Why are some people born with a fire in the belly, while others need something to get their pilot light lit?

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.

His reading suggested a man swimming in the sea among the wreckage of his ship, and trying to save his life by greedily clutching first at one spar and then at another.

In these negotiations we are not a helpless object, although great world powers are involved. We play an active role and try to influence our destiny; we have our own trump cards and we use them.

Church is not a museum for Saints, but rather a hospital for sinners.

It is decreed by a merciful Nature that the human brain cannot think of two things simultaneously . . .

Never forget those who were killed. Never let rest those who killed them.

As all Americans head forward into the new reality globalization has created, they want leaders who will level with them and help level the playing field.

We suffer as a result of our own actions; it is unfair to blame anybody for it.

People don't know this, but early in your career, you don't just glide on to The Tonight Show.

The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.

The actual danger is nothing, and the positive advantages very great.