【每日阅读训练第四期——速度越障11系列】【11-6】科技

peill

以为考GMAT是最难的部分，到了申请才发现，最焦虑的其实是现在。主要还是我考出成绩晚了，大家明年申请的还是尽早申请啊。


－上周我们说到多哈召开的气候大会，协定京都议定书的续篇。这一周就是大会的成果啦。
－你有没有想过人工大脑这么回事呢，搞不好机器人真的会统治世界哦。
－鱼妹妹呢心烦气躁的时候是喜欢听着音乐入眠，你呢？来看下研究人员讲了个什么样的入睡跟音乐的小故事呢。
－11月考了一片RNA判断物种分类的，好巧不巧哦，这一周科学美国人的一片重头文章。大家抓紧时间熟悉一下体裁吧，千万不要错过哦！


科学可以很有趣～大家Enjoy！

Speed1
Geo-Engineering Wins Scant Enthusiasm at U.N. Climate Talks
Cheap, short-cut ideas to cool the planet such as shading sunlight are failing to win support from U.N.

By Environment Correspondent Alister Doyle




DOHA (Reuters) - Cheap, short-cut ideas to cool the planet such as shading sunlight are failing to win support from U.N. delegates looking to improve on the slow progress made by existing technologies.

Many scientists say the proposed solutions, known as geo-engineering, are little understood and might have side effects more damaging than global warming, which is projected to cause more floods, heatwaves, droughts and rising sea levels.

"Let's first use what we know," said Christiana Figueres, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, dismissing suggestions that it was time to try geo-engineering to halt a rise in greenhouse gas emissions.

"There are so many proven technologies we know exist that are tried and true that have not been used to their maximum potential," she told Reuters. "To begin with, the simplest is energy efficiency."

Geo-engineering options include adding sun-reflecting chemicals to the upper atmosphere to mimic the effect of big volcanic eruptions that mask the sun, or fertilizing the oceans to promote the growth of algae that soak up carbon from the air.

Among other ideas, a giant mirror could be placed in space to block some sunlight or sea spray could be injected into the air to create clouds whose white tops would reflect sunlight.

"Let's face it, geo-engineering has a lot of unknowns," Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the U.N.'s panel of climate scientists, told Reuters on the sidelines of U.N.-led climate change talks among 200 nations in Doha from November 26-Dec 7.

"How can you go into an area where you don't know anything?" he said. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is examining geo-engineering in depth for the first time as part of a major report due in 2013 and 2014.

Still, one study by U.S. scientists in August indicated that planes or airships could carry a million tonnes a year of sun-dimming sulfate materials high into the atmosphere for an affordable price tag of below $5 billion.
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Speed2

CHEAPER

That would be far cheaper than policies to cut world greenhouse gas emissions, estimated to cost between $200 billion and $2 trillion a year by 2030, they wrote in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

"If you are looking at solutions you could look at solar energy," said Mira Mehrishi, head of India's delegation in Doha. "It's a little premature to start looking at geo-engineering."

"There's a lot of skepticism" about geo-engineering, said Artur Runge-Metzger of the European Commission. "Research is necessary to see if it could be viable in one way or other."

U.N. negotiations on slowing global warming have been running since a U.N. Climate Convention was agreed in 1992.

One problem is that adding sulfates - a form of pollution - to the air would not slow an acidification of the oceans since concentrations of greenhouse gases led by carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would keep building up.

Some carbon dioxide, absorbed into the oceans, reacts to form carbonic acid. That erodes the ability of creatures from clams or mussels to lobsters and crabs to build their protective shells. In turn, that could disrupt marine food chains.

"You might temporarily delay the warming but you are certainly not going to help the oceans at all," said Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a vice-chair of the IPCC, of using sulfates. "Ocean acidification is a real emerging issue."


A mask of pollution might help some crops by reducing heat stress but it might have other side-effects, for instance, by disrupting Monsoon patterns. That could bring disputes between countries that benefited and others that suffered.

