Galileo did not invent the telescope, but on hearing, in 1609, that such an optical instrument had been made, he quickly built his own device from an organ pipe and spectacle lenses.

As with those of humans, the DNA of grape plants contains sites where certain unique sequences of nucleotides are repeated over and over.

2001 proved to be the automaker's first losing year since 1992, when the company had lost $7.4 billion, which was primarily because of almost $7 billion in accounting charges.

The yield per acre of coffee berries varies enormously in that a single tree, depending on both its size and on climate and altitude, could produce enough berries to make between one and twelve pounds of dried beans a year.

The parachutelike membranes of Africa's scaly-tailed flying squirrels differ from those of the flying squirrels in the family Sciuridae because they are attached to a cartilage rod at the elbow instead of the wrist.

Unlike a female grizzly bear in the Rockies, which typically occupies a range of 50 to 300 square miles, a male's range will cover 200 to 500 and occasionally as many as 600.

The electronics company has unveiled what it claims to be the world's smallest network digital camcorder, the length of which is that of a handheld computer, and it weighs less than 11 ounces.

Patience Lovell Wright, whose traveling waxworks exhibit preceded Madame Tussaud's work by 30 years, became well known as much because of having an eccentric personality as for having skillfully rendered popular public figures in wax.

Frederick Winslow Taylor, a machinist and engineer who worked in the early twentieth century, believed that the productivity of a job could be improved if one were to separate the components of a task into its individual motions and found the best way to perform each motion, then redesign the job so that each motion could be done as efficiently as possible.

Born into poverty and sent by her father into servitude at the age of seven, Martha Matilda Harper created America's first retail franchise network, a radical new business model that enabled women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to own their own businesses and gain financial independence.