Since the 1930s aircraft manufacturers have tried to build airplanes with frictionless wings, shaped so smoothly and perfectly that the air passing over them would not become turbulent.

Sartre, an inadvertent guru, had an opinion on everything, painfully considered, elaborately reasoned, often changed.

When Medicare was enacted in 1965, it was aimed at the prevention of a catastrophic illness from financially destroying elderly patients.

Rejecting its argument that the Masters Dog Training Club’s primary aim was to teach people to train dogs, the court ruled the club ineligible for tax exemption as an educational group.

To read of Abigail Adams’ lengthy separation from her family, her difficult travels, and her constant battles with illness is to feel intensely how harsh life was even for the so-called aristocracy of Revolutionary times.

A study of children of divorced parents found that ten years after the parents’ divorce, children who had been under six years of age at the time of the settlement were not preoccupied, nor even very curious, about the reasons that led to their parents’ divorces.

Indoor air pollution can threaten the health of closely confined farm animals and the workers who tend them and perhaps as well impairs the quality of such farm products like eggs, poultry, and pork.

The effect of the earthquake that caused most of Port Royal to sink into the Caribbean was like the eruption that buried ancient Pompeii: in each case a slice of civilization was instantly frozen in time.

It may someday be worthwhile to try to recover uranium from seawater, but at present this process is prohibitively expensive.

Carbon-14 dating reveals that the megalithic monuments in Brittany are nearly 2,000 years as old as any of their supposed Mediterranean predecessors.