[1]

Though they can often be seen lugging bags stuffed with fresh vegetables home from Beijing markets, brothers Nan Weidong and Nan Weiping are not chefs- they are musicians. [A] Their instruments of choice (1) is considered rather unusual: a pan pipe fashioned from carrots, an ocarina create from sweet potato, ocarina created (2) other brightly colored vegetables. Gourds, daikon radishes, and (3) other vegetables, are used to round out the "orchestra."

[2]

From an early age, the Nan brothers, raised on a vegetable farm in China's Anhui province, (4) who were taught to play conventional musical instruments by their father, a music teacher. [B] The siblings' love of music and passion for performance led them to begin experimenting with vegetable musical instruments a few years ago.

[3]

(5) Working by hand while constructing their edible instruments, the brothers manually bore holes into the vegetables by using long metal drill bits, snacking on discarded pieces as they work. [C] Weiping says that to create a low pitch, (6) which makes a deep hole.  (7) Nonetheless, a high pitch requires a shallow hole. Other (8) factors, like, the diameter of the hole and changes in air temperature and humidity, also (9) effects the sound quality.

[4]

[1] A newly picked vegetable that sits at the market for even one day may lose much of its water content, (10) producing a pitch that is out of tune. [2] Because of this, the brothers must carve a fresh set of instruments before each performance. [3] Still, the most critical ingredient in creating high-quality (11) sound, Weidong says, is the vegetables' high water content. [12]

[5] 

(13) While the brothers' musical repertoire is as varied as their instruments, ranging from traditional Chinese flute music to modern pop songs. [D] They maintain that different vegetables have different scales and are therefore suited to different types of music. Since 2011, the Nan brothers have performed regularly, playing a wide variety of music on their edible instruments and bringing a whole new meaning to the idea of playing with your food. [14]

[1]

Located in Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, artist Mark Dion's Neukom Vivarium has been called a combination of art and ecology, sculpture and nature. The installation contains a sixty-foot-long nurse log, (16)  it is a slowly decaying piece of tree trunk that provides a home and nutrients for young plants and supports a variety of microbial life. [A] This single  (17) log offers visitors to the urban  (18) park, a glimpse into the complicated cycle of life unfolding in the forests outside the city.

[2]

Vivarium comes from the Latin word vivus, which means "alive"-a fitting description for a piece of art that exemplifies a thriving forest ecosystem. [B] Dion found the log, part of a western hemlock  (19) lying in a Washington forest,  (20) and, transporting it to the city along with some of the soil, fungi, and plants that had surrounded the tree. [C] Working with a team of scientists and architects, Dion installed the log in a specially constructed eighty-foot-long greenhouse. The greenhouse is customized with magnifying glasses and microscopes that disclose minute details of the life supported by the (21) log. Repeated visits to the installation (22) reveals the larger process of decay and transformation.

[3]

In the wild, this complex, interconnected system of life would have had no trouble sustaining itself. In the city, however, city, maintaining the nurse log requires (23) a great number of energy and technology. [D] Humidity  is electronically monitored, the soil is  (24) constantly replenished with nutrients, and sunlight is filtered through green-hued glass designed to mimic the color of a forest canopy. [25]

[4]

For Dion, the amount of work (26) in the middle of a busy city required to sustain this ecosystem conveys an important message.  (27) According with the artist, the constant effort substitutes for what nature does instinctively, which highlights the fact that "it's incredibly difficult, expensive, and technological to approximate that system. In other words, nature, once (28) destroyed is virtually impossible to reconstruct.

Before Mosaic—the web browser widely credited with popularizing the World Wide Web—was invented, the Internet wasn’t user-friendly. Internet (31) navigation required knowledge of specific typed commands; online documents, consisting almost entirely of text, were hard to locate and download. (32) Given these obstructive hindrances, many people assumed the web would remain the domain of technology experts and never have mass appeal. Marc Andreessen believed the opposite: everyone would want the Internet. [34]

As a student (35) worker, for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, Andreessen (36) became enthralled by the Internet. In 1992, he conceived of a browser that would simplify web navigation. Rather than typing specific commands, people would be able to access different web pages by clicking on icons. He showed his idea to fellow student Eric Bina, who helped refine the program. The two then worked with the NCSA to develop Mosaic, (37) which became available in 1993. Free to anyone with an Internet connection, Mosaic quickly became popular. (38) Approximately 60,000 copies of the browser were downloaded in its first year.

