【NativeSpeaker每日综合训练—26系列】【26-01】科技

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Hi~~ 26期跟大家say hello！

change每周一的科技文又再一次迟到了~ o(╯□╰)o  这次的科技帖也会是change的最后一岗了。。。正式在小分队也都快半年了  从默默跟帖到后来自己发帖，伴随着我磕磕碰碰的三次惨痛杀G路，真的真的很不舍~~     哎。。。不知道该说些什么，貌似说什么都显得矫情了  总之：感谢一路有你们陪伴！！ 也希望大家一如既往的跟随小分队的训练，坚持真的真的很重要！  我也会一直跟读的~~加油！！！


今天文章的topic都比较有意思，越障很长，分成了两部分，希望大家 enjoy~~`(*∩_∩*)′

翠花~~ 上酸菜啦！

Part I：Speaker

【Rephrase 1】 Generosity Can Breed Contempt

[Dialog, 1:18]
MP3：

[Transcript hided]
It's better to give than to receive. But if you give too much, you might receive contempt. Because a study finds that people shun group members who are overly generous.
Three-hundred-ten volunteers were each given points that they could contribute to the group or keep for themselves. They were also told that their final points tally would be converted to chances at winning a gift card.
After seeing the amounts contributed by five other group members—that were really computer simulations—participants had the option of punishing those that contributed the most. And they gladly gave up one of their own points to deduct 3 points from the most generous member.
Participants also rated how much they wanted other members to remain in the group. They went after those that gave too little and too much. The study is in the journal Social Science Research. [Kyle Irwin and Christine Horne, A normative explanation of antisocial punishment]
The researchers believe that a group’s members can find conformity within the group more important than the success of the group. As Ben Franklin may have put it, in some cases hanging together makes hanging separately more likely.

【End】
Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=generosity-can-breed-contempt-13-09-24

Part II：Speed

What Your Messy Desk Says About You (It’s a Good Thing)

【Time 2】
When I got back from vacation the other day, I returned to a clean desk. Well, not actually clean, but every stack of paper was aligned. Not a sheet was askew.
  
This lasted about 20 minutes.
But rather than stare forlornly at the paper swirl building before me, this time I gave myself a big “attaboy,” because clearly I was getting my creative on.
  
When things get messy
That’s right, a messy desk is a sign of an innovative mind at work, not a chaotic one. At least that’s the sage suggestion from a team of researchers at the University of Minnesota.
  
Here’s how they reached this conclusion. First, they arranged a room to look either particularly tidy or especially messy and haphazard. Then they invited people in for what they were told was a “consumer choice study.” The study participants were shown a menu for fruit smoothies. Actually, there were two versions of the menu. On one, smoothies with a “health boost” of added ingredients, were labeled “classic.” On the the other menu, those same smoothies were promoted as “new.”
  
And here’s how it played out: When people were in the tidy room, they picked smoothies with a health boost twice as often if it was labeled classic. Conversely, when they made their smoothie choices while in a messy room, they opted for those described as “new”—again twice as often. In short, they preferred convention while in a clean environment and novelty when immersed in messiness.
  
Interesting, but it doesn’t feel like this is quite enough to declare that messiness fosters creativity. So the Minnesota researchers, led by Kathleen Vohs, ratcheted up the research. They used the same tidy and messy rooms, only this time, they asked subjects to propose as many different uses for ping pong balls as possible. Then they had a team of independent judges rate the ideas based on the level of creativity.
Suggesting that the balls be used for beer pong wouldn’t have impressed the judges. Recommending that they could be converted into ice cube trays would.
  
Once again, the messy room worked its magic. As Vohs explained recently in the New York Times, the people who spent their time there offered up five times as many ideas deemed “highly creative.”、

Maybe it’s time to aim a fan at the papers on my desk and start thinking deep thoughts.
(words:396)


【Time 3】

It’s all about connections
If only it were that simple. Turns out that even the way our brains produce creative thoughts appears to be a lot more complicated than long believed. The conventional wisdom that the right half of our brain handles creative thinking? Way too simple—at least according to a study published last week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A team of Dartmouth scientists found that human imagination is much more of a whole brain experience.

