Physicists and biologists are working together to understand cooperation at all levels of life, from the cohesion of molecules to interspecies interactions.
Physicists and biologists don't usually mix, and when they do, things can get messy. But the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics (KITP) is trying to change that. For more than 30 years, this prestigious research facility, which in 2007 was rated by a study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences as one of America's most influential research institutes, has been pairing the world's brightest physicists with scholars from diverse fields in an effort to answer a wide-range of scientific questions - most recently, the evolution of multicellular life.