For an online retailer, inventory represents a major source of cost. Every item of inventory represents an item that has not been sold and which therefore represents unrealized gains. Moreover, the greater the inventory a retailer must hold the anticipation of filling customer orders, the greater the amount of money it must have invested in something that cannot be used for other purposes. Two tenets of inventory management are to turn over inventory as quickly as possible and to hold the minimum amount of inventory necessary to fulfill tomorrow's orders efficiently. Those two challenges are related. If lower levels of inventory are needed, then less inventory will be on hand and it will be turned over more quickly. In competing with another online retailer, however, a company will be inclined to hold inventory of as many items as exist. If a particular type of item is not in stock at one retailer, a customer will turn to a competing retailer. Holding all of the possible stock items in stock adds to inventory cost. A solution to this issue has been previously for a company to have one central, monster-sized warehouse. Centralizing inventory allows a company to hold the widest possible range of items at the lowest necessary levels. But since customers also value speed of delivery time, the "monster warehouse model" has a flaw in that it involves shipping from a location which may not be as close to a customer's location as otherwise and which therefore would be vulnerable to a competitor who can deliver faster.      These considerations highlight the importance of information about consumer demand. At the basic level, knowing what items sell helps brick-and-mortar retailers determine what items to stock. In competitive online retail, companies with good data can stock minimum sufficient inventory levels. Even more significant, a national retailer that can forecast demand for specific items by region can move from the monster warehouse model to a system of regional warehouses, decreasing shipping time without increasing inventory costs.    

     The outsourcing of production factories to locations overseas from companies' home countries has been a hallmark practice of multinational brands since the 1990s and is lauded by some economists as advancing the well-being of people in both the home country and the production country. However, not all of the benefits attributed to this globalization practice necessarily accrue, and there are concerns about outsourcing that are not readily addressed within the formulations of economic theory. First, a home company that separates its brand and its product as completely as possible and places the brand as paramount hardly sends a message that product quality is central to its operations; more likely, all of its innovation attempts will focus on branding, and such a company will settle with a product that is merely (and maybe barely) good enough. Dismissing this point, economists may cite the law of comparative advantage: outsourcing allows both companies involved to pursue greater profit and well-being according to their capabilities. Specifically, workers in the companies of manufacture should be paid more than they would be paid otherwise, even if they are paid less than factory workers in the original country; meanwhile, workers in the home country should be pushed to increase their skills and education and move to higher-skill jobs that are less available in the country of manufacture. Whether displaced workers in the home country acquire skills and make this shift in any reasonable timeframe is hardly demonstrated, however, and while outsourcing may create value by lowering costs, it has been asserted that workers in the countries of production are making no more after outsourcing than previously and hence in effect are enjoying none of the new profit. The CEO of one outsourcing company, when pressed on this point by a reporter, explained that, as the employees of those factories were not employees of his company, he could not be responsible for them. He asked the reporter whether journalists should be expected to know, and be responsible for, the manufacturing conditions of the paper on which their articles are printed. This comment, as much as it defends corporations, highlights the broadest form of worry about outsourcing: in global supply chains with increasingly distant and opaque connections, responsibility is too easy to shirk and maybe even impossible to determine.  

     Yawning is a reflex consisting of the simultaneous intake of air and reflexive stretching of the eardrums, followed by an exhalation of breath. There are two leading theories of the purpose of yawning, both in humans and other animals. Because yawning is common to most vertebrates, biologists assume that it plays an important role in survival. Two competing theories, dubbed “A” and “B,” seek to explain how.      Supporters of theory A argue that the primary purpose of yawning is to keep the brain cool. The human brain is quite sensitive to even small temperature increases: our reaction times increase and our recall is diminished when the temperature of the brain differs a few tenths of a degree from the perfect temperature of 98.6° F. The proponents of theory A point out that, in terms of escaping from a predator, these tiny temperature changes in the brain could easily be the difference between life and death.      However, critics of theory A argue that yawning is not more common in warmer climates, and that the body has much more sophisticated methods of maintaining the optimal temperature in the brain—the circulatory system, for one example, and sweating, for another. They advocate theory B, which claims that yawning plays a primarily social role based on the fact that yawning is “contagious.”      Because yawning is so demonstrative and affects the body so little, say supporters of theory B, the reflex is most likely a social mode of communication that happens to have some slight physiological effects. The contagiousness of yawning has been shown to be stronger among group members who feel closer to each other, implying that it has a major social component. Based on this information, theory B claims that the primary purpose of yawning is to communicate an increased need for alertness throughout a group. This alertness, according to theory B, is only slightly encouraged by the yawning itself; the real benefit of the contagious yawn is that the yawning animal is reminded to stay alert to the other members of the group and to the surroundings.

