Yellow jackets number among the 900 or so species of the world's social wasps, wasps living in a highly cooperative and organized society where they consist almost entirely of females—the queen and her sterile female workers.

El Niño, the periodic abnormal warming of the sea surface off Peru, a phenomenon in which changes in the ocean and atmosphere combine allowing the warm water that has accumulated in the western Pacific to flow back to the east.

The stars, some of them at tremendous speeds, are in motion just as the planets are, yet being so far away from Earth that their apparent positions in the sky do not change enough for their movement to be observed during a single human lifetime.

Even though Clovis points, spear points with longitudinal grooves chipped onto their faces, have been found all over North America, they are named for the New Mexico site where they were first discovered in 1932.

One of the primary distinctions between our intelligence with that of other primates may lay not so much in any specific skill but in our ability to extend knowledge gained in one context to new and different ones.

Heating-oil prices are expected to be higher this year than last because refiners are paying about $5 a barrel more for crude oil than they were last year.

Nobody knows exactly how many languages there are in the world, partly because of the difficulty of distinguishing between a language and the sublanguages or dialects within it, but those who have tried to count typically have found about five thousand.

Similar to other early Mississippi Delta blues singers, the music of Robert Johnson arose from an oral tradition beginning with a mixture of chants, fiddle tunes, and religious music and only gradually evolved into the blues.

In 2000, a mere two dozen products accounted for half the increase in spending on prescription drugs, a phenomenon that is explained not just because of more expensive drugs but by the fact that doctors are writing many more prescriptions for higher-cost drugs.

Starfish, with anywhere from five to eight arms, have a strong regenerative ability, and if one arm is lost it quickly replaces it, sometimes by the animal overcompensating and growing an extra one or two.