Becoming food savvy is one thing, but it's amazing how fast savvy turns to snooty, and snooty leaves you preparing three-hour meals that break your budget and that the kids won't even eat.

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.

We're learning how important it is both to preserve sibling relationships if they work and repair them if they're broken. We're also learning a lot about nonliteral siblings - stepsiblings, half-siblings - and the surprising power they can have.

Introverts listen better, they assess risks more carefully, they can be wiser managers. It's not for nothing that the Silicon Valley billionaires are so often the retiring types.

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.

Spare a thought for the poor introverts among us. In a world of party animals and glad-handers, they're the ones who stand by the punch bowl. In a world of mixers and pub crawls, they prefer to stay home with a book. Everywhere around them, cell phones ring and e-mails chime and they just want a little quiet.

Since narcissism is fueled by a greater need to be admired than to be liked, psychologists might use that fact as a therapeutic lever - stressing to patients that being known as a narcissist will actually cause them to lose the respect and social status they crave.