Bee Movie centers on the life of Barry B. Benson—a maverick bee who is less than enthusiastic about taking his place in the hive as a life-long worker. When Barry takes an unauthorized trip into the human world, he makes a shocking discovery: humans are stealing the honey that bees work so long and hard to produce.

Incensed at the injustice, Barry files a lawsuit on behalf of all bees demanding ...

The Power of Forgiveness is a collection of seven short stories that, taken together, reveal the limits, difficulties, healing qualities, and unforeseen effects an act of forgiveness can have in the lives of the people who give it. One of the stories focuses on Kathleen Lawler-Row, a professor of psychology who has conducted extensive research into the effects of forgiveness on the human body.

In this ...

The January 29, 2007, issue of TIME magazine was all about the brain. The lead article, "The Mystery of Consciousness," was by Dr. Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard. While marveling at the workings of the brain, Pinker clearly thinks we have only the brain—no eternal soul. At the end of the article he writes:

And when you think about it, the doctrine of a life-to-come ...

In his book The Gospel According to Starbucks, Leonard Sweet tells the story of Ed Faubert. Faubert is what you call a "cupper"—in layman's terms, he's a coffee-taster. And his perspicacious taste buds are actually certified by the state of New York!

So refined is Faubert's sense of taste for coffee that even while blindfolded, he can take one sip of coffee and tell you "not just that it is from ...

If a Baylor University professor has his way, death will no longer be an excuse for not keeping in touch. Dr. David Eagleman—an assistant professor of neuroscience and psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine—is the founder of Deathswitch, an automated online service that allows a person to send e-mail after his or her demise.

Customers pay a yearly fee of $19.95 and, when they pass away, ...

In January of 2007, the New York City Board of Health unexpectedly withdrew a proposal to allow city residents to change the sex on their birth certificates without undergoing sex-change procedures. Heath Commissioner Thomas R. Frieden, who enthusiastically supported the plan only a month before, told the New York Times that institutions like hospitals and jails raised concerns the board hadn't considered: ...

That 16-ounce honey bear in your pantry exists only because tens of thousands of bees flew some 112,000 miles in a relentless, unquestioned pursuit of nectar gathered from 4.5 million flowers. Every one of those foraging bees was female. By the time the life of each ended—they live all of 6 weeks during honey-making season—each bee flew about 500 miles in 20 days, the span each lives outside ...

I recently toured the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England, famous as the location of the prime meridian. It is a remarkable location. I was able to take a picture of my children straddling the meridian, each standing with one foot in the Eastern Hemisphere and the other foot in the Western Hemisphere.

As delightful as that might be, I would have to add that the prime meridian itself is not physically ...

Biologist Richard Dawkins, a vocal atheist and critic of organized religion, inadvertently revealed the lack of certainty that must accompany all denials of God's existence in his 2006 book The God Delusion.

On a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 is certitude that God exists and 7 is certitude that God does not exist, Dawkins rates himself a 6: "I cannot know for certain, but I think God is very improbable, ...

In the fall of 2006, researchers from the United States and England achieved what had only been dreamed of in science fiction: they created and tested a cloaking device. And it worked. In their first attempt, the scientists were able to cloak a copper can from microwave radiation. Microwaves operate in a similar manner to visible light and radar, in that the waves bounce off of objects, making them ...