In the 1970s, Janaki Ammal, a prominent botanist, emerged as a powerful voice in India’s environmental conservation movement. Her exhaustive chromosomal survey of plants in Silent Valley, a pristine tropical forest in Kerala, India, that is home to nearly 1,000 species of native flora (many of which are endangered), ______blank instrumental in the government’s decision to preserve the forest.

The haiku-like poems of Tomas Tranströmer, which present nature- and dream-influenced images in crisp, spare language, have earned the Swedish poet praise from leading contemporary ______blank them Nigerian American essayist and novelist Teju Cole, who has written that Tranströmer’s works “contain a luminous simplicity.”

Led by Syrian American astronomer Shadia Habbal, the Solar Wind Sherpas are an intrepid team of scientists who travel the globe to study solar winds, the streams of particles emanating from the Sun that are only visible from certain locations during a total solar eclipse. When such an eclipse is imminent, the Sherpas pack up their telescopes and ______blank ready.

Human-made (synthetic) fibers used in clothes and many other consumer products are more durable than most natural plant ______blank the manufacture of synthetic fibers requires toxic chemical solvents that can pollute air and water.

Formed in 1967 to foster political and economic stability within the Asia-Pacific region, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations was originally made up of five members: Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. By the end of the 1990s, the organization ______blank its initial membership.

Mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz used the metaphor of the “butterfly effect” to explain how seemingly minor events can have major impacts on future weather. According to Lorenz’s metaphor, the wind from a butterfly flapping ______blank in Brazil might eventually grow into a storm elsewhere across the globe.

Eli Eisenberg, a genetics expert at Tel Aviv University in Israel, recently discovered that ______blank have a special genetic ability called RNA editing that confers evolutionary advantages.

Cheng Dang and her colleagues at the University of Washington recently ran simulations to determine the extent to which individual snow ______blank affect the amount of light reflecting off a snowy surface.

In 1966, Emmett Ashford became the first African American to umpire a Major League Baseball game. His energetic gestures announcing when a player had struck out and his habit of barreling after a hit ball to see if it would land out of ______blank transform the traditionally solemn umpire role into a dynamic one.

Generations of mystery and horror ______blank have been influenced by the dark, gothic stories of celebrated American author Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849).

Sociologist Alton Okinaka sits on the review board tasked with adding new sites to the Hawai‘i Register of Historic Places, which includes Pi‘ilanihale Heiau and the ‘Ōpaeka‘a Road Bridge. Okinaka doesn’t make such decisions ______blank all historical designations must be approved by a group of nine other experts from the fields of architecture, archaeology, history, and Hawaiian culture.

A subseasonal weather forecast attempts to predict weather conditions three to four weeks in ______blank its predictions are therefore more short-term than those of the seasonal forecast, which attempts to predict the weather more than a month in advance.

In her book The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, author Maxine Hong Kingston examines themes ______blank childhood, womanhood, and Chinese American identity by intertwining autobiography and mythology.

In the 1950s, a man named Joseph McVicker was struggling to keep his business afloat when his sister-in-law Kay Zufall advised him to repurpose the company’s product, a nontoxic, clay-like substance for removing soot from wallpaper, as a modeling putty for kids. In addition, Zufall ______blank selling the product under a child-friendly name: Play-Doh.

Ten of William Shakespeare’s plays are classified as histories. Although each one of these plays, which include Henry V and Richard III, ______blank on a single historical figure (specifically, an English king), some, such as Henry VI Part One and Henry VI Part Two, feature different episodes from the same monarch’s life.