【Native Speaker每日综合训练—33系列】【33-12】科技

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大家好!胖胖翔来了! 精彩尽在今日科技——speaker中，如何“听”颜色？ speed：听说过挂羊头卖狗肉的，现在欧洲也有挂牛排卖马肉的！大象闻声辨敌友！大西洋海底中出现的“铅层”是怎么回事？ enjoy~

Part I：Speaker

【Rephrase1】
Article 1
Neil Harbisson: I listen to color
[Dialog, 9: 36]






Source:
http://www.ted.com/talks/neil_harbisson_i_listen_to_color#

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Part II：Speed

【Time 2】
Article 2
In business as in science, prejudice holds women back
Investors favour pitches from men, and recruiters assume that male applicants are better at maths.

Gender-related bias partly explains why men are more likely than women to found start-up companies and why they hold more jobs in science-related fields, according to two studies published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In one study, Alison Wood Brooks, a social psychologist at Harvard Business School in Boston, Massachusetts, and her colleagues showed videos of US entrepreneurial pitch competitions to experienced business investors. The investors were 60% more likely to invest in pitches presented by men than by women. What's more, attractiveness gave the men, but not the women, an advantage. This effect was independent of the investor's gender.

To rule out the possibility that the content of each pitch affected the outcome, the researchers showed 194 volunteers the same pitch video, narrated by a man or a woman and accompanied by a photograph of a sex-matched entrepreneur of higher or lower attractiveness. The volunteers were more likely to invest in pitches narrated by a man, especially if they thought he was attractive, but attractiveness did not make female entrepreneurs more competitive.

That finding surprised study co-author Laura Huang, a behavioural economist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. "We had expected that attractiveness might give females a 'premium', mainly because there is much more attention paid to females being concerned about appearance," she says.

But Madeline Heilman, a psychologist at New York University who was not involved in the study, says that attractiveness has been shown to benefit men but not women in fields historically dominated by men — and business investment is certainly such a field. The study, she adds, shows for the first time that stereotypes that other studies have shown benefit men in fields such as management and the sciences seem to operate in business investment as well.


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【Time 3】

Number crunch

In a second study, Ernesto Reuben, a behavioural economist at Columbia University in New York, and his colleagues asked nearly 200 volunteers to evaluate 96 candidate pairs for a job that required skill in a maths-related task.

With no information other than the candidate's appearance, the volunteers ‘hired’ men twice as often as women. This was also the case when applicants told the volunteers how well they thought they would perform in the task, in part because the men were more likely to brag about their performance, and the women were more likely to underestimate it.

When the volunteers were told how the applicants had done in the maths task (which men and women did equally well in most cases), discrimination declined — but it didn't disappear completely. Both male and female recruiters were still more likely (about 30% more on average) to prefer the male applicants.

This suggested that the volunteers were biased against women in positions that require maths skills. Indeed, the researchers found evidence for such a bias in an ‘implicit association test’ (IAT), in which the participants showed stronger associations between pictures of men and words related to maths and science than between pictures of men and words related to the liberal arts. What's more, the stronger their gender–maths bias was in the IAT, the stronger was their tendency to prefer men in their hiring decision for the maths-related job.

To Reuben, this suggests that because people are not used to seeing women in maths-related jobs, they form a stereotype in which the two are not connected. This can create a cycle: stereotypes make it harder for women to succeed in being hired for such jobs, which could in turn discourage women from applying for the jobs in the first place.

For now, it's important to raise awareness that these biases exist and that people often don't know they have them, says study co-author Paola Sapienza, an economist at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management in Evanston, Illinois. She says that people should all get to know their own biases, for example by taking the IAT. She adds: "The more people learn that they have biases, the more they [will] be aware and maybe [can] unbias themselves."

Sapienza has already followed her own advice and taken the test. "I was seriously afraid that I had the [gender–maths] bias myself," she says. But she had no reason to worry — she didn't have it.


