and fish could be friends, if they knew that the other existed. But thanks to robots, it turns out that the answer is definitely yes.

If the 20th century promised better living through chemistry, the 21st century has promised better living through digital technology.

It has eight arms, three hearts — and a plan. Scientists aren’t sure how the cephalopods got to be so intelligent. To demonstrate how smart an octopus can be, Piero Amodio points to a YouTube video. It shows an octopus pulling two halves of a coconut shell together to hide inside.

At the end of last year, scientists discovered a small octopus city – dubbed Octlantis – a find that suggests members of the gloomy octopus species (Octopus tetricus) are perhaps not the isolated and solitary creatures we thought they were.

In 1981, a remarkable book was published: After Man: A Zoology of the Future, by Dougal Dixon.

I logged into "Second Life" in the year 2018 A.D. It still exists, sort of. Residents and businesses began fleeing for more popular social networks long ago. Vast acres of land are abandoned or sparsely populated by the few remaining diehard users.

You’re on the Spaceship Earth […] You’d better pay your fare now You’ll be left behind You’ll be left hangin’ In the empty air You won’t be here and you won’t be there.

Humankind is revealed as simultaneously insignificant and utterly dominant in the grand scheme of life on Earth by a groundbreaking new assessment of all life on the planet. The world’s 7.6 billion people represent just 0.01% of all living things, according to the study.