Pain and pleasure seem like simple facts of life, however they are anything but that. Neuroscientists still cannot say why physical pain differs from psychological pain, for instance, or why a loved one’s touch soothes while a stranger’s touch repels. To explore the science behind these sensations, Janna Levin talked to Ishmail Abdus-Saboor, a neuroscientist at Columbia University’s Zuckerman…

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Does intelligent life exist elsewhere in the universe? The question has captivated us for centuries, but despite decades of searching it remains frustratingly unanswered. Every so often a curious signal appears — fossilized structures in a meteorite, say, or an unusual gas in an exoplanet’s atmosphere — and for a moment it seems possible that we are not alone before the excitement gives way to a…

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One of the most surprising and remarkable discoveries in recent scientific history has been CRISPR. Short for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, CRISPR is a form of immune system that evolved in bacteria more than a billion years ago to defend against persistent viral threats. Under attack, bacteria can snip a small fragment of a virus’s DNA, store it in the CRISPR region…

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