Being a United States citizen since 1988 and born in Calcutta in 1940, author Bharati Mukherjee has lived in England and Canada, and first came to the United States in 1961 to study at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

The nephew of Pliny the Elder wrote the only eyewitness account of the great eruption of Vesuvius in two letters to the historian Tacitus.

The physical structure of the human eye enables it to sense light of wavelengths up to 0.0005 millimeters; infrared radiation, however, is invisible because its wavelength - 0.1 millimeters - is too long to be registered by the eye.

Unlike the United States, where farmers can usually depend on rain or snow all year long, the rains in most parts of Sri Lanka are concentrated in the monsoon months, june to September, and the skies are generally clear for the rest of the year.

Proponents of artificial intelligence say they will be able to make computers that can understand English and other human languages, recognize objects, and reason as an expert does-computers that will be used to diagnose equipment breakdowns, deciding whether to authorize a loan or other purposes such as these.

If Dr. Wade was right, any apparent connection of the eating of highly processed foods and excelling at sports is purely coincidental.

Intar, the oldest Hispanic theater company in New York, has moved away from the Spanish classics and now it draws on the works both of contemporary Hispanic authors who live abroad and of those in the United States.

Since 1986,when the Department of Labor began to allow investment officers' fees to be based on how the funds they manage perform, several corporations began paying their investment advisers a small basic fee,with a contract promising higher fees if the managers perform well.

Under a provision of the Constitution that was never applied, Congress has been required to call a convention for considering possible amendments to the document when formally asked to do it by the legislatures of two-thirds of the states.

Analysts blamed May's sluggish retail sales on unexciting merchandise as well as the weather, colder and wetter than was usual in some regions, which slowed sales of barbecue grills and lawn furniture