The following text is from Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. The narrator is being driven in a carriage through a remote region at night.

The baying of the wolves sounded nearer and nearer, as though they were closing round on us from every side. I grew dreadfully afraid, and the horses shared my fear. The driver, however, was not in the least disturbed; he kept turning his head to left and right, but I could not see anything through the darkness.

The güiro, a musical instrument traditionally made from a dried and hollowed gourd, is thought to have originated with the Taíno people of Puerto Rico. Players use a wooden stick to scrape along ridges cut into the side of the gourd, creating sounds that are highly ______blank: the sounds produced by güiros can differ based on the distance between the ridges, the types of strokes the player uses, and the thickness of the gourd.

In Nature Poem (2017), Kumeyaay poet Tommy Pico portrays his ______blank the natural world by honoring the centrality of nature within his tribe’s traditional beliefs while simultaneously expressing his distaste for being in wilderness settings himself.

The following text is adapted from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1844 short story “Drowne’s Wooden Image.” Drowne, a young man, is carving a wooden figure to decorate the front of a ship.

Day by day, the work assumed greater precision, and settled its irregular and misty outline into distincter grace and beauty. The general design was now obvious to the common eye.

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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The idea that time moves in only one direction is instinctively understood, yet it puzzles physicists. According to the second law of thermodynamics, at a macroscopic level some processes of heat transfer are irreversible due to the production of entropy—after a transfer we cannot rewind time and place molecules back exactly where they were before, just as we cannot unbreak dropped eggs. But laws of physics at a microscopic or quantum level hold that those processes should be reversible.

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In 2015, physicists Tiago Batalhão et al. performed an experiment in which they confirmed the irreversibility of thermodynamic processes at a quantum level, producing entropy by applying a rapidly oscillating magnetic field to a system of carbon-13 atoms in liquid chloroform. But the experiment “does not pinpoint ... what causes [irreversibility] at the microscopic level,” coauthor Mauro Paternostro said.

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The Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction event is usually attributed solely to an asteroid impact near Chicxulub, Mexico. Some scientists argue that volcanic activity was the true cause, as the K-Pg event occurred relatively early in a long period of eruption of the Deccan Traps range that initially produced huge amounts of climate-altering gases. These dissenters note that other mass extinctions have coincided with large volcanic eruptions, while only the K-Pg event lines up with an asteroid strike.

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In a 2020 study, Pincelli Hull and her colleagues analyzed ocean core samples and modeled climate changes around the K-Pg event. The team concluded that Deccan Traps gases did affect global conditions prior to the event, but that the climate returned to normal well before the extinctions began—extinctions that instead closely align with the Chicxulub impact.

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Films and television shows commonly include a long list of credits naming the people involved in a production. Credit sequences may not be exciting, but they generally ensure that everyone’s contributions are duly acknowledged. Because they are highly standardized, film and television credits are also valuable to anyone researching the careers of pioneering cast and crew members who have worked in the mediums.

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Video game scholars face a major challenge in the industry’s failure to consistently credit the artists, designers, and other contributors involved in making video games. Without a reliable record of which people worked on which games, questions about the medium’s development can be difficult to answer, and the accomplishments of all but its best-known innovators can be difficult to trace.

Economist Marco Castillo and colleagues showed that nuisance costs—the time and effort people must spend to make donations—reduce charitable giving. Charities can mitigate this effect by compensating donors for nuisance costs, but those costs, though variable, are largely ______blank donation size, so charities that compensate donors will likely favor attracting a few large donors over many small donors.

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. 

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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.

The field of study called affective neuroscience seeks instinctive, physiological causes for feelings such as pleasure or displeasure. Because these sensations are linked to a chemical component (for example, the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain when one receives or expects a reward), they can be said to have a partly physiological basis. These processes have been described in mammals, but Jingnan Huang and his colleagues have recently observed that some behaviors of honeybees (such as foraging) are also motivated by a dopamine-based signaling process.

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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.

In Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park, an almost imperceptible smile from potential suitor Henry Crawford causes the protagonist Fanny Price to blush; her embarrassment grows when she suspects that he is aware of it. This moment—in which Fanny not only infers Henry’s mental state through his gestures, but also infers that he is drawing inferences about her mental state—illustrates what literary scholar George Butte calls “deep intersubjectivity,” a technique for representing interactions between consciousnesses through which Austen’s novels derive much of their social and psychological drama.

During a 2014 archaeological dig in Spain, Vicente Lull and his team uncovered the skeleton of a woman from El Algar, an Early Bronze Age society, buried with valuable objects signaling a high position of power. This finding may persuade researchers who have argued that Bronze Age societies were ruled by men to ______blank that women may have also held leadership roles.