And Van Ypersele said that, if geo-engineering went wrong and needed to be shut down after a few years, there would be a big, damaging jump in temperatures.
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Speed3

Simulated brain scores top test marks
First computer model to produce complex behaviour performs almost as well as humans at simple number tasks.
        Ed Yong
29 November 2012

A pure computer simulation, Spaun simulates the physiology of each of its neurons, from spikes of electricity that flow through them to neurotransmitters that cross between them. The computing cells are divided into groups, corresponding to specific parts of the brain that process images, control movements and store short-term memories. These regions are wired together in a realistic way, and even respond to inputs that mimic the action of neurotransmitters.

As Spaun sees a stream of numbers, it extracts visual features so that it can recognize the digits. It can then perform at least eight different tasks, from simple ones like copying an image, to more complex ones similar to those found on IQ tests, such as finding the next number in a series. When finished, it writes out its answer with a physically modelled arm.

Spaun is almost as accurate at such simple tasks as the average human, and reproduces many quirks of human behaviour, such as the tendency to remember items at the start and end of a list better than those in the middle. “We weren’t surprised that it could do tasks,” says Eliasmith, ”but we were often surprised that subtle features like the time it took or the errors it made were the same as for humans”.


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Speed4
Behavioural switchboard

Spaun could provide a powerful platform for testing hypotheses about how the brain works. For example, it includes a virtual version of the basal ganglia, a region thought to act as a switchboard to allow the brain to toggle between different behaviours. “This was an untested suggestion,” says Eliasmith. “We showed that the basal ganglia can perform that role in a way that allows Spaun to match human performance for different tasks.”

He adds, “If we destroy parts of this model, we can see what behaviours might fail. Or we could change how neurotransmitters function and see how that relates to behaviour.” The researchers have already submitted a paper in which they killed off Spaun's virtual neurons at the same rate as those in an ageing brain, and saw the same cognitive decline.

Spaun has its limits. It simulates only a small fraction of the full brain, and cannot learn completely new tasks or deal with inputs beyond the ten numerals and a few symbols. It is also slow in computing terms, taking hours to simulate one second of neural behaviour. Eliasmith wants to improve the model so that Spaun works in real time and can learn on its own. “Instead of us giving it strategies for performing these tasks, it would be able to discover strategies based on experience, just like humans do,” he says.
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Speed5
Learn Music While You Sleep
Hearing a song during the night might improve your playing
By Jessica Gross


If you have been practicing a piece of music, hearing it again while you are sleeping could help you play it more accurately the next time, according to a study from Northwestern University published online in June in Nature Neuroscience.

Sixteen participants with a range of musical education learned to play two melodies by pressing keys in time with a sequence of moving circles, as in the video game Guitar Hero. During a 90-minute nap, one of the tunes was played over and over during slow-wave sleep, which is thought to be an important period for memory consolidation. When the participants awoke, they were better at both tunes, but their accuracy was especially improved for the tune they had heard (without knowing it) in their sleep.

“Memory processing during sleep happens, and it can be beneficial,” says senior author Ken A. Paller. “The findings we have suggest that slow-wave sleep is a very important part of the process.” Future research will focus on the memory mechanisms at work during this stage of the sleep cycle—and their practical implications.
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越障
RNA-only genes
The origin of species?
A recently discovered class of gene may help regulate embryonic development, control the differences between body tissues and even drive animal evolution
Dec 1st 2012 | from the print edition

THE old saying that where there’s muck, there’s brass has never proved more true than in genetics. Once, and not so long ago, received wisdom was that most of the human genome—perhaps as much as 99% of it—was “junk”. If this junk had a role, it was just to space out the remaining 1%, the genes in which instructions about how to make proteins are encoded, in a useful way in the cell nucleus.

That, it now seems, was about as far from the truth as it is possible to be. The decade or so since the completion of the Human Genome Project has shown that lots of the junk must indeed have a function. The culmination of that demonstration was the publication, in September, of the results of the ENCODE project. This suggested that almost two-thirds of human DNA, rather than just 1% of it, is being copied into molecules of RNA, the chemical that carries protein-making instructions to the sub-cellular factories which turn those proteins out, and that as a consequence, rather than there being just 23,000 genes (namely, the bits of DNA that encode proteins), there may be millions of them.

The task now is to work out what all these extra genes are up to. And a study just published in Genome Biology, by David Kelley and John Rinn of Harvard University, helps do that for one new genetic class, a type known as lincRNAs. In doing so, moreover, Dr Kelley and Dr Rinn show just how complicated the modern science of genetics has become, and hint also at how animal species split from one another.