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Source:
http://www.nature.com/news/in-business-as-in-science-prejudice-holds-women-back-1.14845


【Time 4】
Article 3
Elephants recognize the voices of their enemies
African elephants can distinguish human languages, genders and ages associated with danger.

Humans are among the very few animals that constitute a threat to elephants. Yet not all people are a danger — and elephants seem to know it. The giants have shown a remarkable ability to use sight and scent to distinguish between African ethnic groups that have a history of attacking them and groups that do not. Now a study reveals that they can even discern these differences from words spoken in the local tongues.

Biologists Karen McComb and Graeme Shannon at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, guessed that African elephants (Loxodonta africana) might be able to listen to human speech and make use of what they heard. To tease out whether this was true, they recorded the voices of men from two Kenyan ethnic groups calmly saying, “Look, look over there, a group of elephants is coming,” in their native languages. One of these groups was the semi-nomadic Maasai, some of whom periodically kill elephants during fierce competition for water or cattle-grazing space. The other was the Kamba, a crop-farming group that rarely has violent encounters with elephants.

The researchers played the recordings to 47 elephant family groups at Amboseli National Park in Kenya and monitored the animals' behaviour. The differences were remarkable. When the elephants heard the Maasai, they were much more likely to cautiously smell the air or huddle together than when they heard the Kamba. Indeed, the animals bunched together nearly twice as tightly when they heard the Maasai.

“We knew elephants could distinguish the Maasai and Kamba by their clothes and smells, but that they can also do so by their voices alone is really interesting,” says Fritz Vollrath, a zoologist at the University of Oxford, UK (see video below).

Fascinated by their findings, McComb, Shannon and their colleagues wondered whether the Maasai language on its own was a danger signal, or whether the animals were responding to the combination of the language and the voice of an adult male who was likely to wield a spear. To find out, they recorded Maasai women and boys saying the same phrase, and monitored elephant-family responses to them.


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【Time 5】

Careful listeners

The differences were similar to what they saw with the Kamba. The elephants were less likely to flee from the voices of Maasai women and boys than they were from Maasai men, and they bunched together less closely. Most intriguingly, the researchers noted that elephant families led by matriarchs more than 42 years old never retreated when they heard the voices of boys, but those led by younger matriarchs retreated roughly 40% of the time.

It is not yet clear whether elephants are born knowing what a dangerous human sounds like or whether they can learn this from one another, but McComb suspects that the knowledge is cultural rather than innate. “Even though spearings by Maasai have declined in recent years, it’s still obvious that fear of them is high. This is likely down to younger elephants following the lead of their matriarchs who remember spearings from long ago,” says McComb.

In fact, elephants seem to be able to communicate about their encounters with dangerous people, according to a separate recent study that appeared late last month in PLOS One2. It found that the animals adjusted the frequencies of their vocalisations as they meet different threats, and made a unique call when they came across swarming bees and a different unique call when they met people who traditionally hunted them. Whether these calls are something akin to language remains to be determined, but the findings certainly hint that there is much more going on in the minds of these animals than previously expected.


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Source:
http://www.nature.com/news/elephants-recognize-the-voices-of-their-enemies-1.14846


【Time 6】
Article 4
How Much Horse Is in Your Burger?

Don't like surprises in your hamburgers? New research may help ensure that you don't get a serving of horse meat when you buy beef. Using Raman spectroscopy, a technique where light scattered off a sample is used to measure molecular vibrations, researchers have created a scoring system that can distinguish beef, horse meat, and mixtures of the two. The work, to be published next month in Food Chemistry, is timely considering a meat scandal that occurred early last year in Europe, where some of the products sold as beef in grocery stores and to caterers turned out to be partially or entirely horse meat instead. The motive appears to have been profit, as horse meat is generally cheaper than beef. Testing to check for horse meat is generally done using DNA analysis, but the new method allows for a simpler and quicker test that can be performed onsite.


