The decline of the mountain yellow-legged frog in the high reaches of the Sierra Nevada has become severe enough for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service quite possibly to list it as an endangered species in the near future.

Both the complexity of the phenomenon known as extinction and the vastness of the biosphere, having prompted many scientists to call for a large increase in the number of biologists working both in the field and in laboratories to clarify the relationships among the planet's many endangered life-forms.

Research has shown that when speaking, individuals who have been blind from birth and have thus never seen anyone gesture nonetheless make hand motions just as frequently and in the same way as sighted people do, and that they will gesture even when conversing with another blind person.

Although they are more temperamental and far more expensive than transistor-driven amplifiers, many audiophiles and audio professionals prefer the warmer, richer tones produced by vacuum-tube-driven amplifiers.

Archaeologists in Egypt have excavated a 5,000-year-old wooden hull that is the earliest surviving example of a "built" boat--in other words, a boat constructed out of planks fitted together--and that thus represents a major advance, in terms of boat-building technology, over the dugout logs and reed vessels of more ancient vintage.

Methane, which has long been counted among the greenhouse gases that are implicated in global warming, comes both from natural sources such as bogs and from a host of human sources, including coal mines, leaking pipelines, landfills, and rice paddies.

A recent study has found amoxicillin, long a standard treatment for ear infections, as being about as effective as newer, more expensive antibiotics and causing fewer side effects.

Results of a United States study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine have shown college-educated women and women living in the South and West to be significantly more likely to be using supplemental hormones as women living in the Northeast and Midwest.

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.

In 1945, after a career as First Lady in which she shattered expectations more audaciously than either Abigail Adams or Dolly Madison ever had been, Eleanor Roosevelt was appointed a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly by President Harry S Truman