If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds. Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense the stirring of a breeze.

It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

The Earth is a place. It is by no means the only place. It is not even a typical place.

All of the rocky and metallic material we stand on, the iron in our blood, the calcium in our teeth, the carbon in our genes were produced billions of years ago in the interior of a red giant star. We are made of star stuff.

Recent research shows that many children without enough to eat wind up with diminished capacity to understand and learn (“cognitive impairment” ). Children don't have to be starving for this to happen. Even mild undernourishment — the kind most common among poor people in America — can do it.

What an astonishing thing a book is.