That’s what they observed after they hooked 15 participants up to an fMRI scanner and asked them to visualize specific abstract shapes, then told them to imagine combining those shapes into more complex figures. Large networks within the subjects’ brains became active as they conjured up the images. This included areas that deal with visual processing, along with others related to attention and executive processes. All of them worked together to make the imaginary images take shape.

While their findings didn’t provide a clear answer as to why some people are more creative than others, it did allow the scientists to speculate that it may come down to a matter of connections, that in truly creative people, the different brain regions needed to shape imagination are particularly well-connected.
(words:211)

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/ideas/2013/09/what-your-messy-desk-says-about-you-its-a-good-thing/

  
Why Binge Drinking Makes You More Likely to Break Your Bones

【Time 4】
For years, doctors have observed a strange effect of alcohol abuse: People who drink heavily are more likely break their bones, and the risk can’t be fully explained by more frequent careless falls and alcohol-induced car accidents.
“As an orthopedic surgery resident, time after time, I see people come in with broken limbs while under the influence of alcohol,” says Roman Natoli, a doctor at Loyola University in Chicago.
  
Statistics suggest that their risk of a bone fracture is equal to that of a non-drinker a decade or two older than them, and they also tend to go through a slower healing process, filled with more frequent complications.
  
The reasons for this haven’t been entirely clear. Evidence suggested it had something to do with the way alcohol interfered with the activity of osteoblasts (the cells that synthesize new bone growth), while osteoclasts (the cells that remove old, damaged bone tissue) continued work as usual, leaving small cavities where new tissue was supposed to form. Data also indicated that the problem was dose-dependent—the more alcohol people drank, the greater the problem.
  
To find out the exact nature of the issue, Natoli and a group of medical researchers from Loyola did the logical thing: They got some mice rather intoxicated.
  
Specifically, the doctors—and John Callaci, who presented their findings yesterday at the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research’s annual meeting—sought to simulate the effects of a single intense bout of binge drinking on mice who’d suffered a bone fracture.
  
To do so, they gave mice levels of alcohol that were roughly equivalent to a human with .20 blood alcohol content, several times the legal limit for driving. For an average person, reaching this level would require drinking about 6-9 drinks in an hour, and would likely lead to confusion, disorientation, dizziness, exaggerated emotions and severe risk of injury.
  
We have no idea if the mice experienced mood swings, but the doctors did look closely at the way their tibias healed after an induced fracture, as compared to induced fractures in a control group of mice that hadn’t had any alcohol. They found that, in the mice who’d gone through the alcohol binge, the callus—the mass of temporary bone tissue formed by osteoblasts in the gap between the two broken bone ends—was less dense and softer.
(Words:389)

【Time 5】
They also uncovered a few underlying reasons why this might be the case. For one, the body generates new bone tissue by recruiting immature stem cells to the site of the break, where they develop into osteoblasts and mature bone cells. The researchers found, however, that one of the main two proteins that the body uses to bring these stem cells to the fracture site—a protein called osteopontin, or OPN—was present in much lower levels in the mice who’d had so much alcohol.
  
Additionally, the alcohol-exposed mice seemed to suffer from a general problem that affects a range of cellular functions: oxidative stress. In essence, this type of stress results for an overabundance of oxidizing molecules—such as peroxides and free radicals—that can damage a variety of cell components, including proteins and DNA. It’s been implicated in a huge range of disorders in humans (including cancer, heart failure and Alzheimer’s).
  
The mice who’d been drinking had much higher levels of a molecule that scientists use as a proxy marker for oxidative stress (malondialdehyde), which jibes with previous studies that show alcohol can lead to higher production of oxidizing molecules and interfere with the body’s ability to break them down, especially in the liver. These higher stress levels, the researchers say, could inhibit bone growth and healing for reasons we still don’t fully understand.
  
If these findings apply to effects of drinking on the bone-healing process in humans, they could suggest some intriguing novel therapies for speeding bone growth in people who suffer from alcoholism, and perhaps even in non-drinkers. “The basic goal is to get these fractures to heal normally,” Natoli says.
  
