With kids heading back to school, parents can be stretched thin. So it's time to get back to the basics with three strategies for better parenting. Read More

Our bodies apparently have 10-20 times as many foreign, microbial cells in them as they have human cells, and research increasingly focuses on our colonization by these critters as a factor in our health.  Are we simply Microbe Motels? Read More

A recent report suggested that we prefer confident rather than diffident experts...even when the confident ones are wrong. There are two kinds of experts: the folks who are very, very confident about what they know - and the folks who are very, very aware of the limits of what they know. A football running back is a confident expert - hit the hole, hit it fast, hit it hard. (Even the Minnesita Vikings recognize this!) Running back-style experts say things like - DRINK TWO GLASSES OF RED WINE A DAY!!!!! A scientist is usually a tentative expert - see the data, see the limits in the data, present the highly qualified possibilities of what the data might mean if we can get more data that look a lot like the data we just reported. Can we get people to listen to the second kind? Read More

The Flash of Insight, The Grand Gesture, The Rousing Speech, The Last Straw. All of these are doppelgangers of The Big Thing, which too many of us wait for to come along and change our lives. The secret is, of course, that it's not coming. Worse, by waiting for The Big Thing, you could let the little things that make life rich, and accumulate into the important experiences of your life, slip away. Read More