Carl Sagan famously said "we are all star stuff" in his 1980s TV series Cosmos. The stuff theme stuck. Lawrence Krauss wrote in New Scientist for February's Darwin Bicentennial that we should all "celebrate evolution as only star children can." He said, "Since the days of Galileo, astronomy has established a fundamental connection between humans and the cosmos.

by Brian Thomas, M.S. and Frank Sherwin, M.A.*

Imagine going to a doctor with a flare-up of gout or a migraine. To your utter shock, the physician calmly instructs you to reach into a water tank and hug an electric fish. This is what Roman physician Scribonius Largus prescribed in his Compositiones Medicae in 46 AD, and it worked too well, probably killing the patient.

Why do men have beards and women do not? Deep in the brain, the hypothalamus produces surges of gonadotropin-releasing hormone, a small chemical that acts like a key to turn on the manufacture and export of follicle-stimulating hormone and leutenizing hormone (LH) from the pituitary gland.