One possibility that his team plans to test in future studies is injecting mice with extra stem cells, so that even with diminished quantities of the stem cell-recruiting protein OPN, they’d be able to get sufficient levels to the healing site. Another option could be giving mice an antioxidant called NAc, which combats oxidative stress throughout the body, perhaps speeding bone healing as well.
  
Of course, potential remedies notwithstanding, the findings should serve as a warning: if you’re a heavy drinker, your bones are likely weaker and have more difficulty healing. The silver lining, though, comes from other research, which has indicated that the problem is reversible—simply abstain from alcohol, and your bones will eventually regain most of their density and be able to heal normally again.
(words:403)
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2013/10/why-binge-drinking-makes-you-more-likely-to-break-your-bones/


Sleeping Babies Can Sense When Mommy and Daddy Are Fighting

【Time 6】
Opening a new window into the mysterious realm of how infants respond to their surroundings, researchers have found that parental bickering appears to have a visible effect on babies’ brains—even when the little ones are sleeping.

Previous studies suggest that frequent fighting at home, including spats several decibels lower than anything in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, can set a child up for anxiety and behavioral problems, but psychologists at the University of Oregon wanted to learn how and when the stressful experience can leave its mark.

So they asked mothers, recruited through fliers and on Craigslist, to fill out a standard survey gauging how often tempers flare at home, and then examined the brain activity of their 6- to 12-month-old babies using functional MRI, a type of noninvasive imaging technology designed to detect blood flow in real time. That blood flow serves as a proxy for brain activity.

Each of the 24 infants was placed in the laboratory scanner after a parent had put him or her to sleep. The babies wore headphones that delivered recordings of nonsense phrases read in neutral and angry voices—and that protected tiny ears from the machine’s loud banging noise.

The brain scans turned up an intriguing difference, says Alice Graham, the graduate student who conducted the study. Babies whose parents often fought at home had a stronger neurological response to angry tones—as shown by the intensity of the colors in a computer-generated brain map—compared with babies from less conflict-ridden households. The strong brain activity was centered in regions associated with the processing of stress and emotion, the first time this pattern has been observed under these conditions.

Parental conflict, which can often occur after a newborn joins the family, appears to affect how young brains respond to stressful stimuli, say the researchers. But it is too soon to say whether there will be negative consequences later on. “It could be that this is adaptive,” Graham says, “that the way they’re responding in higher-conflict homes is helping them adjust to life in those homes.”

For now, psychologist Ben Hinnant of the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. urges parents to find constructive ways to resolve their disagreements. His own studies show that kids who are already sensitive to stress can experience a sort of burnout if their parents fight often, leading to later trouble handling frustration. “What you’re doing in front of your kids, how you’re talking to your spouse, has a big effect,” Hinnant says.

The new research underscores the view that little brains are incredibly impressionable. Even saving an argument for nap time may not spare a baby. “There isn’t really time off from being a parent,” says Graham.
(words:452)
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ideas-innovations/Sleeping-Babies-Can-Sense-When-Mommy-and-Daddy-Are-Fighting-224923342.html

Part III： Obstacle

Why Do We Eat Popcorn at the Movies?

【Paraphrase 7】
Movie theater popcorn is a concession stand staple whose scent has spawned marketing ploys and copycat recipes, but movie theaters haven’t always been saturated with the tempting smell of salt and butter. The history of popcorn is vast, and it intersects with movies in the relatively recent past–a symbiosis of taste and place created to save the fledgling movie theater industry from near collapse during the Great Depression.

About 8,000 years ago, maize was cultivated from teosinte, a wild grass that doesn’t look much like the modern corn we know today. Popcorn–a name mostly associated with puffed kernels of corn–is actually a strain of corn, characterized by especially starchy kernels with hard kernel walls, which help internal pressure build when placed over heat. It was one of the first variations of maize cultivated in Central America. “Popcorn went north and it went south, but as far as I can see, it really only survived in South America,” says Andrew Smith, author of Popped Culture: A Social History of Popcorn. Eventually, trade and commerce brought the unique kernels northward. “Most likely, North American whalers went to Chile, found varieties of popcorn, picked them up and thought that they were cute, and brought them back to New England in the early 19th century,” Smith explains.

