Older siblings get more total-immersion mentoring with their parents before younger siblings come along. As a result, they get an IQ and linguistic advantage because they are the exclusive focus of their parents' attention.

There's a sort of sibling moratorium when you're establishing yourself as an adult. So much of your energy has to be focused on other things like work and kids. But when people become more settled, siblings tend to regroup because now you're building a new extended family.

A child gets vaccinated and soon after, autism symptoms emerge. The apparent cause-and-effect is understandable but erroneous - more a coincidence of the calendar and childhood developmental stages than anything else, as repeated and exhaustive studies have shown.

There may be no more-radioactive term in the English language than what we now almost always refer to as the 'n-word' - itself a coy means of linguistic sidestepping that is a sign of how perilous it is to utter the thing in full, even in conversations about language.

Scarily, football helmets, which do a fine job of protecting against scalp laceration and skull fracture, do little to prevent concussions and may even exacerbate them, since even as the brain is rattling around inside the skull, the head is rattling around inside the helmet.

Science has yet to isolate the Godiva Chocolate or Prada gene, but that doesn't mean your weakness for pricey swag isn't woven into your DNA. According to a new study of identical twins, it's less TV ads or Labor Day sales that make you buy the things you do than the tastes and temperaments that are already part of you at birth.

Well, I think of the folks who are the climate deniers as the flat Earthers and the people who say the moon landings never happened.