Particle physicists like Ayana Holloway Arce and Aida El-Khadra spend much of their time ______blank what is invisible to the naked eye: using sophisticated technology, they closely examine the behavior of subatomic particles, the smallest detectable parts of matter.

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Stage lighting theorist Adolphe Appia was perhaps the first to argue that light must be considered alongside all the various elements of a stage to create a single, unified performance. Researcher Kelly Bremner, however, has noted that Appia lacked technical expertise in the use of light in the theater. As a result of Appia’s inexperience, Bremner argues, Appia’s theory of light called for lighting practices that weren’t possible until after the advent of electricity around 1881. 

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Adolphe Appia was not an amateur in the practice of lighting. Instead, it is precisely his exposure to lighting techniques at the time that contributed to his theory on the importance of light. When working as an apprentice for a lighting specialist in his youth, Appia observed the use of portable lighting devices that could be operated by hand. This experience developed his understanding of what was possible in the coordination of elements on the stage.

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Microbes are tiny organisms in the soil, water, and air all around us. They thrive even in very harsh conditions. That’s why Noah Fierer and colleagues were surprised when soil samples they collected from an extremely cold, dry area in Antarctica didn’t seem to contain any life. The finding doesn’t prove that there are no microbes in that area, but the team says it does suggest that the environment severely restricts microbes’ survival.

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Microbes are found in virtually every environment on Earth. So it’s unlikely they would be completely absent from Fierer’s team’s study site, no matter how extreme the environment is. There were probably so few organisms in the samples that current technology couldn’t detect them. But since a spoonful of typical soil elsewhere might contain billions of microbes, the presence of so few in the Antarctic soil samples would show how challenging the conditions are.

Early in the Great Migration of 1910–1970, which involved the mass migration of Black people from the southern to the northern United States, political activist and Chicago Defender writer Fannie Barrier Williams was instrumental in helping other Black women establish themselves in the North. Many women hoped for better employment opportunities in the North because, in the South, they faced much competition for domestic employment and men tended to get agricultural work. To aid with this transition, Barrier Williams helped secure job placement in the North for many women before they even began their journey.

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The live music festival business is growing in event size and genre variety. With so many consumer options, organizers are finding ways to cement festival attendance as a special experience worth sharing. This phenomenon is linked to the growing “experiential economy,” where many find it gratifying to purchase lived experiences. To ensure a profitable event, venues need to consider the overall consumer experience, not just the band lineup.

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Music festival appearances are becoming a more important part of musicians’ careers. One factor in this shift is the rising use of streaming services that allow access to huge numbers of songs for a monthly fee, subsequently reducing sales of full-length albums. With this shift in consumer behavior, musicians are increasingly dependent on revenue from live performances.

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For decades, bluegrass musicians have debated whether their genre should exclude influences from mainstream genres such as rock. Many insist that bluegrass is defined by its adherence to the folk music of the US South, out of which bluegrass emerged. Such “purists,” as they are known, regard the recordings of Bill Monroe, which established the bluegrass sound in the 1940s, as a standard against which the genre should still be measured.

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Bluegrass isn’t simply an extension of folk traditions into the era of recorded music. In reality, Bill Monroe created the bluegrass sound in the 1940s by combining Southern folk music with commercial genres that had arisen only a few decades before, such as jazz and the blues. Since bluegrass has always been a mixed genre, contemporary bluegrass musicians should not be forbidden from incorporating into it influences from rock and other mainstream genres.

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Astronomer Mark Holland and colleagues examined four white dwarfs—small, dense remnants of past stars—in order to determine the composition of exoplanets that used to orbit those stars. Studying wavelengths of light in the white dwarf atmospheres, the team reported that traces of elements such as lithium and sodium support the presence of exoplanets with continental crusts similar to Earth’s.

