The river curves through the desert like a ribbon twisting, and bending for hundreds of miles.

One of the most influential niche constructors is the earthworm, an organism found almost everywhere on the planet. A scientist only concerned with evolution would predict that, in order to live on land, earthworms would have to significantly change. Earthworms didn’t change their physiology a great 1 amount, however, instead, they changed the soil to make it more like the ocean in order to survive. Land with earthworms is less compacted, is more nutrient rich, and is better mixed than land without them – leading to monumental changes in the ecosystem.

Niche constructors are particularly important in colonizing new environments. One of the easiest ways to measure this effect on evolution has been in the effect that the number of earthworms has on soil fertility, a measure of how hospitable an environment is to plant growth. Even the least fertile soil has around 62 worms per square meter, and as the number of worms increases so does soil fertility. As worms move through the different layers of soil, they eat, digest, and excrete massive amounts of organic matter. They leave their excretions behind in the form of nutrient-rich droppings known as casings. As these casings decompose, they release nutrients into the soil. This process not only moves nutrients from one layer of the soil to another but also converts the nutrients to forms that plants can absorb and process more easily. Because it is easier for plants to get the proper nutrients, plants don’t have to invest time and energy into making better root systems to gather nutrients. As a result, plants have, over time, lost some of these 1 mechanisms – a form of evolution. 

The traditional view of archaeologists usually involves a college professor who spends much of his or her time digging and researching in ancient foreign libraries or a museum curator who works every day to preserve the artifacts the museum holds. While this view isn’t completely incorrect, it is incomplete, both in terms of the types of jobs available to archaeologists and in terms of the types of work within those jobs. For example, college professors may spend summers at dig sites, but much of their time is also spent writing grants, teaching students, and writing about their research projects. Additionally, although there are still many people who work in archaeology as professors and museum 1 curators. The demand for these job far outstrips the number of positions available, making the positions difficult to acquire.

As the research progresses, they must present their findings in both written and oral reports to stakeholders in the project. Depending on the site and what they find, CRM archaeologists may also work with architects and 1 planners. This work is to revise building sites to protect sensitive areas. So while everyday archaeologists may not be involved in saving the world from existential threats, they do play an important role in society, helping us preserve and consider the past even as we plan for the future. As cities and communities continue to expand, the work they do will only grow in importance.

Which of the following most effectively combines the sentences at the underlined portion?

Ecosystems are made of a complex system of energy and nutrient transfers from one organism to another. Some of these transfers are in the form of 1 predation: one organism eating another – while others are in the form of ecosystem engineering, an organism changing the environment around them. One major form of ecosystem engineering is niche creation. Niche creation is the process of an organism changing their environment to create a competitive advantage. In order for an organism to be considered as creating a niche, three things must be true: the organism must significantly modify their environment, those changes must affect other organisms’ survival, and those changes must lead to an evolutionary response in another organism.

For thousands of years, cooking was considered more of a practice than a science. Much of what chefs and food scientists alike knew about cooking came from conventional wisdom rather than carefully designed research. For individuals who considered cooking to be an art rather than a science, this seemed to be for the best; however, for physicist Nicholas Kurti and chemist Herve This, the lack on empirical knowledge around what we eat was not just an affront to science. It was a challenge. In 1988 the pair coined the term “molecular 1 gastronomy,” which they defined as the investigation of the physical and chemical transformation that ingredients undergo during the course of cooking. They argued that if chefs understood these processes, they could produce dishes improved by the findings. 

The Sagrada Familia has stood, incomplete, as part of the Barcelona skyline since the early phases of its construction in 1882. The project, originally intended to be a cathedral in the gothic style, was begun by the bookseller Joseph Maria Bocabella under the direction of the architect Francisco de Paula del Villar. Del Villar and Bocabella imagined a basilica modeled on the Gothic revival churches Bocabella had seen on trips to Italy. However, Bocabella’s ideal basilica never came to be. In 1883 del Villar resigned from the project, and 30-year old Antoni Gaudi, a young but already well known architect from Catalonia, took over as lead architect.

Gaudi decided to depart from del Villar’s original Gothic design in favor of a more modern design. The new design was ambitious, featuring eighteen tall spires and four different facades on different sides of the basilica. But work on the new building was slow. Decades passed, and the work was still incomplete. In 1 1915, Gaudi - now 63 years old - abandoned all other work in favor of dedicating himself to the completion of the monumental church, but progress on the building was still slow. When pressured to speed up work on the monumental building, Gaudi was said to have replied, “My client is not in a hurry.”  By the time Gaudi died in 1926, the basilica was only somewhere between 15 and 20 percent complete.

The pair brought scientific thinking and equipment to the kitchen, challenging perceptions about what belonged in the lab and what belonged in a chef ’s kitchen. For example, an early experiment in pie baking involved injecting pies with a syringe full of liquid after baking in order to preserve the crust. Other experiments involved creating 16 meringue, (cooked whipped egg whites with sugar) in a vacuum chamber and a “reverse” baked Alaska (ice cream topped with meringue) with the hot merengue on the inside and the ice cream on the outside. Although the experiments themselves might not have been useful to the home cook, they did give insights into the science of cooking that improved recipes and techniques for cooks everywhere.

Alexander Graham Bell is commonly credited with the invention of the telephone; but the first documented phrase transmitted by an electromagnetic device can actually be attributed to inventor Johann Philipp Reis in 1860.