【Native Speaker每日综合训练—38系列】【38-02】科技

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公益申请名额，每月一名

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Part I: Speaker

Hi-Tech Helmet Heads Off Stroke Damage
A helmet placed on the head of a stroke victim sends low-intensity microwaves through the brain to quickly determine whether a blockage or hemorrhage is taking place, making faster treatment possible. Wayt Gibbs reports

When a person suffers a stroke quick treatment is crucial. But there are two very different kinds of strokes: some result from blood clots that block circulation within the brain, others are caused by ruptured vessels that spill blood into surrounding tissue. The use of clot-busting drugs when a hemorrhage is happening can cause additional injury or death. So doctors lose precious time waiting for stroke victims to get MRIs or CAT scans before they start treatment.

But soon EMT’s might be able to quickly tell whether patients have a blockage or a bleed—by having them wear a high-tech helmet.

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden developed the prototype helmet and tested it on 45 stroke patients.

The gadget covers the head with a patchwork of antennas. As each antenna beams low-intensity microwaves through the head in sequence, the other antennas detect how the waves scatter. Any pooling blood from a hemorrhage causes deflections easily spotted on an attached computer. The research is in the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering. [Mikael Perrson et al, Microwave-based stroke diagnosis making global pre-hospital thrombolytic treatment possible]

Trials using mobile stroke helmets in ambulances are scheduled to start in the fall. As with proper treatment, the sooner the better.

—Wayt Gibbs

Source: Scientificamerican
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/stroke-helmet/


[Rephrase 1, 1:23]

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Part II: Speed

World Cup teams could suffer from too much talent
BY Nathan Collins | 17 June 2014

[Time 2]

There's such a thing as too much talent, at least when it comes to sports teams. Psychologists reached that conclusion by studying World Cup soccer games, where players from top professional clubs compete on national squads alongside others from lesser leagues. Analyzing rankings from the 2010 and 2014 World Cup qualification periods, the researchers found that a team benefits from more elite footballers until they make up about three-quarters of the squad. Go past that, and the team’s ranking starts to decline. Two American sports suggest why. In the National Basketball Association, having more top-scoring players helps only until they make up about 60% of the team, whereas Major League Baseball teams rack up more wins as their proportion of top players goes up. The difference? Because their roles overlap more, soccer and basketball players alike can end up fighting over the ball, competing with each other for the most points. In baseball, the various positions are far more specialized. The results, to be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, might be news to French national team coach Didier Deschamps. After five losses last year, Deschamps told Agence France-Presse that the more players he could get from elite French and European professional teams, the better his team (including forward Karim Benzema, above, playing Honduras yesterday) would perform in the future. Maybe he’s got it backward: The more top players he has, the more they’ll just hog the ball.

[240 words]
Source: science
http://news.sciencemag.org/brain-behavior/2014/06/world-cup-teams-could-suffer-too-much-talent?rss=1


Antarctic icebergs decimating seafloor life
BY Carolyn Gramling | 17 June 2014

[Time 3]

A decade ago, the sea floor off the coast of the west Antarctic Peninsula (WAP) was a patchwork quilt of different colors and species. But now, icebergs are increasingly scouring the sea floor as they drift close to shore, fundamentally altering that rich ecosystem in the process. That’s the conclusion of a study reported this week in Current Biology. Each winter, the WAP sea surface freezes over, forming a skin of “fast ice” that holds back the bergs. But with climate change, the WAP is experiencing rapid regional warming, with fewer days each year of fast ice—letting the icebergs into the shallows more often, where they carve huge gashes through the habitat of the colorful, tentacled invertebrate animals carpeting the sea floor. The team examined the spatial distribution, diversity, and interactions between and within species from 1997 to 2013, along with scours from the ice each year. What it found was sobering: Most species weren’t able to recover from the increasingly frequent pounding by the ice. Instead, one species—a nondescript white mosslike animal encrusted on the rocks—emerged as an all-conquering winner, edging out the rest by its sheer ability to take a beating. It now has a near-monopoly in the area, the study found—and that could make the whole region more vulnerable to invading species.

