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.

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.

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.

Emperor penguins don’t waddle out of the ocean. They launch themselves at such a high speed that they travel up to two meters before landing. How ______blank A layer of microbubbles on their plumage reduces friction as the penguins speed to the surface.

Beatrix Potter is perhaps best known for writing and illustrating children’s books such as The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902), but she also dedicated herself to mycology, the study of ______blank more than 350 paintings of the fungal species she observed in nature and submitting her research on spore germination to the Linnean Society of London.

In assessing the films of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, ______blank have missed his equally deep engagement with Japanese artistic traditions such as Noh theater.

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foster political and economic stability within the Asia-Pacific region, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations was originally made up of five members: Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia.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.

Archaeologists have estimated that the pre-Columbian Native American city of Cahokia, located across the Mississippi River from modern-day St. Louis, Missouri, had as many as 20,000 inhabitants in the year 1150 ______blank it one of the largest cities in North America at the time.

In recent years, economists around the world have created new tools that quantify the overall well-being of a country’s citizens. Economists in India, for example, use an Ease of Living Index. This tool ______blank economic potential, sustainability, and citizens’ quality of life.

In 1903, environmentalist John Muir guided President Theodore Roosevelt on a scenic, sprawling trip through California’s Yosemite Valley. Upon returning from the three-day excursion, Roosevelt ______blank to conserve the nation’s wilderness areas, a vow he upheld for his remaining six years in office.

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.

Gathering accurate data on water flow in the United States is challenging because of the country’s millions of miles of ______blank the volume and speed of water at any given location can vary drastically over time.

In a 2016 study, Eastern Washington University psychologist Amani El-Alayli found that, among the study participants who experienced frisson (a physiological response akin to goosebumps or getting the chills) while listening to music, there was one personality trait that they scored particularly ______blank openness to experience.

On April 5, 1977, Kitty Cone and 150 other disability rights activists entered a San Francisco federal building. After pleading for years—to no effect—for the passage of key antidiscrimination legislation, ______blank until their demands were addressed. Finally, on April 28, the legislation was signed.

Over twenty years ago, in a landmark experiment in the psychology of choice, professor Sheena Iyengar set up a jam-tasting booth at a grocery store. The number of jams available for tasting ______blank some shoppers had twenty-four different options, others only six. Interestingly, the shoppers with fewer jams to choose from purchased more jam.