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Past studies of white dwarf atmospheres have concluded that certain exoplanets had continental crusts. Geologist Keith Putirka and astronomer Siyi Xu argue that those studies unduly emphasize atmospheric traces of lithium and other individual elements as signifiers of the types of rock found on Earth. The studies don’t adequately account for different minerals made up of various ratios of those elements, and the possibility of rock types not found on Earth that contain those minerals.

Former astronaut Ellen Ochoa says that although she doesn’t have a definite idea of when it might happen, she ______blank that humans will someday need to be able to live in other environments than those found on Earth. This conjecture informs her interest in future research missions to the moon.

The following text is adapted from Herman Melville’s 1857 novel The Confidence-Man. Humphry Davy was a prominent British chemist and inventor.

Years ago, a grave American savant, being in London, observed at an evening party there, a certain coxcombical fellow, as he thought, an absurd ribbon in his lapel, and full of smart [banter], whisking about to the admiration of as many as were disposed to admire. Great was the savant’s disdain; but, chancing ere long to find himself in a corner with the jackanapes, got into conversation with him, when he was somewhat ill-prepared for the good sense of the jackanapes, but was altogether thrown aback, upon subsequently being [informed that he was] no less a personage than Sir Humphry Davy.

The work of molecular biophysicist Enrique M. De La Cruz is known for ______blank traditional boundaries between academic disciplines. The university laboratory that De La Cruz runs includes engineers, biologists, chemists, and physicists, and the research the lab produces makes use of insights and techniques from all those fields.

Astronomers are confident that the star Betelgeuse will eventually consume all the helium in its core and explode in a supernova. They are much less confident, however, about when this will happen, since that depends on internal characteristics of Betelgeuse that are largely unknown. Astrophysicist Sarafina El-Badry Nance and colleagues recently investigated whether acoustic waves in the star could be used to determine internal stellar states but concluded that this method could not sufficiently reveal Betelgeuse’s internal characteristics to allow its evolutionary state to be firmly fixed.

Using NASA’s powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), Mercedes López-Morales and colleagues measured the wavelengths of light traveling through the atmosphere of WASP-39b, an exoplanet, or planet outside our solar system. Different molecules absorb different wavelengths of light, and the wavelength measurements showed the presence of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in WASP-39b’s atmosphere. This finding not only offers the first decisive evidence of CO₂ in the atmosphere of an exoplanet but also illustrates the potential for future scientific breakthroughs held by the JWST.

Some studies have suggested that posture can influence cognition, but we should not overstate this phenomenon. A case in point: In a 2014 study, Megan O’Brien and Alaa Ahmed had subjects stand or sit while making risky simulated economic decisions. Standing is more physically unstable and cognitively demanding than sitting; accordingly, O’Brien and Ahmed hypothesized that standing subjects would display more risk aversion during the decision-making tasks than sitting subjects did, since they would want to avoid further feelings of discomfort and complicated risk evaluations. But O’Brien and Ahmed actually found no difference in the groups’ performance. 

Dance choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar aims to give people the opportunity to be ______blank her creative process. For example, live performances of her dance HairStories, which debuted in 2001, featured videos of people across the United States talking about their hair and audience members sharing pictures of their interesting hairstyles.

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Fossils of the hominin Australopithecus africanus have been found in the Sterkfontein Caves of South Africa, but assigning an age to the fossils is challenging because of the unreliability of dating methods in this context. The geology of Sterkfontein has caused soil layers from different periods to mix, impeding stratigraphic dating, and dates cannot be reliably imputed from those of nearby animal bones since the bones may have been relocated by flooding.

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Archaeologists used new cosmogenic nuclide dating techniques to reevaluate the ages of A. africanus fossils found in the Sterkfontein Caves. This technique involves analyzing the cosmogenic nucleotides in the breccia—the matrix of rock fragments immediately surrounding the fossils. The researchers assert that this approach avoids the potential for misdating associated with assigning ages based on Sterkfontein’s soil layers or animal bones.