[219 words]
Source: science
http://news.sciencemag.org/climate/2014/06/antarctic-icebergs-decimating-seafloor-life


Mystery of 1918 Flu That Killed 50 Million Solved?
Children born in the late 1800s lacked exposure to influenza before the deadliest pandemic of the early 20th century hit.
BY Dan Vergano| 28 April, 2014

[Time 4]

Scientists announced Monday that they may have solved one of history's biggest biomedical mysteries—why the deadly 1918 "Spanish flu" pandemic, which killed perhaps 50 million people worldwide, largely targeted healthy young adults. (Related: "How Flu Viruses Attack.")
The explanation turns out to be surprisingly simple: People born after 1889 were not exposed as kids to the kind of flu that struck in 1918, leaving them uniquely vulnerable. Older people, meanwhile, had been exposed to flu strains more closely related to the 1918 flu, offering some immunity.
Simply put, the Spanish flu owed its ferocity to a switch in dominant influenza varieties that had occurred a generation earlier. (Related: "1918 Flu That Killed 50 Million Originated in China.")
"All a matter of timing," says virologist Vincent Racaniello of Columbia University in New York, who was not part of the study.
Researchers involved in the study looked at the evolutionary history of the components of the 1918 flu, which was built of genes from human and avian flu strains. They unraveled the history of dominant flu strains stretching back to 1830.
The evolutionary biologists found that a worldwide 1889 outbreak of the so-called Russian flu, the H3N8 flu virus, left a generation of children that had not been exposed to anything resembling the Spanish flu, which was an H1N1 strain. (The H and N in the flu designation stand for proteins called hemagglutinin and  neuraminidase, respectively).

[235 words]

[Time 5]

The spread of a more closely related H1 flu variety after 1900 provided partial immunity to children born after that time. That closed the window of vulnerability.
"You have the most deadly flu pandemic in history essentially leaving the elderly, its most frequent victims, completely alone," says biologist Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona in Tucson, who led the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences report.
Instead, people aged 18 to 29 died in droves during the outbreak, which killed about 1 in 200 of victims.
Experts have suggested that such a window of vulnerability partly explained the 1918 pandemic, Racaniello notes. But the new study provides computational evidence that the 1918 flu's precursor originated around 1907, he says, and explains how the window of vulnerability opened and closed for the disease.
The new finding may help public health officials deal with future pandemics, amid current worries about deadly avian flu strains jumping to humans.
It may also alter how we vaccinate against future flu outbreaks, keying vaccines not to current seasonal flavor, but instead to strains that people didn't gain immunity to as children. (Related: "Influenza—A Killer Cold?")

Flu Fluctuations
Seasonal flu strains typically enjoy decades of dominance in the human population. These periods are often capped by outbreaks of new flu varieties, such as the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic that led to the current reign of this strain of flu, which killed perhaps 284,000 people worldwide, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"The seasonal drift is normal and is the reason why we have yearly vaccines produced to protect against these seasonal changes," says immunologist Michael Gale, Jr., of the University of Washington in Seattle.

[284 words]

[Time 6]

The key to the team's reconstruction was the realization that flu genes evolve at different speeds in birds, pigs, and people, Worobey says (it's faster in chickens, for example). Once the evolution of flu strains is reset with timing tuned to each carrier species, "the picture came clear," he says.
Rather than a sudden movement of avian flu genes in 1918 explaining the Spanish flu, the study suggests that many of them moved into seasonal flu after 1900. A change in the kind of hemagglutinin used by an already-existent flu strain likely led to the pandemic around 1918.

Universal Vaccine
The overall message of the study is a hopeful one, say the researchers, because the bacterial pneumonia secondary to the 1918 flu that killed most of its victims is treatable with modern antibiotics.
"If there was something particularly deadly about the 1918 strain, then you are out of luck when something like it happens again," Worobey says. "But if this is just the effect of lack of exposure, then we can be more confident of treatment."
If that's the case, the makers of future flu vaccines may want to tune their ingredients to people's ages, aiming to arm them against flu strains they likely missed exposure to during childhood, the prime age for getting the flu.
"It really offers a lot of support for a 'universal' flu vaccine that aims to prevent all varieties of flu," Worobey says. Such a vaccine would be aimed at all strains of flu viruses, not just the current dominant seasonal ones.

[257 words]
Source: nationalgeographic
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/04/140428-1918-flu-avian-swine-science-health-science/

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Part III: Obstacle

3D images remodel history
Digital-photo software promises to offer unprecedented access to artefacts and sites.
BY Ewen Callaway| 17 June, 2014

[Paraphrase 7]

