Because of wireless service costs plummeting in the last year, and as mobile phones are increasingly common, many people now using their mobile phones to make calls across a wide region at night and on weekends, when numerous wireless companies provide unlimited airtime for a relatively small monthly fee.

An exceptionally literate people, more Icelanders publish books per capita than do the people of any other nation.

Analyzing campaign expenditures, the media has had as a focus the high costs and low ethics of campaign finance, but they have generally overlooked the cost of actually administering elections, which includes facilities, transport, printing, staffing, and technology.

Since February, the Federal Reserve has raised its short-term interest rate target five times, and because of the economy's continued strength, analysts have been predicting for weeks that the target will be raised again in November.

Marconi's conception of the radio was as a substitute for the telephone, a tool for private conversation; instead, it is precisely the opposite, a tool for communicating with a large, public audience.

Birds known as honeyguides exhibit a unique pattern of behavior: the bird leads another animal, such as a honey-badger or a human, to a bees' nest with their chattering when they fly ahead; after the larger animal takes honey, the bird eats the wax and bee larvae.

Retailers reported moderate gains in their November sales, as much because of their sales of a year earlier being so bad as that shoppers were getting a head start on buying their holiday gifts.

The first shots of the American Revolution, fired at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, were, according to legend, heard around the world, but news of these shots, which were sent by swift messenger, took four days in reaching New York City as well as another additional eleven days to reach Charleston, South Carolina.

On August 13, 1868, the warship U. S. S. Wateree, anchored in the harbor of Arica, off the coast of what is now northern Chile, rode on the crest of a tsunami (seismic sea wave) and coming to rest in the Atacama Desert, it was some three miles up the coast and almost two miles inland from its initial anchorage.

The period when the great painted caves at Lascaux and Altamira were occupied by Upper Paleolithic peoples has been established by carbon dating, but what is much more difficult to determine are the use to which primitive peoples put the caves, the reason for their decoration, and the meaning of the magnificently depicted animals.