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[阅读小分队] 【每日阅读训练第四期——速度越障18系列】【18-20】科技

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发表于 2013-5-14 19:27:50 | 显示全部楼层 |阅读模式

胖胖翔来发科技文咯!很荣幸能够和大家分享18系列最后一篇。感觉今天文章的难度比较适中,希望大家喜欢!第四篇速度有个科学家的名字是“情人节”,呵呵~

Part I: Speed

[Time 1]
Article 1
Global Partnership Intends to Fight Cassava Viruses


Cassava is a major source of food in Africa, and it's under increasing threat from two devastating diseases. This week researchers and development organizations meeting in Bellagio, Italy, pledged to step up their efforts to prevent the spread of the diseases and safeguard the crop.
About 300 million people in Africa depend on cassava, a root that is ground into flour, used as starch, biofuel, and for brewed into beer. For a century, production across the continent has been hindered by outbreaks of cassava mosaic disease, which is caused by several viruses. Breeding of new varieties helped get this problem mostly under control, but in the last decade cassava brown streak disease (CBSD) has emerged as an even more serious concern. The virus can wipe out the root crop underground without a farmer noticing until harvest.
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[Time 2]

CBSD has been afflicting crops in east and central Africa. Now there are worrying signs it is moving west. Whiteflies, which spread the viruses, have been found east of the Congo, the world's third largest source of cassava. If the disease were to reach into Nigeria, Congo, and Ghana, which all grow a lot of cassava, "it would be a human disaster, an economical disaster, and would translate to a lot of instability," says Claude Fauquet of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Cali, Colombia.
Fauquet helped organize the meeting, which included representatives from 22 organizations, including the World Bank, U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, the Gates Foundation, and others. "There is urgency to get organized internationally to better control these diseases," Fauquet says.
Attendees at the meeting committed to developing a surveillance system to prevent outbreaks from blowing up into epidemics. The disease is "relatively easy to eradicate when you have a few [infected] acres," Fauquet says. The surveillance system would first be implemented in Africa and then perhaps expanded to Southeast Asia, which is now also growing cassava. In a second step, the partnership will focus on eradicating the disease where it is already present. The third component is to create a public-private partnership that will provide farmers with high-quality, disease-free seed. They will also begin and coordinate research projects, such as breeding plants that can resist the disease and the white flies.
The groups did not discuss a price tag for these projects, but within 2 months they will publish a road map of actions needed and then work out a budget.
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[Time 3]
Article 2
Diarrhea Deaths Decoded

Every year, 800,000 children under age 5 living in the developing world die from a disease that's usually considered a mere annoyance in the West—diarrhea. But until now, there's been very little reliable data on the microbes behind all this mortality, as well as their precise effects on children's health around the world. In order to fill in these knowledge gaps, a team of scientists spent 3 years studying diarrheal diseases at seven sites in south Asia and Africa. The results were sobering: children with moderate-to-severe diarrhea (MSD) were 8.5 times more likely to die within 60 days than children not suffering from MSD, the researchers report today in The Lancet. What's more, children who survived their bout with MSD showed signs of stunted growth that could impair their future development. On a microbial level, the team was surprised to discover that a majority of childhood MDS cases were caused by only four pathogens: rotavirus (pictured), the parasite Cryptosporidium, a strain of the Escherichia coli bacteria known as ST-ETEC, and the bacteria Shigella. The fact that rotavirus tops the list is actually good news, since efforts are already underway to vaccinate at-risk children against the virus. But the appearance of the Cryptosporidium is more troubling—scientists had no idea the parasite, which is usually seen in HIV-positive patients, was causing so many cases of childhood MSD. They hope this new study will fast-track much needed research about how to protect against this under-studied bug.
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[Time 4]
Article 3
Experimental volcanoes make a blast

