Indeed, the best way to think of willpower is not as some shapeless behavioral trait but as a sort of psychic muscle, one that can atrophy or grow stronger depending on how it's used.

A cockroach likely has no less brainpower than a butterfly, but we're quicker to deny it consciousness because it's a species we dislike.

Is there anything sadder than the foods of the 1950s? Canned, frozen, packaged concoctions, served up by the plateful, three meals per day, in an era in which the supermarket was king, the farmer's market was, well, for farmers, and the word 'locavore' sounded vaguely like a mythical beast.

Photography is about freezing a moment in time; McGinley's is about freezing a stage in a lifetime.

A jellyfish is little more than a pulsating bell, a tassel of trailing tentacles and a single digestive opening through which it both eats and excretes - as regrettable an example of economy of design as ever was.

Kids whose puberty begins too soon face not just psychological risks, but physical ones too, with an increased likelihood of cancer, as well as skeletal changes that could prevent them from attaining their full adult height.

Marketers have long known that a name can make all the difference when you're trying to move the merch. The kiwifruit was once the Chinese gooseberry, after all - at least until the produce peddlers wised up - and the Chilean sea bass was once the singularly unappetizing Patagonian toothfish.