1. Because the collagen fibers in skin line up in the direction of tension, surgical cuts made along these so-called Langer’s lines sever fewer fibers and is less likely to leave an unsightly scar.

2. ln A.D. 391, resulting from the destruction of the largest library of the ancient world at Alexandria, later generations lost all but the Iliad and Odyssey among Greek epics, most of the poetry of Pindar and Sappho, and dozens of plays by Aeschylus and Euripides.

3. The nephew of Pliny the Elder wrote the only eyewitness account of the great eruption of Vesuvius in two letters to the historian Tacitus.

4. Nearly two tons of nuclear-reactor fuel have already been put into orbit around the Earth, and the chances of a collision involving such material increase greatly as the amount of both space debris and satellites continue to rise.

5.  Though being tiny, blind, and translucent, a recently discovered species of catfish lessens their vulnerability with thickened bones and armor plates on their sides.

6. A recent court decision has qualified a 1998 ruling that workers cannot be laid off if they have been given reason to believe that their jobs will be safe, provided that their performance remains satisfactory.

7. Thomas Eakins’powerful style and his choices of subject-the advances in modern surgery, the discipline of sport, the strains of individuals in tension with society or even with themselves-was as disturbing to his own time as it is compelling for ours.

8. As well as heat and light, the sun is the source of a continuous stream of atomic particles known as the solar wind.

9. The psychologist William James believed that facial expressions not only provide a visible sign of an emotion, actually contributing to the feeling itself.

10. lnspired by the Helsinki Accords and outraged by the harsh sentences meted out to a group of Czech rock musicians called the Plastic People of the Universe, Charter 77 was established by dissident writers, philosophers, and other professionals to be a human rights group.