For centuries, people on sea voyages washed their clothes by placing the dirty laundry in a strong cloth bag, then toss it overboard, and let the ship drag the bag for hours.

Unlike Schoenberg's twelve-tone system that dominated the music of the postwar period, Bartók founded no school and left behind only a handful of disciples.

In an attempt to produce premium oysters, a firm in Scotland has developed a prototype of a submersible oyster farm, sitting below the surface of the ocean, and it provides ideal conditions for the mollusks' growth.

Though subject to the same wild-animal control efforts that killed off almost all the wolves in North America over the past century, the coyote's amazing ability of adapting to the presence of humans has enabled it to expand its range into Alaska and Central America.

Scientists have dated sharp-edged flakes of stone found in the fine-grained sediments of a dry riverbed in the Afar region of Ethiopia to between 2.52 and 2.60 million years ago, pushing back by more than 150,000 years the earliest date when it is known that humans made stone tools.

Heavy commitment by an executive to a course of action, especially if it has worked well in the past, makes it likely to miss signs of incipient trouble or misinterpret them when they do appear.

Section 301 of the 1988 Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act enables the United States Trade Representative to single out a country as an unfair trader, begin trade negotiations with that country, and, if the negotiations do not conclude by the United States government's being satisfied, to impose sanctions.

A leading figure in the Scottish enlightenment, Adam Smith's two major books are to democratic capitalism what Marx's Das Kapital is to socialism.

Although producer prices rose at an unexpectedly steep rate in September, analysts said that the increase resulted mostly from temporary factors and not necessarily foreshadowing that there would be a resurgence of inflation.

Faulty voting equipment, confusing ballots, voter error, and problems at polling places have been cited by a new study of the 2000 United States presidential election, which estimated that they did not count 4 million to 6 million of the 100 million votes cast.