When you're your parents' one shot at a genetic legacy, you may get to attend all the best schools, wear all the best clothes and eat all the best foods - at least relative to children in multiple-sibling households. But you also wind up with an overweening sense of your own importance.

There's no one place a virus goes to die - but that doesn't make its demise any less a public health victory. Throughout human history, viral diseases have had their way with us, and for just as long, we have hunted them down and done our best to wipe them out.

Spending $1 for a brand new house would feel very, very good. Spending $1,000 for a ham sandwich would feel very, very bad. Spending $19,000 for a small family car would feel, well, more or less right. But as with physical pain, fiscal pain can depend on the individual, and everyone has a different threshold.

Jellyfish serve as a model for bioengineers for the same reason yeast were once so valuable to geneticists: they're simple to deconstruct.

My family went through divorces and remarriages and the later, blended home - and then watched that home explode, too.

Sisters have ways of socializing brothers into the mysteries of girls. Brothers have ways of socializing sisters into the puzzle that is boys.

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.