Jellyfish serve as a model for bioengineers for the same reason yeast were once so valuable to geneticists: they're simple to deconstruct.

There's no such thing as downtime for your brain.

Your parents leave you too soon and your kids and spouse come along late, but your siblings know you when you are in your most inchoate form.

Vaccines save lives; fear endangers them. It's a simple message parents need to keep hearing.

From the time we're born, our brothers and sisters are our collaborators and coconspirators, our role models and our cautionary tales.

Confidence quickly curdles into arrogance; smarts turn to smugness, charm turns to smarm.

It's not mere extremism that makes folks at the fringes so troubling; it's extremism wedded to false beliefs. Humans have long been dupes, easily gulled by rumors and flat-out lies.

There's a universe inside your head - a place of pictures and passions, of songs and sorrows. It's everything you are - and it's an utter mystery.

When we're awake, cortisol can fragment memories - one reason eyewitness crime scene accounts are so unreliable. But at night that very fragmentation allows creative recombinations of ideas.

In both children and adults, there can be a hard-to-deny link between a robust sense of hope and either work productivity or academic achievement.

No one ever pretended that shopping for anything is a rational experience. If it were, would there be Fluffernutter? Laceless sneakers? Porkpie hats? Would the Chia Pet even exist?

Damn your principles! Stick to your party.

My policy is to be able to take a ticket at Victoria station and go anywhere I damn well please!

Global crude oil demand is increasing, particularly in places like China

You can teach to a wall, but when you help someone learn, you have to get involved with the whole person.

You get to have some mischief before you're basically a blackened banana, impotent, and nothing to be afraid of.

Guitar is the most expressive instrument in the world. I don't play much any more. Maybe a bit in private.

The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

My parents reverted to their Catholic faith through the charismatic renewal, so I was raised charismatic.

I shall not make an argument ad hominem. My argument is ad bullshitem.

I never liked opera growing up. I always liked chamber music or solo music even more than orchestral music.