It took hundreds of thousands of workers decades to create China’s terracotta army, but digital avatars made in minutes could solve the lingering mystery of one of the country’s most famous relics. By creating three-dimensional (3D) models of the 2,200-year-old collection of statues, archaeologists hope to confirm whether the soldiers were intended to represent a real army of distinct individuals.
Known broadly as computer vision, the technology was developed to enable machines such as factory robots and the Mars rovers to map a 3D world from camera images. But now it is quietly revolutionizing archaeology and palaeontology, allowing virtual bones, artefacts and whole excavation sites to be shared and studied without risk of damage.
“In the future, it’s highly likely that these sorts of methods will be the standard thing you do to record an archaeological site,” says Andrew Bevan, an archaeologist at University College London, who is part of a team using computer vision to build digital models of the terracotta army’s life-size warriors.
Since the army was discovered in 1974 in an emperor’s mausoleum near Xian, historians have debated whether the soldiers’ facial details were modelled on actual militiamen. “Are the warriors portraits of individual people? Or are they a ‘Mr Potato Head’ approach to individualism, where you slap on different noses and moustaches and ears?” Bevan says.
Computer-vision models might offer the answer, Bevan suggests. Digital photos can be taken quickly, cheaply and without disturbing the statues. Several dozen high-quality photos of a soldier, taken from multiple perspectives, can provide a computer algorithm with enough data to determine where each image was taken from and create a 3D map in a few minutes. The model — a set of x, y and z coordinates — can be plotted against other models, analysed and even used to make a cast with a 3D printer.
In a pilot study published on 4 June, Bevan’s team modelled the faces of 30 warriors and found that no two ears were identical — evidence that the army consists of individuals (A. Bevan et al. J. Archaeol. Sci. http://doi.org/s7v; 2014). The researchers compared ears because these are unique and may have been modelled on real people. But they plan to analyse other anatomical features to see whether the soldiers vary in ethni­city or bear the hallmarks of distinct craftsmen. Bevan stresses that the work is at an early stage.
Archaeologists and palaeontologists have used computer model­ling for decades, to map digs with laser scanners or study bones with computed tomography (CT), for example. But proponents of computer vision argue that these technologies are costly and not made for routine use in the field.
“You’re talking about having a camera versus having a £30,000 [US$50,000] piece of kit ready,” says Sarah Duffy, an archaeolo­gist at the University of York, UK. When 900,000-year-old footprints were found on eastern England’s Norfolk coast last year, she was part of a team that raced to photograph the scene and capture the footprints in 3D. The resulting model revealed that they had been left by a human ancestor — the oldest such relics discovered outside Africa (N. Ashton et al. PLoS ONE http://doi.org/rd2; 2014). The prints had nearly vanished by the time the researchers lugged a laser scanner to the site a week later.

Benjamin Ducke at the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin agrees that the technology has the potential to preserve sites that are disappearing. Last October, he used a drone equipped with a video camera to create a 3D map of a large pre-Columbian settlement in Mexico in a couple of days. His team, called Project Archaeocopter, plans to analyse sites in Uzbekistan and at Pompeii in Italy. With an infrared camera mounted on a drone, the technology could map archaeological sites obscured by dense forests, he says.
Powerful computer-vision software is affordable and readily available, but advocates such as Heinrich Mallison, a palaeontologist at Berlin’s Natural History Museum, see the technology as more than a time and money saver. “It means we can expect to see entire collections of hundreds of thousands of objects digitally available in a decade, so everybody can use these for research,” he says. Ducke thinks that the technology has the potential to break the “interpretative monopoly” of scholars whose theories prevail because others lack access to particular artefacts or remains.
Jean-Jacques Hublin, a palaeoanthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, expects museums to limit the creation and distribution of such models in their collections, in the same way as some have done for CT scans. Museums worry about losing control over their collections, but Hublin thinks that demand among scientists will inevitably push more collections online. With computer-vision technology in mind, in May the European Union began accepting applications for a €14-million (US$19-million) fund to create 3D models of examples of Europe’s cultural heritage.
But data theft is a worry, Mallison says. “I can go to a museum in Beijing, pull out my Canon, play tourist and do research on a high-resolution 3D model of their fossils.” Academics might not risk the backlash of collecting data without permission, but replica sellers could pillage museum collections with computer-vision software, says Mallison. He thinks that inter­national rules are needed to prevent this. Never­theless, he predicts that it is only a matter of time before 3D models of museum collections are widely available. “The question is, do we see it in 5 years or 10 years or 15 years?” he says.

[910 words]
Source: nature
http://www.nature.com/news/3d-images-remodel-history-1.15418

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1.1-31
Rather than improve the performance of the whole team, getting moreelite in the football team will take a toll on the feat.

