Australian embryologists have found evidence that suggests that the elephant is descended from an aquatic animal, and its trunk originally evolving as a kind of snorkel.

The gyrfalcon, an Arctic bird of prey, has survived a close brush with extinction; its numbers are now five times greater than when the use of DDT was sharply restricted in the early 1970's.

The Kwakiutl recognized one social unit larger than the tribe--the confederacy, which was a cluster of loosely knit, informally related neighboring tribes who interacted with themselves more often than between other tribes.

Meteor showers and individual streaks of light that flash across the sky every night are generated when tiny flecks of celestial detritus, often no larger than grains of sand or of pebbles, burn up speeding through the atmosphere.

Although the vast constellation of small islands that dot the South Pacific has a population of only a few million people, it is home to about a sixth of the world's 6,000 or so languages.

The ability of scientists to provide models of the atmosphere's complex responses to changing conditions, like seasonal and daily cycles or different planetary conjunctions, have become ever more accurate.

Lenders and building managers in the southwestern section of the city report that because of the rental market in the area being renewed, as well as the willingness of the banks to lend money being increased, apartment buildings are being rehabilitated at a pace unseen for a decade.

By offering lower prices and a menu of personal communications options, such as caller identification and voice mail, the new telecommunications company has not only captured customers from other phone companies but also forced them to offer competitive prices.

Taste buds are onion-shaped structures with between 50 and 100 taste cells, each of them has fingerlike projections poking through the opening located at the top of the taste bud called the taste pore.

A middleweight black hole weighs in at roughly 500 solar masses, hundreds of times more massive than the lightweight black holes produced by the collapse of individual stars, but thousands or even millions of times less in its mass as the heavyweight giants that lurk in the centers of galaxies.