Lincs in the chain

Molecules of lincRNA are similar to the messenger-RNA molecules which carry protein blueprints. They do not, however, encode proteins. More than 9,000 sorts are known, and most of those whose job has been tracked down are involved in the regulation of other genes, for example by attaching themselves to the DNA switches that control those genes.

LincRNA is rather odd, though. It often contains members of a second class of weird genetic object. These are called transposable elements (or, colloquially, “jumping genes”, because their DNA can hop from one place to another within the genome). Transposable elements come in several varieties, but one group of particular interest are known as endogenous retroviruses. These are the descendants of ancient infections that have managed to hide away in the genome and get themselves passed from generation to generation along with the rest of the genes.

Dr Kelley and Dr Rinn realised that the movement within the genome of transposable elements is a sort of mutation, and wondered if it has evolutionary consequences. Their conclusion is that it does, for when they looked at the relation between such elements and lincRNA genes, they found some intriguing patterns.

In the first place, lincRNAs are much more likely to contain transposable elements than protein-coding genes are. More than 83% do so, in contrast to only 6% of protein-coding genes.
Second, those transposable elements are particularly likely to be endogenous retroviruses, rather than any of the other sorts of element.

Third, the interlopers are usually found in the bit of the gene where the process of copying RNA from the DNA template begins, suggesting they are involved in switching genes on or off.

And fourth, lincRNAs containing one particular type of endogenous retrovirus are especially active in pluripotent stem cells, the embryonic cells that are the precursors of all other cell types. That indicates these lincRNAs have a role in the early development of the embryo.

Previous work suggests lincRNAs are also involved in creating the differences between various sorts of tissue, since many lincRNA genes are active in only one or a few cell types. Given that their principal job is regulating the activities of other genes, this makes sense.

Even more intriguingly, studies of lincRNA genes from species as diverse as people, fruit flies and nematode worms, have found they differ far more from one species to another than do protein-coding genes. They are, in other words, more species specific. And that suggests they may be more important than protein-coding genes in determining the differences between those species.

What seems to be happening is that endogenous retroviruses are jumping around in an arbitrary way within the genome. Mostly, that will—in evolutionary terms—be either harmless or bad. Occasionally, though, a retrovirus lands in a place where it can change the regulation of a lincRNA gene in a way beneficial to the organism. Such variations are then spread by natural selection in the way that any beneficial mutation would be. But because they affect developmental pathways and tissue types, and thus a creature’s form, rather than just its biochemistry, that could encourage the formation of a new species.

This is a long chain of speculation, but it looks a fruitful one. For it is still the case that, more than a century and a half after Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species”, biologists do not fully understand how species actually do originate. Work like this suggests one reason for this ignorance may be that they have been looking in the wrong place. For decades, they have concentrated their attention on the glittering, brassy protein-coding genes while ignoring the muck in which the answer really lies.

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yangreat

叮。第一个沙发 鱼妹妹give me five~
祝申请顺利！
速度
3:03
Scientists of Geo-engineering gave plans to refect sunlight.
To mimic the effect of big volcanic eruptions that mask the sun.
To build a big mirror in the space.
To fertilize  algae that soak up carbon from the air.
To spary the ocean to make clouds.
Use planes or airships to Carry materials into atmosphere.
2:37
Side-effects & Costs
The solar energy is a little premature to start looking at geo-engineering.
The ideas arouse in the meeting have side-effects.
When there are more carbon in the ocean, the creatures living there would change their surface and then the food-chain would change. This is not to help the ocean but to destroy.
Some countries would benefit and others would suffer.
2:07
The study of AI
Computer simulates the physiology of human.
The neurons are divided into groups based on different functions.
It can finish the simple tasks.
We surprised that the subtle features it made were the same as for ours.
2:12
We can observe the malfunction of the specific area in the Spaun to analyse the question of the same area in human brain.
It can not learn completely new things because it has limits.
1:50
Listening the tunes while sleep can help you understand the music better and let you play the tunes accuracy after the sleep.
The slow-wave sleep is an important period for memory consolidation.