There's such a thing as too much talent, at least when it comes to sportsteams. Psychologists reachedthat conclusion by studying World Cup soccer games, where players fromtop professional clubs compete on national squads alongside在这里表示比in comparison with sth. 即明星云集的队伍和较少明星队伍比较othersfrom lesser leagues.Analyzing rankings from the 2010 and 2014 World Cup qualification periods, theresearchers found that a team benefits from more elitefootballers until they make up aboutthree-quarters of the squad. 精英球员达到3/4之前都会对球队有益处Go past that, and the team’s ranking starts to decline. 超过就会产生副作用ill effect TwoAmerican sports suggest why. In the National Basketball Association, havingmore top-scoring players helps only until they make up about 60% of the team, whereas Major League Baseball teams rack up more wins astheir proportion of top players goes up. The difference? Because their rolesoverlap more, soccer and basketball players alike can end up fighting over the ball,competing with each other for the most points. In baseball, the variouspositions are far more specialized. The results, to be published in an upcoming issue ofPsychological Science, might be news to 后文会解释为什么对DD是个新闻，因为他的观念正好和研究相反French national team coach Didier Deschamps.After five losses last year, Deschamps told Agence France-Presse that the moreplayers he could get from elite French and European professional teams, thebetter his team (including forward Karim Benzema, above, playing Hondurasyesterday) would perform in the future. Maybe he’s got it backward: The more top players he has, the more they’ll just hog the ball就是说大家都会去争球，不团结.

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2. 1-25
Because of climate changes, species have in WPS suffered from icebergs. In that region, species diversity is increasingly reduced, and only one, M, is well adapt to the change and almost takes over the site, thus making the field vulnerable to invading species.

Antarcticicebergs decimatingseafloor life

A decade ago, the seafloor off the coast of the west Antarctic Peninsula (WAP) was a patchwork quilt直译是“拼布床单”，但这里是指WAP的生物圈是由许多不同的生物组成的 of different colors and species. But now, icebergs are increasingly scouring the sea floor asthey drift close toshore, fundamentally altering thatrich ecosystem in the process.漂移的冰山从根本上改变了这里原本丰富的生态系统 That’s the conclusion of a study reported thisweek in Current Biology. Each winter, the WAP sea surface freezes over全面结冰, forming a skin of “fast ice”这不是“快冰”，而是“固定冰”，水面结冰，阻止漂移冰山的进入 that holds backthe bergs. But with climate change, the WAP is experiencing rapid regionalwarming, with fewer days each year of fast ice—letting the icebergs into theshallows more often, where they carve huge gashes through the habitat of the colorful,tentacled invertebrate animals carpeting the sea floor. The team examined the spatial distribution, diversity, and interactions 从生物的空间分布、多样性和相互作用三个方面分析betweenand within species from 1997 to 2013, along with再加上这个因素 scours from the ice each year. What it found wassobering: Mostspecies weren’t able to recover from the increasingly frequent pounding by the ice.Instead, one species—a nondescriptwhite mosslikeanimal encrusted onthe rocks—emerged as an all-conqueringwinner, edging outthe rest by its sheer ability to take a beating. It now has a near-monopoly in the area, the study found—andthat could make the whole region more vulnerable to invading species.冰山入侵的结果是，一种生物独占此地，因此生物多样性收到严重伤害，并且面对外来入侵物种会更加脆弱

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3. 1-31
Recent researches reveal the mystery of the 1918 viral invader, which killed a huge number of people, mainly young adults. The reason is that those young people were lack of concerned immunity to deal with the viral, while elder had that immunity.

Mystery of 1918Flu That Killed 50 Million Solved?
Childrenborn in the late 1800s lacked exposure to influenza before the deadliest pandemic of the early 20thcentury hit.

Scientists announced Monday that they may havesolved one of history's biggest biomedical mysteries—why the deadly 1918 "Spanish flu"pandemic, which killed perhaps 50 million people worldwide, largely targetedhealthy young adults. 为什么是是年轻人？后文有解释

The explanation turns out to be surprisingly simple: People born after1889 were not exposed as kids to thekind of flu that struck in 1918, leaving them uniquely vulnerable. Olderpeople, meanwhile, had been exposedto flu strains more closely related to the 1918 flu, offering some immunity.大多数年轻人缺少相应免疫系统，但是老人有
Simply put, the Spanish flu owedits ferocity to aswitch 变种in dominant influenza varieties that hadoccurred a generation earlier. (Related: "1918 Flu That Killed 50 MillionOriginated in China.")
"All a matter of timing," says virologist Vincent Racanielloof Columbia University in New York, who was not part of the study.
Researchers involved in the study looked at the evolutionary history ofthe components of the 1918 flu, which was built of genes from human and avianflu strains. They unraveled the history of dominant flu strains stretching back to 1830.
The evolutionary biologists found that a worldwide 1889 outbreak of theso-called Russian flu, the H3N8 flu virus, lefta generation of children that had not been exposed to anything resembling theSpanish flu, which was an H1N1 strain.这就是罪魁祸首(The H and N in the flu designation stand for proteins called hemagglutininand  neuraminidase, respectively).