After popcorn made its way to the eastern part of North America, it spread rapidly. Eaters found the act of popping corn wildly entertaining, and by 1848, popcorn, the snack food, was prevalent enough to be included in the Dictionary of Americanisms. Popcorn had literally exploded onto the scene and was available everywhere–especially at entertainment sites like circuses and fairs. In fact, there was really only one entertainment site where the snack was absent: the theaters.

One reason for popcorn’s increasing popularity was its mobility: in 1885, the first steam-powered popcorn maker hit the streets, invented by Charles Cretor. The mobile nature of the machine made it the perfect production machine for serving patrons attending outdoor sporting events, or circuses and fairs. Not only was popcorn mobile, but it could be mass-produced without a kitchen, an advantage that another crunchy snack–the potato chip–lacked (the earliest potato chips were made in small batches in kitchens, not ideal for mass snack appeal). Another reason for its dominance over other snacks was its appealing aroma when popped, something that street vendors used to their advantage when selling popcorn. Still, movie theaters wouldn’t allow the popular street snack into their auditoriums.

“Movie theaters wanted nothing to do with popcorn,” Smith says, “because they were trying to duplicate what was done in real theaters. They had beautiful carpets and rugs and didn’t want popcorn being ground into it.” Movie theaters were trying to appeal to a highbrow clientele, and didn’t want to deal with the distracting trash of concessions–or the distracting noise that snacking during a film would create.
When films added sound in 1927, the movie theater industry opened itself up to a much wider clientele, since literacy was no longer required to attend films (the titles used early silent films restricted their audience). By 1930, attendance to movie theaters had reached 90 million per week. Such a huge patronage created larger possibilities for profits–especially since the sound pictures now muffled snacks–but movie theater owners were still hesitant to bring snacks inside of their theaters.

The Great Depression presented an excellent opportunity for both movies and popcorn. Looking for a cheap diversion, audiences flocked to the movies. And at 5 to 10 cents a bag, popcorn was a luxury that most people were able to afford. Popcorn kernels themselves were a cheap investment for purveyors, and a $10 bag could last for years. If those inside the theaters couldn’t see the financial lure of popcorn, enterprising street vendors didn’t miss a beat: they bought their own popping machines and sold popcorn outside the theaters to moviegoers before they entered the theater. As Smith explains, early movie theaters literally had signs hung outside their coatrooms, requesting that patrons check their popcorn with their coats. Popcorn, it seems, was the original clandestine movie snack.

Beyond wanting to maintain appearances, early movie theaters weren’t built to accommodate the first popcorn machines; the theaters lacked proper ventilation. But as more and more customers came to the theater with popcorn in hand, owners couldn’t ignore the financial appeal of selling the snack. So they leased “lobby privileges” to vendors, allowing them to sell their popcorn in the lobby of their theater (or more likely on a bit of street in front of the theater) for a daily fee. Vendors didn’t complain about this arrangement–selling popcorn outside the theater widened their business potential, as they could sell to both moviegoers and people on the street.

Eventually, movie theater owners realized that if they cut out the middleman, their profits would skyrocket.  For many theaters, the transition to selling snacks helped save them from the crippling Depression. In the mid-1930s, the movie theater business started to go under. “But those that began serving popcorn and other snacks,” Smith explains, “survived.” Take, for example, a Dallas movie theater chain that installed popcorn machines in 80 theaters, but refused to install machines in their five best theaters, which they considered too high class to sell popcorn. In two years, the theaters with popcorn saw their profits soar; the five theaters without popcorn watched their profits go into the red. Eventually, movie theater owners came to understand that concessions were their ticket to higher profits, and installed concession stands in their theaters.

