Death and the possibility of an afterlife have fascinated artists, philosophers, and scientists throughout history. Fear, ...

For generations, medicine treated death as a clean line: the instant the heart stops, the person is gone. A wave of new research is dismantling that certainty, revealing a messy, lingering borderland ...

People's knee-jerk reaction to seeing death in nature is often not positive. The burn scar left by wildfire on a once-forested hillside, or a ghostly white coral reef, may evoke tragedy and despair.