When Medgar Evers applied to the then-segregated University of Mississippi Law School in February 1954, he did so at a crucial moment in American history. Three months later, in May, the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education struck down state-sponsored segregation, stating that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." The school’s refusal to admit Evers drew the interest of the NAACP and ultimately became the epicenter of its historic campaign to desegregate the school.

The Brown v. Board of Education ruling paved the way for integration and was a major victory for the civil rights movement, but the South was not ready to accept the change. The state governments of Texas, Arkansas, Florida and Alabama actively fought the decision, with some politicians physically blocking African American students’ entry into high schools and universities, moving aside only when confronted with military officers sent by the federal government to enforce the law. The entrenched racism of the South came into conflict with the rest of the country, creating a sense for African Americans that they would have to fight for the rights that had, legally, already been granted to them.

Evers was an active public figure, conducting well-publicized investigations into race-based injustices being perpetrated in the South, such as the unprosecuted murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till. This limelight brought numerous death threats and attempts on his life. On June 12, 1963, just hours after President John F. Kennedy's historic Civil Rights Address, Evers was shot in the back outside his home by a white supremacist. While his death was undoubtedly a tragic loss, some scholars have suggested that it galvanized the African American community, giving many members renewed motivation to carry on Evers’s crusade. His murder was a rallying cry for those who supported civil rights in the U.S., and his legacy continues to lend strength to the ongoing campaign for racial equality.

     A new discovery adds another element to the complex relationship between humans and felines in the prehistoric Americas. Archaeologists recently realized that a skeleton discovered at the Illinois Hopewell Burial Mounds had been misidentified as a dog. The bones actually belonged to a bobcat, probably between four and seven months old when it perished almost two thousand years ago. The bobcat burial was striking in its similarity to human interments, and is possibly the first decorated wildcat burial ever discovered.

     In considering the implications of this discovery, the researchers dismissed the possibility that the bobcat had been sacrificed, because the skeleton did not show signs of any trauma. They decided it was not an intrusive burial because it so closely mirrored the style of Hopewell human burials. They also do not believe the cat was venerated as a wild predator, because its grave did not contain the ceremonial adornments present in coyote burial sites. The conclusion the researchers have drawn is that the bobcat had a much closer relationship to the humans who buried it—that is to say, it may have been domesticated, occupying a place within the residential sphere. Such a conclusion, according to the researchers, is further supported by two Hopewellian artifacts, an effigy pipe and a ceramic figurine, adorned with human-bobcat imagery.

     Everest and Jengish Chokusu, two of the tallest mountains on earth, are both products of collisions between continental plates and other tectonic forces. Ojos del Salado and Llullaillaco are somewhat shorter and the product of volcanic forces. The formation of these mountains can be compared to that of the planets in our solar system, in which the original stellar material congealed to form multiple celestial bodies with wildly varying sizes, compositions, and physical characteristics. The mountains of Earth are, however, more identifiable than the materials from which they originally formed: mountains are formed from the same rocks and minerals that have existed on Earth for billions of years. Everest, for example, is largely composed of limestone and marble, Jengish Chokusu consists primarily of crystalline and sedimentary rocks, and though Ojos del Salado and Llullaillaco are both different types of volcanic peak, both have similar metamorphic compositions.

     The distinction between volcanic and tectonically formed peaks has behavioral ramifications. Ojos de Salado remains an active volcano, and Llullaillaco is dormant at present but has been active in the past. Everest and Jengish Chokusu were formed from a tectonic plate collision millions of years ago, so they exhibit no volcanic activity. Because of that, the appearances of Everest and Jengish Chokusu are permanent, more or less; tectonic changes occur more slowly than volcanic changes and those two mountains will change but very gradually. On the other hand, the appearances of Ojos del Salado and Llullaillaco might change rapidly and with little warning, as dormant volcanoes have been known to become active and volcanic eruptions can radically reshape mountains in a matter of moments.

