Both the caribou and the reindeer belong to the species Rangifer tarandus, but after 7,000 years of domestication in Eurasia, reindeer have developed a tendency to circle in tight groups, while caribou tend to spread far and wide.

In a blow to those who still harbored the illusion that E-mail exchanges are private, a watchdog group recently uncovered a trick for enabling an interloper to rig an E-mail message so that this person will be privy to any comments that a recipient had added as the message is forwarded to others or sent back and forth.

The number of plant and animal species that humans are known to have forced to extinction in the last half millennium is over 800.

Critics of the research study claimed that monkeys are different enough from human beings that comparing the two species can be as questionable–or as useless–as comparisons between humans and mice.

Now that so much data travels via light–i.e., is carried in glass fibers rather than by electrical current–one goal of semiconductor research is to develop a silicon chip that can transmit and receive light signals directly, a development that may one day lead to smaller, faster semiconductors.

Just as the free computer operating system Linux has of late become even more crash resistant, so support for it within the computer industry has been growing.

Exceeding even the figures predicted by the most optimistic financial analysts, the automobile company had earnings in the first quarter that more than doubled the previous quarter.

Because Miranda, the smallest moon of Uranus, has a large number of different surface features, including craters, mountains, valleys, and fractures, some astronomers suggest that at one time repeated impacts broke the surface apart, and after which the fragments were subsequently rejoined because of mutual gravitational attraction.

Complex human traits such as artistic talent or social skill are likely to be shaped by thousands, if not tens of thousands, of the 80,000 or so genes in the human genome.

Diesel engines burn as much as 30 percent less fuel than gasoline engines of comparable size, as well as emitting far less carbon dioxide gas and far fewer of the other gases that have been implicated in global warming.