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DEFINITION: (noun) One who wanders from place to place without a permanent home or a means of livelihood. SYNONYMS: drifter, vagabond, floater. USAGE: When things started disappearing from their backyard, they began to suspect the vagrant who had recently been roaming the streets.

Historians consider the Papal bull Unam sanctam—which proclaimed that there is no salvation outside of the Church—to be one of the most extreme statements of Papal spiritual supremacy ever made. It arose from the Pope's feud with Philip the Fair of France, in which each attempted to prevent the other from receiving money from taxes, and it highlights the conflict between temporal and spiritual authority in the Middle Ages. How did Philip respond to the bull?

Debt-ridden farmers, struck by the economic depression that followed the American Revolution, petitioned the Massachusetts state senate to halt foreclosure of mortgages on their property and imprisonment for debt. When the senate failed to undertake these reforms, armed rebels, led by Daniel Shays and other local leaders, forcibly closed a number of debtors' courts. The rebellion, suppressed in 1787, less than a year after it began, prompted the fledgling US government to make what changes?

Engineers have started the two-month process of cooling down the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a "doomsday vault" that will house seeds from all types of major food crops. The Norwegian government is funding the project, which aims to safeguard the world's crops from disasters such as nuclear wars and dangerous climate change. The vault's design utilizes the surrounding rock and permafrost as a "cold store" that will allow it to preserve the seeds at 0F (-18C) while remaining energy efficient.

DEFINITION: (verb) Attribute or credit to. SYNONYMS: ascribe, attribute, assign. USAGE: Keller, why does your article impute things to my father without the slightest foundation?

A severe cyclone, packing winds of 155 mph (250 kph), has struck Bangladesh, killing more than 1000 people and leaving tens of thousands homeless. The storm triggered 15 ft (5 m) high tidal surges that swept over 3 coastal towns and forced millions to evacuate. The death toll is expected to rise as search operations continue and the extent of the damage is more accurately assessed. Bangladesh is often subject to severe weather events; in 1970, the Bhola cyclone claimed up to 500,000 lives.

The craft of bookbinding began simply, with the use of boards to protect parchment manuscripts. By the 2nd century, sheets of parchment were being folded and sewn together. During the Middle Ages, the practice of making fine bindings for these sewn volumes rose to great heights; books were rare and precious articles, and many were treated with exquisite gilded and jeweled bindings. What is the uncommon practice of binding books in human skin, a technique dating back to the 17th century, called?

DEFINITION: (noun) A style that involves indirect ways of expressing things. SYNONYMS: ambage, circumlocution. USAGE: Parents often engage in periphrasis when discussing adult matters in the presence of their children.

In 1951, the British Royal Navy ship HMS Challenger II surveyed the Challenger Deep trench of the Pacific Ocean, located between Indonesia and Japan, establishing it as the deepest known point of any ocean on Earth. Less than a decade later, a US Navy deep-sea diving submersible descended to the trench floor. There, the crew observed small sole and flounder and noted that the floor consisted of diatomaceous ooze. What is the maximum depth surveyed at the Challenger Deep?

For the first time, scientists have successfully created dozens of cloned embryos from adult monkeys, a technological breakthrough that is bound to revive concerns about the ethics of possible human cloning. According to a new report from the UN University Institute for Advanced Studies, the international community faces a stark choice regarding the future of human cloning—it must either ban the practice or create a framework in which rights of cloned individuals are protected. In 2005, negotiations for an international cloning ban collapsed following disagreements about whether or not to permit research cloning, also known as therapeutic cloning.