Controlled explosions could aid monitoring of active eruptions.
A row of miniature volcanoes exploded last week — on command.
Volcanologists detonated explosive charges buried in a meadow in Ashford, New York, blowing 12 small craters in the ground and throwing debris 80 metres in the air. The aim was to recreate, in true-to-life detail, what happens when a volcanic eruption punches through Earth’s crust.
For some experiments, “you need to be big and messy and outdoors”, says Greg Valentine, a volcanologist at the University of Buffalo in New York and the experiment’s organizer.
Seventeen scientists and nine students from five countries descended on the meadow for the tests on 7-8 May. They monitored each blast with an array of instruments, including high-speed cameras, seismometers and low-frequency, ‘infrasound’ microphones. “We’re collecting the same information that you would at a real volcanic eruption,” says Valentine.
The work could guide the way that active volcanoes are monitored, and could help safety officials to decide where to restrict public access at volcanoes such as Italy’s Stromboli, where dozens of tourists arrive every night to watch spectacular fire fountain displays, says Jacopo Taddeucci, who studies eruptions at the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Rome.
Valentine says that controlled explosions can provide details about eruptions that cannot be gathered through bench top experiments. For instance, many volcanoes erupt repeatedly at the same crater, yet few experiments have been done on whether a pre-existing crater affects the shape of later eruptions in the same place. In pilot versions of the New York experiments done in 2012, Taddeucci, Valentine and others found that repeat explosions from the same crater tend to limit the distance that rocks spray out1. And the deeper a crater is, the more it restricts those dangerous jets.
This time around, Valentine’s team dug two trenches — one of them 1 metre deep and the other 1.5 metres deep — and filled them with layers of natural materials such as sand and gravel of different particle sizes. The scientists planted explosives at various depths and set them off. “It sounds more like a thump than a bang,” says Valentine. Left behind were craters as wide as 2 metres and as deep as 45 centimetres.
The work could help scientists better understand shallow, intermittent explosions — like those created when magma heats groundwater, says Jenni Barclay, a volcanologist at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK who was not involved in the study. However, she says that it is not yet clear whether experimental blasts will yield unusual enough results for officials to redraw volcano hazard maps.
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[Time 5]
Article 4
Hearing changes could be ancient in the human line

Comparison between hominins suggests modern middle-ear bones evolved early.
A study of two ancient hominins from South Africa suggests that changes in the shape and size of the middle ear occurred early in our evolution. Such alterations could have profoundly changed what our ancestors could hear — and perhaps how they could communicate.
Palaeoanthropologist Rolf Quam of Binghamton University in New York state and his colleagues recovered and analysed a complete set of the three tiny middle-ear bones, or ossicles, from a 1.8-million-year-old specimen of Paranthropus robustus and an incomplete set of ossicles fromAustralopithecus africanus, which lived from about 3.3 million to around 2.1 million years ago. The ossicles are the smallest bones in the human body, and are rarely preserved intact in hominin fossils, Quam says.
In both specimens, the team found that the malleus (the first in the chain of the three middle-ear bones) was human-like — smaller in proportion compared to the ones in our ape relatives. Its size would also imply a smaller eardrum. The similarity between the two species points to a “deep and ancient origin” of this feature, Quam says. “This could be like bipedalism: a defining characteristic of hominins.”
Quam and his colleagues publish their results this week in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Echo from the past
It is hard to draw conclusions about hearing just from the shape of the middle-ear bones because the process involves so many different ear structures, as well as the brain itself. However, some studies have shown that the relative sizes of the middle-ear bones do affect what primates can hear. Genomic comparisons with gorillas have indicated that changes in the genes that code for these structures might also demarcate humans from apes.
Callum Ross, an evolutionary morphologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois, says the discovery of these ossicles was “a step in the right direction in the understanding of human hearing”. However he says he is “underwhelmed” by the findings, especially given that his own research4 has found that differences in the size and shape of the outer ear have a greater influence on the hearing sensitivities of primates than the dimensions of the middle-ear bones.
Ross also says that changes in the hearing apparatus are unlikely to have had as much impact on human cognition as the other morphological changes our ancestors experienced. “The truly important changes are in bipedalism, the feeding apparatus and, ultimately, brain size,” he says.
But Quam is confident that his team will soon demonstrate the importance of changes in the ossicles. “We are going to try and reconstruct the hearing capacities of these same specimens: then we will be able to say something about their sensory ecology,” he says.
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Part II: Obstacle
Article 5
Scientists ask public to hunt for power plants
Initiative will use crowdsourced data to inform global carbon modelling.
Big, ugly and emanating an incessant industrial hum, power plants belch clouds of steam and pollution as they generate electricity, the life-blood of modern society. You might think that it would be easy enough for a scientist to work out where they are and what they are doing.
You would be wrong. A team of researchers is now appealing to the public to rectify that situation.
It turns out that we know far less about fossil fuels than we thought we did,” says Kevin Gurney, an emissions modeller at Arizona State University in Tempe, and leader of the Ventus citizen-science project. “We could use some help.”
Decades of research into global warming and its causes have produced greenhouse-gas inventories that allow scientists to paint a fairly comprehensive portrait of human industrial activity at national and global scales. These inventories work less well, however, as scientists seek to model global carbon emissions at a detailed level across local landscapes. Although data are available in places such as the United States, Europe and Canada, they remain difficult to access across much of the world.
Challenge accepted
For the Ventus project, Gurney’s team has designed a simple Google Earth application that allows anybody to provide information — such as specific location, type of fuel and electricity generation — about the world's estimated 30,000 power plants, which together produce roughly 40% of global carbon emissions. Some 25,000 facilities are already listed, courtesy of a commercial database that contains voluntary and often incomplete reports from industry. Participants do not have to register with the project website, but if they do, they can join a competition: the citizen scientist who enters the most data will win a trophy and a position as a co-author on any resulting paper.
Success is not guaranteed. A team of geographers at King's College London embarked on a similar effort to locate dams in 2006, but the crowdsourcing component was a bust. Seven years and several graduate students later, Mark Mulligan and his team are finally preparing to publish a database of some 36,000 dams around the world.
Mulligan is sceptical that the power-plant initiative will be any different, although he acknowledges that people are more familiar with the software now than they were in 2006, and are also more likely to engage with power plants near their homes than with remote reservoirs. “Getting people to map local things, that’s more interesting,” says Mulligan.
Global emissions
The power-plant research is part of a larger initiative at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, that seeks to capitalize on atmospheric carbon dioxide data provided by Japan’s Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite (GOSAT). Researchers are building a high-resolution model of the global carbon cycle in the hope of building a monitoring system that can verify and track data about emissions from fossil fuels. Solving that piece of the carbon equation would also help scientists resolve enduring mysteries about how much carbon is taken up and given off by vegetation and the oceans.
Building on earlier work with urban emissions, Gurney’s team has already modelled fossil-fuel emissions across the world at a resolution of 10 square kilometres. The new project uses various data sets, including satellite imagery showing lights at night and human development, to work out where power is being used and so where the emissions are coming from. The team now wants to increase the resolution to 1 square kilometre, and the single largest source of uncertainty is power plants.
Gurney readily acknowledges the risk of relying on crowdsourcing to fill that data gap, but says that the potential pay-off is overwhelming in comparison with the minimal investment needed to design the project website. And if it does not pay off, then he and his team will keep plugging away, pressing governments for better data. “I’m optimistic over the long haul that we will get there,” says Gurney, “but it will take some time.”
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发表于 2013-5-14 19:47:27 | 显示全部楼层
18系列最后一个帖子,我来赶下末班车吧~


