Everybody knows the power of deadlines - and we all hate them. But their effectiveness is undeniable.

Who we can be begins with our molecular blueprints - a series of alien codes penned in invisibly small strings of acids - well before we have anything to do with it. We are a product of our inaccessible, microscopic history.

We spend our lives on a thin slice between the unimaginably small scales of the atoms that compose us and the infinitely large scales of galaxies.

Just like a good drama, the human brain runs on conflict.

It is the most wondrous thing we have discovered in the universe, and it is us.

As an undergraduate I majored in British and American literature at Rice University.

Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.