Like their male counterparts, women scientists are above average in terms of intelligence and creativity, but unlike men of science, their female counterparts have had to work against the grain of occupational stereotyping to enter a "man's world."

As well as heat and light, the Sun is the source of a continuous stream of atomic particles known as the solar wind.

Defying efforts by policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic at restraining it, the United States dollar, continuing its rise, reaching its highest level in six years against the German mark.

In the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the United States acquired 828,000 square miles for about four cents an acre, which more than doubled the country's size and that brought its western border within reach of the Pacific Ocean.

Since the start of the space age, more and more littering has occurred in orbits near Earth, often because the intentional discarding of lens caps, packing material, fuel tanks, and payload covers.

Part of the proposed increase in state education spending is due to higher enrollment, since the number of students in public schools have grown steadily since the mid-1980's and, at nearly 47 million, are at a record high.

An international team of astronomers working at telescopes in the Canary Islands and Spain has detected at least 18 huge gas spheres estimated to have 5 to 15 times the mass of Jupiter, the solar system's largest planet.

It is possible that, like the Volkswagen, whose unchanging exterior over decades concealed many changes in its internal machinery, the evolution of many prehistoric microbes occurred with no significant modification to their sheaths.

Shrinking faster than any other nation's, the projected decline of Japan's population is 17 percent during the next half century.

Due to poaching and increased cultivation in their native habitats, researchers have determined that there are fewer than 100 Arabian leopards left in the wild, and that these leopards are thus many times as rare as China's giant pandas.