1. Outlining his strategy for nursing the troubled conglomerate back to health, the chief executive’s plans were announced on Wednesday for cutting the company’s huge debt by selling nearly $12 billion in assets over the next 18 months.

2. lt is called a sea, but the landlocked Caspian is actually the largest lake on Earth, which covers more than four times the surface area of its closest rival in size, North America’s Lake Superior.

3. Neuroscientists, having amassed a wealth of knowledge over the past twenty years about the brain and its development from birth to adulthood, are now drawing solid conclusions about how the human brain grows and how babies acquire language.

4. According to a recent study of consumer spending on prescription medications, increases in the sales of the 50 drugs that were advertised most heavily accounts for almost half of the $20.8 billion increase in drug spending last year, the remainder of which came from sales of the 9,850 prescription medicines that companies did not advertise or advertised very little.

5. Along the major rivers that traverse the deserts of northeast Africa, the Middle East, and northwest India, the combination of a reliable supply of water and good growing conditions both encouraged farming traditions that, in places, endure in at least 6,000 years.

6. Despite its covering the entire planet, Earth has a crust that is not seamless or stationary, rather it is fragmented into mobile semirigid plates.

7. Emily Dickinson’s letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson were written over a period beginning a few years before Susan’s marriage to Emily’s brother and ending shortly before Emily’s death in 1886, outnumbering her letters to anyone else.

8. Al the end of 2001, motion picture industry representatives said that there were about a million copies of Hollywood movies available online and expected piracy to increase with high-speed lnternet connections that become more widely available.

9. Making things even more difficult has been general market inactivity lately, if not paralysis, which has provided little in the way of pricing guidance.

10. Unlike the conviction held by many of her colleagues that genes were relatively simple and static, Barbara McClintock adhered to her own more complicated ideas about how genes might operate, and in 1983, at the age of 81, was awarded a Nobel prize for her discovery that the genes in corn are capable of moving from one chromosomal site to another.