     Bernard Winkler's analysis of the effect of the industrialization of England on the conduct of British foreign policy through the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is a major contribution to a scholarly debate pitting two separate schools of historical thought against each other: the school of economic determinism and the school of ideological determinism.

     Winkler makes the assertion that economic and technological developments play a decisive role in military mobilization and logistical organization. Stated more simply, economic development makes extensive foreign interventions inevitable by making them simpler. Winkler implies this phenomenon has been obfuscated by a recent fondness on the part of historians for ideological explanations, of which George Nguyen's is a representative example. For Nguyen, the economic possibility of a foreign action is insignificant compared to ethnic, religious, or socio-political motivations for pursuing a course of action abroad. Economic development is construed as a mere facilitator of extant international grievances and desires such as border disputes, enmity between competing religious sects, and long-term foreign policy goals. This contention represents a significant trend in academic historiography, and it is known as ideological determinism.

     Ideological determinists entrench themselves by embracing a mistaken interpretation of economic determinism: for example, economic determinists are supposed to contend that economic development is responsible for all the various subtleties of foreign policy implementation. The alternative to ideological determinism, to say it another way, is to see economics as coextensive with society, as being responsible for even the most minor variations in social phenomena.

     Winkler undermines the misrepresentations of the ideological determinists by means both conceptual and concrete. Conceptually, he defines “economic causes” according to the interactions of industrialization with extant political and sociological realities. Descriptions of sociological and political phenomena as wholly divorced from economic factors are untenable because a state can hardly feed its armies on ideas alone. On a more concrete level, Winkler shows that rapid advances in economic production opened new vistas for political interpretation, religious expression, international relations, and the organization of armies. Some developments Winkler attributes to the ways politicians and bodies politic reacted to the new realities of industrialization, whereas others are attributed to industrialization itself. Therefore, Winkler responds to the question: “When are economic causes decisive and when are the interpretations of changing economic realities more significant?”

     Koltsov predicted in 1927 that an organism's inherited traits are determined by gradual changes in a “giant hereditary molecule,” later known as DNA, that is the building block of the genome that determines an organism's genetic makeup. This hypothesis was unproven, for a time, because of limitations in experimental methodology and an inability to do much more than observe qualities of an organism's DNA compared to the traits it expressed.

     To determine the nature of the connection between DNA and heritable characteristics, scientists needed to be able to bring about changes in the genome and observe whether they corresponded to physical changes in the organism. An experiment conducted by Zimmer in 1935 indicated that this was possible: radiation applied to living tissue can change the structures of DNA and another nucleic acid, RNA, that are found in the cells of every organism. Most of the exposed molecules go unchanged in this experiment, but some of them respond to experimental pressures. When X-rays are applied to cells, the nucleic acids warp and rearrange themselves, sometimes dramatically altering the traits they cause the organism to express. Because the changes induced by radiation exposure are more rapid and intense than those brought about by natural selection, significantly altered heritable traits can be observed in a single generation.

    As a proof of the connection between DNA and heritable characteristics, radiation experiments have two advantages. First, they are universally applicable: the genome of any organism responds to radiation exposure in a way comparable to any other organism. Second, it is a more direct means of genetic intervention than other methods like selective breeding. These advantages mean that radiation experiments can be used to isolate the hereditary influence of DNA from other confounding variables. The results of these experiments demonstrate that DNA exerts a substantial influence on the hereditary characteristics organisms express: DNA is the way that organisms transfer heritable traits between generations. These experiments have established an unassailable connection between intergenerational biological change and the information contained within the building blocks of the genome.

    However, it is important to note that there are other biological mechanisms, such as epigenetics and certain environmental pressures, that also affect the expression of inherited characteristics. The advantage of the Koltsov theory is its broad applicability; DNA is present in every organism on earth, which is not true of the various other factors that might have a role to play in determining the expression of heritable characteristics. That said, the comparative immeasurability of these other potential influences does not make them unworthy of study.