Though the law will require emissions testing of all diesel vehicles, from tractor trailers to excursion buses, it will have no effect on sport utility vehicles, almost all of which are gasoline powered, and will not be subjected to emissions-control standards as stringent as they are for diesel-powered vehicles.

New items developed for automobiles in the 1997 model year included a safer air bag, which, unlike previous air bags, eliminated the possibility that a burst of smoke would appear when the bag inflated, and making an already terrified passenger think the car was on fire.

Until recently, the Inuit people led a nomadic existence, sheltering in igloos, the ice-block domes that are peculiar to north-central Canada, and in structures made of stones, bones, driftwood, and skins.

A Harvard anthropologist has proposed that using fire to cook food could be dated back to almost two million years and that it could explain hominid features like having a large brain and small teeth.

For many revisionist historians, Christopher Columbus has come to personify devastation and enslavement in the name of progress that has decimated native peoples of the Western Hemisphere.

Recent findings lend strong support to the theory that a black hole lies at the center of the Milky Way and of many of the 100 billion other galaxies estimated to exist in the universe.

Discussion of greenhouse effects has usually focused on whether the Earth would warm and by how much, but climatologists have indicated all along that the most obvious effects, and those that would have the largest impact on people, would be extremes of temperature, precipitation, and storminess.

According to a 1996 survey by the National Association of College and University Business Officers, more than three times as many independent institutions of higher education charge tuition and fees of under $8,000 a year than those that charge over $16,000.

Using a criterion based on an object's color, astronomers recently identified 23 galaxies so distant from Earth that their light has taken 85 percent of the age of the universe to reach us.

Drawing on her roots in a society that has a strong tradition of story-telling and oral renditions of the past, Indian writer Suniti Namjoshi incorporates many types of literature into her writing: including historical texts, legends, and even nursery rhymes from both Indian as well as European sources.