In many of the world’s regions, increasing pressure on water resources has resulted both from expanding development, changes in climate, and from pollution, so that the future supply in some of the more arid areas is a concern going forward.

Unable to build nests or care for their young, a female cowbird lays up to 40 eggs a year in the nests of other birds, including warblers, vireos, flycatchers, and thrushes.

Kudzu, an Asian vine that has grown rampantly in the southern United States since introducing it in the 1920s to thwart soil erosion, has overrun many houses and countless acres of roadside.

In early Mesopotamian civilization, castor oil served not only as a laxative, but also a skin-softening lotion and it was a construction lubricant for sliding giant stone blocks over wooden rollers.

The treasury market dropped in response to a decrease in the value of the dollar and to continued concern that the economy might be growing as fast as to accelerate inflation and drive interest rates higher.

A new satellite sweeping over the poles at altitudes of up to 32,000 miles is called POLAR, giving scientists their best look yet at the magnetosphere, the region of space under the invisible influence of Earth’s magnetic field.

In his Uses of Enchantment (1976), it was psychologist Bruno Bettelheim's assertion that the apparently cruel and arbitrary nature of many fairy tales actually are an instructive reflection of a child’s natural and necessary “killing off” of successive phases in his or her own development.

In 1776 Adam Smith wrote that it is young people who have “the contempt of risk and the presumptuous hope of success” needed to found new businesses.

Child development specialists believe that, in confining babies much of the time to strollers, high chairs, playpens, and walkers, muscle development can be inhibited.

Recently declassified information from military satellites in orbit thousands of miles above the Earth show the planet continually bombarded by large meteoroids that explode with the power of atomic bomb blasts.