1. Foraging at all times of the day and night, but interspersing their feeding with periods of rest that last between one and eight hours, a sperm whale could eat so much as a ton of squid a day.

2. ln some types of pine tree, a thick laver of needles protects the buds from which new growth proceeds; consequently they are able to withstand forest fires relatively well.

3.  The tourism commission has conducted surveys of hotels in the most popular resorts, with the ultimate goal of reducing the guests who end up expressing overall dissatisfaction with the service in the hotels.

4.  A new study suggests that the conversational pace of everyday life may be so brisk it hampers the ability of some children for distinguishing discrete sounds and words and, the result is, to make sense of speech.

5. The nineteenth-century chemist Humphry Davy presented the results of his early experiments in his “Essay on Heat and Light,” a critique of all chemistry since Robert Boyle as well as a vision of a new chemistry that Davy hoped to found.

6. To attract the most talented workers, some companies are offering a wider range of benefits, letting employees pick those most important to them.

7. Many of the earliest known images of Hindu deities in India date from the time of the Kushan Empire, fashioned either from the spotted sandstone of Mathura or Gandharan grey schist.

8. Tides typically range from three to six feet, but while some places show no tides at all, some others, such as the Bay of Fundy, have tides of at least thirty feet and more.

9. A leading figure in the Scottish Enlightenment, Adam Smith’s two major books are to democratic capitalism what Marx’s Das Kapitalis to socialism.

10. Researchers studying the brain scans of volunteers who pondered ethical dilemmas have found that the basis for making tough moral judgments is emotion, not logic or analytical reasoning.