Source:
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http://news.sciencemag.org/chemistry/2014/03/scienceshot-how-much-horse-your-burger

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Part III： Obstacle

【Paraphase7】
Article 5
3D Maps Reveal a Lead-Laced Ocean
Tracking pollution. Red and yellow areas on a cross-sectional map of the Atlantic Ocean, and in a rotating 3D animation (below), highlight areas with relatively high traces of lead.

HONOLULU—About 1000 meters down in a remote part of the Atlantic Ocean sits an unusual legacy of humanity’s love affair with the automobile. It’s a huge mass of seawater infused with traces of the toxic metal lead, a pollutant once widely emitted by cars burning leaded gasoline. Decades ago, the United States and Europe banned leaded gas and many other uses of the metal, but the pollutant’s fingerprint lingers on—as shown by remarkably detailed new maps released here this week at the 2014 Ocean Sciences Meeting.

The 3D maps and animations are the early results of an unprecedented $300 million international collaboration to document the presence of trace metals and other chemicals in the world’s oceans. The substances, which often occur in minute quantities, can provide important clues to understanding the ocean’s past—such as how seawater masses have moved around over centuries—and its future, such as how climate change might shift key biochemical processes. Over about 30 cruises in the past few years, researchers have collected nearly 30,000 water samples at 787 study sites. Then, using painstaking techniques—including wearing “moon suits” and working in clean rooms to prevent contamination—they’ve measured elements like iron, nickel, and zinc. The effort, known as GEOTRACES, “is a huge improvement over what we were able to do in the past,” says ocean chemist Hein de Baar of the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research in Texel.

GEOTRACES is tracking some 200 elements and other substances, but the lead maps released this week tell an especially sobering story of past pollution—and continuing contamination. In the central Atlantic, for example, the maps show a huge slug of subsurface seawater with lead levels higher than those in surface or deeper waters. That tainted water was once at the surface, where it collected airborne lead particles, explains chemical oceanographer Abigail Noble of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. But the surface water slowly sank into the deep ocean, essentially becoming a time capsule recording “the incredible impact that we have had on the oceans in the past, and how it changes over time.”

Although the elevated lead levels stand out as red and yellow blotches on the GEOTRACES maps, the concentrations are too low to pose a major threat to humans or wildlife, says MIT ocean scientist Edward Boyle. “You probably aren’t going to see stupid fish or whales swimming around,” he says, alluding to the brain damage that can be caused by lead exposure. The lead concentrations are roughly equivalent to what you’d get if you dissolved a small spoonful of frozen orange juice in 200 Olympic-sized swimming pools, Noble estimates. And lead levels in much of the Atlantic have dropped dramatically over the past few decades, Noble and Boyle note, mostly thanks to the lead phaseout in the United States and Europe.

Still, the maps show there are places where lead contamination is a continuing problem. Off the southern tip of Africa, surface waters with relatively high traces of lead are flowing into the South Atlantic from the Indian Ocean. That’s probably due to the continuing use of leaded gasoline in parts of Africa and Asia and perhaps to some heavy industry there, says chemical oceanographer Christian Schlosser of the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom.

Another hot spot, the maps show, is where the Mediterranean Sea empties into the eastern Atlantic. The lead concentrations there “are some of the highest we saw anywhere” in the Atlantic, says chemical oceanographer Rob Middag of the University of Otago, Dunedin, in New Zealand. That may be because the Mediterranean is a relatively enclosed body of water with heavily settled shores and has been collecting pollution for centuries.

The maps will be expanded in coming years as new cruises are completed. But other researchers are already beginning to mine them for insights into trace elements such as iron, which can fertilize plankton blooms and could be a major player in how the oceans respond to climate change. Scientists are also tracking atomic isotopes that can help map the worldwide movements of seawater and help pinpoint the original sources of lead and other trace metals. The unusually detailed GEOTRACES data, Noble says, is letting researchers “see things that we couldn’t see before.”


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Source:
http://news.sciencemag.org/chemistry/2014/02/3d-maps-reveal-lead-laced-ocean