Ideas worth sitting with.

A mouse in a cage picks a mystery over a meal. A fish's curiosity is written in a single letter of DNA. And the brain region that makes you wonder is the same one that registers pain.

We have better maps of Mars than of our own ocean floor. The question is not just what we haven't found — it's why we stopped looking.

In the 1950s, Nikolaas Tinbergen built fake eggs more vivid than anything in nature. The birds preferred them. We are the birds now.

It takes less than a fifth of a second. Before you have chosen to look, your brain has already decided what it wants.

There is a temperature at which a healthy young adult, sitting perfectly still in the shade, will die. That number is lower than you think.

Here is a number: 30,000,000,000,000. That is roughly how many cells make up your body. Not one of them is you.

Do the math. The universe is 13.8 billion years old. You will live, if you are lucky, for about 80 of them.

Stress is not an event. It is an accumulation — and your body keeps a ledger that your mind never sees.