Studying the fruit fly, a household nuisance but a time-honored experimental subject, has enabled the secrets of how embryos develop to begin to be unraveled by scientists.

For the first time in the modern era, non-Hispanic Whites are officially a minority in California, which amounts to a little less than half the population of the state, down from nearly three-quarters only a decade ago.

Unlike most other mergers in the utility industry, which have been driven by the need to save money and extend companies' service areas, the merger of the nation's leading gas and electric company is intended to create a huge marketing network for the utilities in question with states opening their utility markets to competition.

A New York City ordinance of 1897 regulated the use of bicycles, mandated a maximum speed of eight miles an hour, required of cyclists to keep feet on pedals and hands on handlebars at all times, and it granted pedestrians right-of-way.

Growing evidence that coastal erosion occurs continuously, not in just such calamitous bursts like hurricanes, has led scientists and planners to urge a stringent new approach to limiting development along the nation's shoreline.

Competition in the mid-nineteenth century by large western farms gradually caused farmers in Pennsylvania to turn to livestock raising, but before that it was predominantly grain-producing.

Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1956, so embarrassed in his later years by what he considered the excessive sentiment in the poems in his first two collections, he destroyed every copy he could find.

Many financial experts believe that policy makers at the Federal Reserve, now viewing the economy as balanced between moderate growth and low inflation, are almost certain to leave interest rates unchanged for the foreseeable future.

Recently physicians have determined that stomach ulcers are not caused by stress, alcohol, or rich foods, but a bacterium that dwells in the mucous lining of the stomach.

Between 1990 and 2000 the global economy grew more than it did during the 10,000 years from the beginning of agriculture to 1950.