Among lower-paid workers, union members are less likely than nonunion members to be enrolled in lower-end insurance plans imposing stricter limits on medical services and requiring doctors to see more patients, and spend less time with each.

In the past several years, astronomers have detected more than 80 massive planets, most of them as large or larger than Jupiter, which circle other stars.

A recent review of pay scales indicates that CEO's now earn an average of 419 times more pay than blue-collar workers, compared to a ratio of 42 times in 1980.

The particular design of muscles and bones in the neck and limbs of the turtle allow that it can draw in its exposed parts such that an attacker can find nothing but hard shell to bite.

Industrialization and modern methods of insect control have improved the standard of living around the globe while at the same time they have introduced some 100,000 dangerous chemical pollutants, having gone virtually unregulated since they were developed more than 50 years ago.

In addition to her work on the Miocene hominid fossil record, Mary Leakey contributed to archaeology through her discovery of the earliest direct evidence of hominid activity and through her painstaking documentation of East African cave paintings.

According to a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine, aspirin prevents blood clots just as well as a commonly used and more expensive blood-thinning drug does.

After decreasing steadily in the mid-1990's, the percentage of students in the United States finishing high school or having earned equivalency diplomas increased in the last three years of the decade, up to 86.5 percent in 2000 from 85.9 percent in 1999 and 84.8 percent in 1998.

The agreement, the first to formally require industrialized countries to cut emissions of gases linked to global warming, is a formal protocol by which 38 industrialized countries must reduce emissions of these gases by 2012 or face heavy penalties.

The computer company registered a $16 million net loss for the year, largely because it was profitable only overseas, where much of their profits were used for paying higher taxes, while continuing to lose money in North America.