From our tiniest cells performing constant “suicide programs,” to the adaptive measures behind the grand sweep of evolutionary history, death is what truly drives life.

Humans have developed elaborate rituals, institutions and even theories of immortality to lessen the life-long shock that is knowledge of death. What’s behind this primal urge and how does an […]

Our atoms are formed from particles with seemingly infinite lifespans, so why do organisms die? The NYU professor explains the biology of death.

A conversation with the author and professor of biology at New York University.

The International Energy Agency chief economist’s biggest fear: that sharing the world’s primary commodities could spark another global war.

We have to punish the extensive use of fossil fuels and provide incentives for the clean energy technologies.

We have to leave oil before oil leaves us, says Fatih Birol.

Whatever NYC loses to gentrification, the cartoonist argues, it maintains the same vitality it had throughout the whole 20th century.

The role of political cartoonists has largely been usurped by Stewart and Colbert. But what should satirists even target these days?

Comics now are every bit as vibrant as they were in their Depression heyday. And yet for the artists, cartooning still “ain’t a living.”

How did a cartoonist “trying to overthrow the government” end up creating both the sex drama “Carnal Knowledge” and the illustrations for kid-lit classic “The Phantom Tollbooth”?

Forget fancy pens: in his early career, the award-winning cartoonist used sharpened dowels from the local meat market.

Back when MLK Jr. was caricatured as a violent radical and the U.S. was plunging into Vietnam, cartoonist Jules Feiffer vented his anger with an editorial freedom that few publications […]

How the legendary cartoonist got started at the Village Voice, and why his work struck a nerve in a decade when “liberals didn’t understand that they had First Amendment rights.”

The gaming expert waxes nostalgic for the wireframe universe of the arcade game she loved most as a kid.

The modern workplace is a crime against the human spirit. Deepening our understanding of what truly motivates people will make work more productive—and more playful.

Those who think newspaper reading will be the dominant use of the iPad are fooling themselves, says Nicole Lazzaro. It’s going to be gaming—especially two-player gaming “like that Star Wars […]

Nicole Lazzaro explains how she’s trying to reconcile fun gameplay with a social message. (And, as a bonus, drops a reference to nerd-film classic “The Powers of Ten.”)

For years, video game culture has basically been a boys’ club. Nicole Lazzaro’s work will help change that trend forever.

Based on the seven emotions we can identify in the face, researchers have identified the four factors that make for an addictive game.

In the dazzling heat of the desert, gamer Nicole Lazzaro was struck by a vision of human fun throughout the ages.

A conversation with the founder and president of XEODesign.

Robert Kirshner hopes he can convince some of tomorrow’s Wall Street bankers to become astronomers instead.

In order to make his greatest discovery, Robert Kirshner had to overcome his own intellectual prejudice—and his mother’s.

It’s a back-of-the-auditorium kind of question, and scientists don’t have an answer for it yet. But they’re getting there, says Robert Kirshner.

Not all nutty ideas are good science, says Robert Kirshner. But there’s a mystery in physics whose solution, when it arrives, will probably sound pretty weird at first.

Robert Kirshner’s research into supernovae overturned decades of scientific assumptions about the universe, and how it is mysteriously expanding at a rapid rate.

What’s floating around out there in the cosmological zoo? The Harvard astronomer describes the major objects visible via telescope and the naked eye.

A conversation with the professor of astronomy at Harvard University.