The autopoietic definition of life resembles the physiological definition but emphasizes life’s maintenance of its own identity, its informational closure, its cybernetic self-relatedness, and its ability to make …

Life exists all over the Earth in air, water, and soil, with many ecosystems forming the biosphere. Some of these are harsh environments occupied only by extremophiles. The life in a particular ecosystem …

Life is the aspect of existence that processes, acts, reacts, evaluates, and evolves through growth (reproduction and metabolism). The crucial difference between life and non-life (or non-living things) …

NASA defines life as a self-sustaining chemical system capable of biological evolution. A key part of any definition of life is that living organisms reproduce. Let’s now add a couple of observations: …

The cell, Nurse instructs us, is the basic unit of life, just as the atom is the basic unit of matter. Life is unexpectedly modular: everything alive on the plant is either a cell or made from a collection of cells.

Learn about the basic properties of life as well as ongoing debates about the definition of life. In the intro to biology video, we defined biology as the branch of science concerned with the study of living …

All living organisms (biotic) share eight key characteristics or functions: order, sensitivity or response to stimuli, reproduction, growth and development, regulation and homeostasis, energy processing, …

May 15, 2007 · When the topic of the meaning of life comes up, people tend to pose one of three questions: “What are you talking about?”, “What is the meaning of life?”, and “Is life in fact meaningful?”.

Aug 30, 2025 · Explore the scientific quest to define life, from its fundamental characteristics and origins to its vast diversity and the search for it beyond Earth.

Jun 25, 2025 · Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Paul Nurse offers a compelling exploration of biology’s most fundamental question: “What is life?”