Some people insist that children's baseball leagues should use baseballs that are softer than those used by adults and professional leagues. Yet both kinds of balls have their risks. The balls can cause a sudden stopping of the heart when they hit a child in the chest. That might seem hard to believe, but research has shown that a softer ball can also cause the heart to stop. Furthermore, in some circumstances, the softer ball triggers this rare but dangerous response even more than a harder ball does. In addition, a softer ball poses the same risk for eye injury. A softer ball may prevent a serious head injury, but a fast-moving ball of any type is likely to damage the eye socket, seriously hurting the eye.

This is a true story about two ships. One of the ships really existed and the other was created by a fiction writer. The first passenger ship was called the Titanic. It set out on its first trip from a starting point in Southampton, England, in April, 1912. Its destination was New York. One night, the ship hit an iceberg and began to sink. The ship did not have sufficient lifeboats for all passengers, and therefore many people died. The second passenger ship, the Titan, was described in a book by Morgan Robertson. It was almost the same size as the Titanic. The Titan submerged on an April night after it hit an iceberg, and many people died because there were not enough lifeboats. You might think Robertson had copied the true story of the Titanic in his fiction book, but he had not. Robertson wrote his novel in 1898. That was 14 years before the Titanic set out on its voyage.

Although the first thing that comes to mind when we hear the word ballet is a graceful ballerina gliding across the stage, the ballet is not just dancing. The final production is a combination of four arts: dancing, music, drama and painting. It is also a combination of the efforts of many people. The ballerina and her partner dance the main roles. It may be hard to realize that behind their seemingly effortless movements are long years of practice. Some of the people who create a ballet never appear on stage. They are responsible for the music to which the dancers move, the theme of the ballet's story, the sets, and the costumes. It is the fusion of these many talents that creates the one, overall effect that is a ballet.

Most nutritional science involves studying one nutrient at a time. The problem with nutrient-by-nutrition science is that it takes the nutrient out of the context of the food. This nutrient bias is built into the way science is done. Scientists study variables they can isolate; if they can't isolate a variable, they won't be able to tell whether its presence or absence is meaningful. Yet even the simplest food is a hopelessly complicated thing to analyze, a virtual wilderness of chemical compounds, many of which exist in intricate and dynamic relation to one another. So if you're a nutrition scientist, you do the only thing you can do, given the tools at your disposal: Break the thing down into its component parts and study those one by one, even if that means ignoring subtle interactions and contexts and the fact that the whole may well be more than, or maybe just different from, the sum of its parts.

"Cloud seeding" is a process used by several western state governments and private businesses, such as ski resorts, to increase the amount of rainfall or snow over a certain area. First, meteorologists use radar, satellites, and weather stations to track storm fronts. Then they measure a storm's clouds for temperature, wind, and composition. When the meteorologists determine that conditions are right, pilots are sent to "seed" the clouds with dry ice(frozen carbon dioxide). An aircraft files above the clouds, and dry ice pellets are dropped directly into them. Almost immediately, the dry ice begins attracting the clouds' moisture, which freezes to the dry ice's crystalline structure. Finally, precipitation drops from the clouds to the earth in the form of rain or snow.