E.T. surely would have approved. In Steven Spielberg’s suburban homesick alien classic, the title character’s young friend Elliott flips out in class during frog dissection day, and frees all of the ...

Pencils, check. Notebook, check. Backpack, check. Scalpel… wait, what? If you think knives don’t belong on a school-supply list, you’re in good company: Studies show that as many as 25 percent of ...

Dissection, that staple of high school biology class, is slowly going the way of the slide rule, yielding to changes in technology, values, funding and science itself. “Biology has changed a lot,” ...