越障
8:42
Human genome perhaps just contains 1% of the genes in which instructions about how to make proteins are encoded.
LincRNA can hop within genome. These are the descendants of acient infections that have managed to hide away in the genome and get themself passed away from generation to generation.
The mutation of the LincRNA suggests that the evolution exsits.
The processes of how the LincRNA involve.
The diversity of the LincRNA in different species.
Variations are spread by natural selection in the way that any beneficial mutation would be.

jajawjx

<12-2>
1:53 (297)
An acter in Two and A Half Man urged the audience not to watch the tv show any more, because some lines in it were opposite to his bible ??. This acter has been in the show for 10 years and he is the highest paid children acter in Amercia. Then he appologized for what he said and iterated his respct and appreciation for his colleagues.

2:15(335)
A camparison of education system across countress is necessary now. why? forgetten...
Finland and South Karea is the first and the second, and they share the belief that education is important. UK is the sixth, while US and Germany are in the middle.

2:13(303)
China successfully stoped the spread of polio virus.

2:16(310)*
There are three passion in our life: long for love, eagerness to knowledge and pity to the suffering, then the author explained how each of them .

1:51(307)
Seats in campus classrooms and libruaries are scarce when deadline comes. some students in Wuhan University set up a tent to occupy a seat in the libruary. Some other students choose to study in coffie bar, dinning room. A student from UIBE prefer to study in Scupture in Time, because he is free to talk and ask questions. While, a student in Shanghai Noral University prefer libruary because he is more diciplined there.

7:24(1152)
People want to live a wonderful and meaningful life, but at the same time, people are risk aversion. They are worried lots of things: pay, marriage, kids, and social status, etc. They auther encourage people to be brave to make our life special and he gave three examples.
The first is about a Amercian women who worked hard to reserve the legacy of original Americans.The second is about a Cambodian women who tried to preserve their traditional dance. In a war most of the dancers were killed and only 30 were servived, and the 30 dancer got together to teach their next and next generation the traditional dance when the war ended. The third is about a women who went extreme.

<12-3>
2:06 (323)
In DOHA Climate Conference, some new and cutting-edge technology, say geo-engineering, was declined by the UN delegates, for there're unknown side effects related to them. More over, the existing methods - such as rebouce the sunshine, add something into the sea water, or to creat clouds - have not been fully developed.

1:56 (290)
someone still argues for geo-engineering, but a delegation said it does not decrease the carbon dioxide in the air. Carbon dioxide absorbed into the ocean form carbonic acid and harm creatures in the ocean. Anyway, delegations cast doubton geo-engineering.

1:23 (211)
A computer simulation of human brain mimic the work process of human brain, and it"brain" is seperated into different parts to in charge of different tasks, and then all the parts are wired together. The "brain" can do some maths and write the answer. Surprisingly, it make the same mistake as human usually make.

1:26 (228)
Spaun can help do some tests about human brain, because we can see how different parts of the brain working at the same time. However, Spaun has limited fraction of brain, can deal with limited imputes, and takes longer time to finish tasks than real brain. The professor is trying to improve it.

1:01 (179)
A test about learn music. People remember the song listened when falling asleep more acurate.

5:36
It's about gene engineering...

teddybearj4

鱼妹妹~~申请加油啊！

bullheart

1'55
1'51
1'29
1'26
1'01
5'30
当我发现阅读，尤其是科技文对我来说不再那么讨厌的时候，我都想感谢这个温暖的小分队，感谢小分队里的每一个人，感谢每天的练习

Redace

阅读科技文总是速度会慢，第一遍还常常看不懂，需要多多练习呀。
祝鱼妹妹申请顺利！

1“48
In Doha, the suggestion to prevent globe warming through shadowing sunlight were not supported by most.
Geo-engineering... Not agree...
a person called C  F  said...
There are still many exist energy we can try. Geo-engineering could cause many side effects...Exples...
We cannot go into an unknown area.

1"07
...cheaper..
Solar energy is suggested..
The geo-engineering method mentioned above, adding sulfate, could cuase some effect: details about the effect...
Another geo-engineering method...side effect...
Forget...

2"06  2 rounds, cannot get the idea for the first round
A computer simulation, Spaun can behavior neuron...
Spaun's performance...8 tasks the same time...
Evaluation on Spaun....

1"13
Function&Usage of Spaun: could help test how brain works through nerutransmitter...
Limits on Spaun....