Mosaic was (39) soon not the first web browser, but it surpassed all rivals. Unlike other browsers, Mosaic was easy to install, and it worked on every operating system. It was the first browser to display pictures and text on the same page. [40] Featuring hyperlinks, (41) the user of the program was able to visit other web pages with one click. “With Mosaic,” said one writer, “the online world appears to be a vast, interconnected universe of information.” [42]

Even though it gave way to other, more sophisticated browsers within a few years, Mosaic showed average users the significance of the Internet. (43) Comparatively, its simplicity encouraged people to create and upload their own content. In the year Mosaic was (44) discharged, 623 websites existed.

(45) Four years later, there were more than 600,000.

[1]

During athletic festivals in ancient Greece, great poets were (46) placed alongside champion athletes. This has never been true of the modern Olympic Games. [A] The Olympic literary competition, reintroduced in 1912 in Stockholm and included in the Games for decades, (47) is poorly remembered and rarely missed. The only genuine public excitement for even the (48) very first modern, Olympic literary contest was focused on the scandal surrounding the winning poem. [B]

[2]

French aristocrat Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who in 1896 founded the modern Olympic Games, (49) he insisted that talent in the fine arts was as important as skill in athletics. After years of opposition from officials (50) whom felt that the modern Games should focus solely on athletics, Coubertin implemented fine arts competitions, known as the Pentathlon of Muses, in 1912. [C]  For the literary contest, (51) it would submit an unpublished (52) work; Coubertin did not establish a length requirement. After a long deliberation during the literary event's first (53) year; finally judges named duo George Hohrod and Martin Eschbach as gold medalists for their poem "Ode to Sport."

[3]

The (54) judges, so impressed by "Ode to Sport" that they called it "the perfect poem," refused to award either silver or bronze medals to any other literary competitors. (55) Weeks, after the Games had come to an end, the judges attempted to contact Hohrod and Eschbach given that the two had not come forward to receive their medals. (56) The judges discovered that neither author existed. A few years later, Coubertin admitted that he himself had submitted "the perfect poem" pseudonymously.[57]

[4]

The judges argued that they did not know that Coubertin had written "Ode to Sport." But once Coubertin's ruse was uncovered, distrust for the already unpopular competition (58) expanded as a result--and the feeling endured. [D] The literary competition was dropped after the 1948 London Games. Many of the winning poems have since vanished, with only their titles remaining. Few literary historians think that much has been lost.

San Francisco (61) native, Louise Arner Boyd, first saw the blue glaciers and glittering fjord of the Arctic ice (62) cap during a 1924 photography expedition to Spitsbergen, a Norwegian island.  In the United States, little was known about the Arctic: (63) its nearly frozen seas, (64) packed with icebergs, made boat travel to the area treacherous. But Boyd, an amateur naturalist and practiced photographer, made exploring this wide, frigid terrain her life's focus. She would (65) lead seven Arctic expeditions, six by sea and one by air, mainly to the east coast of Greenland. 

Boyd's first two Arctic trips, taken in a small ship with a small crew, were designed for photographing the magnificent glaciers. (66) Soon her interest in the region expanded beyond capturing its beauty. She secured a larger, sturdier ship, the Veslekari, and invited several scientists to travel with her. Over the course of three 1930s voyages, she led her team to the farthest reaches of the (67) Arctic, in 1938, the group anchored (68) close south of the North Pole. Botanists gathered plant specimens from the (69) tundra--paleontologists studied the ancient ice fields, and hydro geographers searched for mountains on the ocean floor. 

Boyd took thousands of photographs. She worked with the best equipment available, including a tripod-mounted large-format camera that (70) freed crisp, high-resolution images of the landscape. (71) She knew about photogrammetry, the science of making 3-D measurements from photographic images. Boyd used precise methods to choose locations and camera positions for (72) its shots. Her well-executed photos, featured in her book The Fiord Region of East Greenland, (73) provided the basis for the first accurate large-scale maps of the east coast of the country.

(74) The polar expert's final Arctic journey in 1955 was over the North Pole, in a chartered flight. Her aerial photos document the trip. Today, scientists are exploring how Boyd's photographs and writing, along with her team's studies, might be used to monitor environmental change in the Arctic.