What is Life?

In this Christmas episode of The Infinite Monkey Cage, Brian Cox and Robin Ince head to the North Pole to explore the dazzling science behind the northern lights, the extreme adaptations that help animals - and even Santa Claus - survive the Arctic cold, and how the Earth’s magne ...  Show more

In perhaps the monkiest Infinite Monkey Cage episode there’s ever been, Brian Cox and Robin Ince attempt to uncover the secrets of love, lust and friendship in primates. Swinging by to offer a hand (or tail) are evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, anthropologist Jo Setchell, ...  Show more

<span style="font-weight: 400">Scientists don’t really agree on a definition for life. We may recognize life instinctively most of the time, but any time we try to nail it down with set criteria, some stubborn counterexample spoils the effort. Still, can we really search for l ...

In this Back To School episode we consider the "List of Life": the criteria that define what it is to be a living thing. Some are easy calls: A kitten is alive. A grain of salt is not. But what about the tricky cases, like a virus? Or, more importantly, what about futuristic andr ...  Show more

There’s a black hole in the middle of the history of life: how did we go from tiny bags of chemicals to the vast menagerie of creatures we see around us? 

Today, we explore one of the most underrated mysteries of all time, and present one possible answer that takes us f ...

How did life on Earth start? To help answer that, researchers are trying to create some life for themselves. This is the second episode in our three-part series, Origins, about the beginnings and boundaries of life on Earth. For more, go to http://vox.com/unexplainable It’s a gre ...  Show more