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The restored Borges Labyrinth viewed from above on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore

The restored Labyrinth, aerial view. Credit: Courtesy Fondazione Giorgio Cini

Architecture Time Is Itself an Architect

Renata Codello on Restoring the Borges Labyrinth as a Living Work of Literature

A labyrinth, by definition, resists being fully known from within it. You can walk its paths, but you cannot see its whole shape while you are inside it. That is precisely what a labyrinth is for. Borges spent much of his writing life returning to this figure: infinite recursion, forking choices, and the impossibility of a single, final map. So when the Fondazione Giorgio Cini set out to restore the physical labyrinth built in his honor on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, they were not simply maintaining a garden.

A protocell drifting in the shallow, mineral-rich waters of the early Earth, with a fatty membrane enclosing a strand of RNA

An early-Earth protocell enclosing a strand of RNA. · Illustration for Our Narratives

Science Before the First Cell

A Nobel laureate explores the moment chemistry first became biology

Somewhere on the early Earth, between three and four billion years ago, chemistry became biology. No one knows exactly where, how, or how many times it might...

Diagram tracing the divergence of the operational code and the standard genetic code from a shared evolutionary origin

Adapted from an original diagram by Dr. Gustavo Caetano-Anollés. · © Gustavo Caetano-Anollés

Science When Chemistry Learned to Remember

Dr. Gustavo Caetano-Anollés on dipeptides, dual codes, and the emergence of biological meaning

One of the deepest questions in biology remains unresolved. Life depends on a translation system that converts nucleotide sequences into proteins through the...

Encounters

Osprey sculpture in progress, carrying a freshly caught fish Marietta, Georgia, USA © Chris Wilson

Osprey: Research, Inspiration, Sculpting, and Carving

Enter the Gallery

Our Narratives is a place where contributors share the ideas, stories, and discoveries that move us forward, inspiring each other toward a better future.

From the Magazine

Quantum physics experiment exploring whether time emerges from within a closed system

Science

What Time Is Made Of

When time emerges from within

Time is one of the most familiar aspects of human experience and one of the least understood in physics. We feel it passing. We measure it constantly. And...

Wild landscape photographed by Carolina Aravena Costa

Photography

The Story Remains

Memory, Loss, and the Stories That Endure

Carolina Aravena Costa came to photography almost by accident, in 2013, in the middle of a divorce, at a moment in her life when she needed to discover something different. What she found instead was Chile itself: its hills, wetlands, birds, and the slow, demanding practice of trying to photograph wild things without disturbing them.

Artist's impression of the Cassini spacecraft flying through the ice plumes of Enceladus

Science

The Pattern Life Leaves Behind

A new way to search for life beyond Earth

For decades, the search for life beyond Earth has rested on a deceptively simple premise: find the right molecules. Amino acids. Fatty acids. The chemical signatures of biology...