A fellow at New York City's Weill Cornell Medical Center, Dr. Sam Parnia is one of the world's leading experts on the scientific study of death. Last week Parnia and his colleagues at the Human Consciousness Project announced their first major undertaking: a 3-year exploration of the biology behind "out-of-body" experiences. The study, known as AWARE , involves the collaboration of 25 major medical centers through Europe, Canada and the U.S. and will examine some 1,500 survivors of cardiac arrest. TIME spoke with ...

Figuring out the story of human origins is like assembling a huge, complicated jigsaw puzzle that has lost most of its pieces. Many will never be found, and those that do turn up are sometimes hard to place. Every so often, though, fossil hunters stumble upon a discovery that fills in a big chunk of the puzzle all at once — and simultaneously reshapes the very picture they thought they were building. The path of just such a discovery ...

Actors call it "backstory." It's all the stuff that happened in the past, before the movie begins. All the stuff that might explain how the character became what he or she is today. It's obvious why that might be fascinating to the actor playing the role. But as for the rest of us, well, you have to figure the writer left it out for a reason. But these days we're seeing a lot more "origin" stories as the ...

As a boy, he was James Howlett: little howler, or wolf boy — names are destiny in superhero stories. As a man, James, alias Logan, a.k.a. Wolverine, has a gigantic torso and bulging veins; he might be a late-'90s home-run hitter after a visit to BALCO. And since he's Hugh Jackman, he's blessed with the winsome stare of a beautiful boy who mistakenly thinks he's done wrong. Anyway, he looks great for someone who's about 160 years old. ...