Turning away from literary realism to write romantic stories about the peasant life and landscape of northern Sweden, in 1909 Selma Lagerlöf was the novelist who became the first woman and was also the first Swedish writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Just like the background in art history needed by an archaeologist in order to evaluate finds of ancient art, the nautical archaeologist needs specialized knowledge of the history and theory of ship design in order to understand shipwrecks.

Thelonious Monk, who was a jazz pianist and composer, produced a body of work both rooted in the stride-piano tradition of Willie (The Lion) Smith and Duke Ellington, yet in many ways he stood apart from the mainstream jazz repertory.

The four-million-year-old fossilized skeleton known as Lucy is so small compared with many other skeletons presumed to be of the same species, and so some paleontologists have argued that Lucy represents a different lineage.

By sucking sap from the young twigs of the hemlock tree, tree growth is retarded by the woolly adelgid, causing needles to change color from deep green to grayish green and to drop prematurely.

Although energy prices have tripled in the United States over the last two years, research indicates few people to have significantly reduced the amount of driving they do, nor are they making fuel efficiency a priority when shopping for cars.

After several years of rapid growth, the health care company became one of the largest health care providers in the metropolitan area, while it then proved unable to handle the increase in business, falling months behind in its payment to doctors and hospitals.

Although people in France consume fatty foods at a rate comparable to the United States, their death rates from heart disease are far lower in France.

In an attempt to guarantee the security of its innovative water purification method, the company required each employee to sign a confidentiality agreement prohibiting that its water purification methods be disclosed to companies using an analogous purification process.

The results of the company's cost-cutting measures are evident in its profits, which increased five percent during the first three months of this year after it fell over the last two years.