What is intelligence? It’s a question we’re all asking ourselves — and silicon-based AI is only one reason why. From lab-grown brain organoids that show the capacity to learn, to companies angling to tweak human intellect at the embryonic stage, the precise boundary between utility and catastrophe is a matter of unresolved debate.

Chimeras, or animals with human cells and tissues, are not new, and researchers have long used them to gain insights into diseases and even as a potential source of transplantable organs. But the research brings up thorny ethical questions regarding animal rights and the moral status of chimeric creatures.

Scientists are trying to create new life, whether to understand how biology first developed on Earth, or design new cells from scratch.  But life hasn’t happened — at least not yet. And questions around safety, as well as what even constitutes life in the first place, continue to swirl.

Human embryo models mimic the earliest development stages; they could offer a glimpse of the first weeks of pregnancy — a mysterious period for which natural embryos are seldom available — and potentially shed light on miscarriage, congenital anomalies, and other health issues. But how far should they go?

Welcome to Season 3 of Entanglements! In our first episode, we discuss neural implants and AI with Judy Illes, a professor of neurology and neuroethics at the University of British Columbia, and Joseph J. Fins, a physician scientist and medical ethicist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York.

Opinion | The biotech and pharma industries are pouring billions of dollars into AI-driven drug discovery and development. But the genomic data used to train AI models are often incomplete, contain errors, or lack contextual information — a quality issue that threatens to slow the pace of biological research.

Photo Essay | From sampling hydrothermal vents and abandoned mines to lab experiments that replicate Mars’ atmosphere, scientists are using what we know about life on Earth to understand how it may exist on other worlds. Italy, it seems, provides particularly fertile ground for such explorations.

Opinion | AI is being integrated into every part of the scientific process, including education, publishing, and the research itself. What does it mean if every component of the enterprise gets replaced by AI tools over time? C. Brandon Ogbunu explores what happens when science gets stripped of human involvement.

Is it possible that AI is — or might one day become — truly intelligent? Undark posed the question to five experts in linguistics, computer science, cognitive science, and psychology. They offered very different answers, though they agreed that the term “intelligence” is vague and poorly suited to the debate.

In “Natural Intelligence & the Logic of Consciousness,” neuroscientist Antonio Damasio argues against the conventional theory that consciousness stems from high-level brain function and cognition, which in turn leads to feelings. Instead, he writes, our basest feelings led us to our loftiest thoughts.

The brain isn’t the self — consciousness is intimately linked with the human body. And if consciousness is the body’s way of knowing itself, then it is the living form in its entirety that should be taken as selfhood proper, with the brain as an especially feverish region.