World War II further solidified the marriage between popcorn and the movie theaters. Competing snacks like candy and soda suffered from sugar shortages and in turn, rationing, as traditional sugar exporters like the Philippines were cut off from the United States.
By 1945, popcorn and the movies were inextricably bound: over half of the popcorn consumed in America was eaten at the movie theaters. Theaters began pushing advertisements for their concessions harder, debuting commercials that played before (and sometimes in the middle of) movies that enticed audiences to check out the snacks in the lobby. Maybe the most famous of these is “Let’s All Go to the Lobby,” a 40-second advertisement that debuted in 1957.
(words:1046)

【The rest】
In 2000, the advertisement was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry due to its cultural and historical value.

But for all their marketing ploys, movie theaters saw their popcorn sales steadily decrease into the 1960s. The culprit was a new technology, the television, which lessened the need to go out to the movies. “The popcorn industry sags in the ’50s as Americans begin to watch more and more television and go less and less to movie theaters,” Smith says.

Popcorn wasn’t widely eaten in homes, mostly due to how difficult it was to make: consumers needed a popper, oil, butter, salt and other ingredients to replicate their favorite movie theater snack at home. To ease this burden, one commercial product, EZ Pop, marketed itself as an all inclusive popcorn maker–simply move the container over a heat source, and the popcorn pops, completely flavored. After EZ Pop came Jiffy Pop, a famous at-home popcorn product that used the same “all-in-one” philosophy. By making popcorn an easy-to-make snack, commercial popcorn products were able to gain a foothold in the home. In the 1970s, microwave ovens become increasingly common in homes, creating another boom for popcorn: now, families can enjoy popcorn in minutes simply by pressing a button.

As popcorn re-entered the home, traditional associations of popcorn and movies, or popcorn and entertainment, persisted. Nordmende, a German electronics company, even used popcorn to advertise its microwave, purporting it to be a “sponsor of the midweek movie.”

Nowadays, the popcorn industry attaches itself to our home movie nights in a very direct way, through commercials that directly engage with popular films or “movie theater” styles of microwave popcorn that market themselves as a direct replica of the beloved theater snack.
But the relationship between popcorn and the movies has changed more than the smell of a theater lobby or the at-home movie night: it’s changed the popcorn industry itself. Before the Great Depression, most popcorn sold was a white corn variety–yellow corn wasn’t widely commercially grown, and cost twice as much as the white variety. Movie vendors, however, preferred yellow corn, which expanded more when it popped (creating more volume for less product) and had a yellowish tint that belied a coating of butter. People became accustomed to the yellow popcorn and would refuse to buy the white variety at markets, requesting the kind that looked like “the popcorn at the movies.” Today, white popcorn accounts for 10 percent of commercially grown popcorn; yellow popcorn takes up almost the rest of the commercial market (with some color varieties, like blue and black, grown in negligible amounts).

Popcorn is just as economically important to the modern movie theater as it was to movie theaters of old. Patrons often complain about the high prices of movie concessions, but there’s an economic basis for this: popcorn, cheap to make and easy to mark-up, is the primary profit maker for movie theaters. Movie theaters make an estimated 85 percent profit off of concession sales, and those sales constitute 46 percent of movie theater’s overall profits.

And so the history of popcorn and the movies was written in stone–sort of. In recent years, luxury theaters have begun popping up around the country–and they’re reinventing the popcorn-snack model. These theaters offer an old school approach to the movies, trying to make the experience of attending a movie theater tantamount to going to a live show (much like the earliest movie theater owners once tried to do). As Hamid Hashemi, the CEO of iPic Theaters, a luxury theater chain with nine locations, says, “Think about going to a live Broadway show—our movie theaters provide that kind of experience. The average time spent in the theater at our theaters is around four hours.” iPic Theaters still provide popcorn to patrons, but their focus is on a more gourmet level of movie theater dining, offering a menu of larger, cooked items like sliders and flatbreads.

Even as the demand for luxury theaters increases, Hashemi doesn’t think popcorn will ever be phased out. “Popcorn is the cheapest thing you can make, and to a lot of people it has that ritualistic experience,” he says, suggesting that for movie theater owners, a cheap snack never loses its golden appeal.
（words:718）
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/food/2013/10/why-do-we-eat-popcorn-at-the-movies