Chlorine is a deadly poison gas employed on European battlefields in World War I. Sodium is a corrosive metal which burns upon contact with water. Together they make a placid and unpoisonous material, table salt. Why each of these substances has the properties it does is a subject called chemistry.

If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate....Try science.

Our perceptions are fallible. We sometimes see what isn't there. We are prey to optical illusions. Occasionally we hallucinate. We are error-prone.

Science is a way of thinking that helps you not to fool yourself.

The dumbing down of America is evident in the slow decay of substantive content, a kind of celebration of ignorance.

While our behavior is still significantly controlled by our genetic inheritance, we have, through our brains, a much richer opportunity to blaze new behavioral and cultural pathways on short timescales.

The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood