1. Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s knowledge of the literatures of Europe, China, and that of Japan were instrumental in his development as a writer, informing his literary style as much as the content of his fiction.

2. According to scientists who monitored its path, an expanding cloud of energized particles ejected from the Sun recently triggered a large storm in the magnetic field that surrounds Earth, which brightened the Northern Lights and also possibly knocking out a communications satellite.

3. ln 1850, Lucretia Mott published her Discourse on Women, arguing in a treatise for women to have equal political and legal rights and for changes in the married women’s property laws.

4. To develop more accurate population forecasts, demographers have to know a great deal more than now about the social and economic determinants of fertility.

5. Laos has a land area about the same as Great Britain but only four million in population, where many are members of hill tribes ensconced in the virtually inaccessible mountain valleys of the north.

6. Having been named for a mythological nymph who cared for the infant Jupiter, the asteroid named lda, in the middle of the belt of asteroids that orbit the Sun between Mars and Jupiter, was discovered in 1884.

7. ln ancient Thailand, much of the local artisans’ creative energy was expended for the creation of Buddha images and when they constructed and decorated the temples that enshrined them.

8. The English physician Edward Jenner found that if experimental subjects were deliberately infected with cowpox, which caused only a mild illness, they are immune from smallpox.

9. Covering 71 percent of Earth’s surface, the oceans play an essential role in maintaining the conditions for human existence on land, moderating temperature by the absorption of heat and carbon dioxide, and giving pure water back to the atmosphere through evaporation.

10. Some anthropologists believe that the genetic homogeneity evident in the world’s people is the result of a “population bottleneck“-at some time in the past our ancestors suffered an event, greatly reducing their numbers and thus our genetic variation.