1"04
Hearting a piece of music when one is sleeping will help to remember and play that piece of music..
Detailes about the experiment...
A worker's word.. Next stage: focus on memory when work during that stage of sleep...

5"02
Introduct the topic: 99% junk gene? Probably not.
Some genes have their functions...
Study...LncRNA...(When I go through the paragraph again, I know what it is but I cannot remember the contents for the 1st round...)
RNA's functions...4 patterns...
lncRNA differ...more species specific
Summary: lncRNA helpful for studying origins of humans....scientists probably looked for wrong things before...


[Some New Words]
simulate 模拟
physiology 生理
spikes of electricity 尖峰电子，可理解为“电流”？
sulfate 硫酸
toggle切换
basal  base的形容词
ganglia 神经节
numeral 数字
memory consolidation记忆巩固
where there’s muck, there’s brass. muck肥料淤泥；brass 黄铜
embryonic胚胎
culmination 高潮
blueprints 蓝图
weird =odd
mutation 突变
intriguing =interesting

spencerX

鱼妹妹每次都好贴心地给出文章提示，谢谢！祝申请顺利！

0:01:42
0:01:25
0:01:19
0:01:07
0:00:54

0:06:06

小浩浩

2'43''
Geo-Engineering, little understood, side effects
CF: use what we know, effciency
RP: face it, Geo-E: sun.../..., cant go

2'55''
MM: Geo-E increases...
ARM: skepticism, research, if variable?
UN:
Problem: 1.sulfates(food chain)
JPVY: be slow, cant help emerging
A mask: reduce heat, side effect
JPVY: if wrong, shut dwn years, temperatrue increases!!

1'58''
Spaun: cells group, wired, respond
Spaun see numbers...
most accurate, reproduces...
E: not surprised can do tasks, but surprised features(mistakes same...)

2'30''
Spaun can test hypos,
e.g basal ganglia
E: destroys, some fail, kill...decline...
Limits: small fraction, cant learn completely new, ....,
E: improve, "would discover..."

2'07''
sleep+music=accurate
2melodies, press keys, one played again and again when slow-wave sleep(memory part)
better at both
the one more accurate
KAP: memory mechanism work....

10'05''
cell nucleus
ENCODE result, DNA RNA
Task: what genes are up to
Study helps: lincRNAs hint how animals split
lincRNA varieties(trans elements) but one group: endo retro from ancient infections
Dr.K and R, mutation in trans elements
1...
2...
3...
4...
Also, lincRNA tissue, pincipal: regulate
Fruit flies and...
happening: end retro jump around within genome
var spread: creature form
long chain fruitful
Charles Darwin...

铁板神猴

1'51''
1'55''
Global heating is a big problem now since nearly no country actually takes action! I got worried about it as to what's the turning point of it?? And what about the Ocean acidification, the first damaging step of Global heating?

1'18''
1'13''
52''
I do that a lot~ the sleeping with music.

glad to read these Speed articles. leave the rest to afternoon. thanks for sharing all these days, peill!! Good luck for your application!

And, the MOST IMPORTANT, I am in the first page! Miahaha......

alun1987

文章真的很好，感谢分享~另祝LZ申请顺利

1'39
1'39
1'14
1'13
'52

越障：
Scientists find a new genetic class called lincRNA which may play a crucial role in evolution and split of species.

What is lincRNA:
>>responsible for encoding proteins
>>contains transposable elements(XXvirus), which could be passed generation by generation.

Scientists believe the lincRNA is related to evolution process, and they have discovered a series of patterns.
>>lincRNAs are more likely to carry the transposable elements
>>transposable elements are likely to be XXviruses
>>lincRNAs are involved in switching genes on and off
>>lincRNAs take part in the early development of embryo
>>lincRNAs may regulate the activities of genes, and are important in developing differences between various sorts of tissues
>>lincRNAs may determine different species

Inference: XXvirus jump around(could be harmless of bad)→land occasionally and change the regulation of lincRNA→those beneficial changed are chosed by natural selection→new species

Conclusion: we have not fully understand the evolution process since the theory was brought out by Darwin. Our previous researches were concentrated on protein-coding genes, but it seems that lincRNAs lead to the final answer.