A study of food resources in the North Pacific between 1989 and 1996 revealed that creatures of the seabed were suffering from dwindling food supplies, possibly a result from increasing sea surface temperatures during the same period

Inhospitable places on our planet, from steaming hot springs to the thick ice of the Polar Regions, tend to be populated by specially adapted microbes flourishing, it seems, in these extreme conditions and are therefore called "extremophiles."

In July 1965 Mariner IV passed by Mars and took the first-ever close-up photographs of another planet, which showed that the Martian surface was like that of the Moon's in that it was pockmarked by moonlike craters and was dry and apparently dead.

Laboratory rats and mice live up to 40 percent longer than usual when fed a diet of at least 30 percent fewer calories than that which they would normally eat, but that otherwise contains all necessary vitamins and nutrients.

Geologists have found that streams in the Karoo basin of South Africa changed suddenly at the end of the Permian period 250 million years ago, from the meandering shape typically found in well-vegetated zones to the braided pattern found in areas without deep-rooted vegetation to hold the soil together.

Without adequate amounts of sleep, people's newly acquired skills and also new factual information may not get properly encoded into their memory circuits.

Unlike amateur clammers, who usually dig clams by hand during the summer, professional clammers work year-round, using all-weather instruments such as the hydraulic dredge or a 20-foot-Iona implement known as a bull rake.

In order to conserve the energy and heat they need to spend the entire winter sitting motionless over incubating eggs, male emperor penguins huddle over the nests in groups, thereby reducing the rate at which they burn energy so that it is 25 percent lower than it would be for isolated birds.

Although beavers can still be found throughout the western United States, their number has declined compared with the eighteenth century, when the abundance of beavers lured armies of European trappers into the Rocky Mountain region to slaughter them for their pelts.

Naked mole rats form colonies of approximately twenty animals, each of which consists of a single reproductive female and workers that defend her.