Human beings are innately trained to do certain basic things: Eat. Drink. And despise television commercials. But put down that remote for a second. While in no way should you shun food and water, don't go skipping through the car ads on your TiVo. Turns out that sitting through those 30-second spots may make you happier than you think.

Photographer: Dennis Bromage

NASA will stay on track to return humans to the Moon by 2020, according to an overview of President Obama's 2010 budget request released on Thursday. Recently, various groups - including Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin and the space advocacy group the Planetary Society - have called for NASA to send astronauts to new destinations, such as asteroids..

Einstein's written view on God.

Several years ago, Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist who now works at Oxford University, concluded the cognitive power of the brain limits the size of the social network an individual can develop. Extrapolating from the brain sizes and social networks of apes, Dunbar suggested that the size of the human brain allows stable networks of 148.

Lip reading is a critical means of communication for many deaf people, but it has a drawback: Certain consonants (for example, p and b) can be nearly impossible to distinguish by sight alone. Tactile devices, which translate sound waves into vibrations that can be felt by the skin, can help overcome that obstacle by conveying nuances of speech ...