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.

I n 1959, an 18-month-old Lebanese boy named Imad Elawar began speaking strange words. Over the next few years, his parents began to discern a narrative, one involving a village called “Khirby,” a ...