——————————————————————————作业的分割线——————————————————————————————

Speed
40''
01'12
01'33
02'50
02'42

Obstacle
04'12

Main idea: Too much CO2 has been emitted onto Mother Earth----What if we can minitor its amount?
Attitude: Positive(+)
Structure:
>>>Problem and initial thought of the solution:
The global warming process never stop, let alone countless power plants working all the time. Scientists urged that we need to find a way to control or at least monitor those process, we need to know how many power plants there are and to locate them would be better.
>>>Start-up on the green project: Scientists have been starting up on this program. It won't be easy, but everyone is doing their best and feelig confident.
>>>How's the process been going on now: There has been a working software or something that could make these thoughts coming true. People can actually locate the specific power plant and see what't going on, how much carbon dioxide has it been emitting.
  The process of fighting against global warming is still going on. There have been some difficulties but the head of the project remain an optimistic attitude toward his team's work, even if they have to press the gvm for better data in the future.
发表于 2013-5-14 20:28:19 | 显示全部楼层
举手占座~(*ゝ∀・*)ノ

1:03  Cassava is the major source of food in Africa, and it suffers two diseases.
1:45  Organizations take some methods to prevent these diseases from dispersing and to eradicate these diseases.
2:05  many children suffer the diarrhea. The risk of death is high if the children who suffer diarrhea are also suffered MSD. And the MSD is caused by four pathogens. However, the Cryptosporidium, one of the four pathogens, is difficult to against.
3:20  
3:14
5:02
发表于 2013-5-14 20:31:26 | 显示全部楼层
占座占座…………

44'
1'35"
1'39"
2'54'
3'08"

3'44"
发表于 2013-5-14 20:38:29 | 显示全部楼层
哇。。。。。。。。。。。最后一贴了吗?昨天有事没做,今天要好好做!PS:感谢胖胖翔啊。。。。。。很喜欢今天文章的内容和节奏感。。。。。。。。。。

speed:
1. 1.12m
Cassava is a major source food of Africa and is threatening by two devastating diseases.

2. 2.02m
CBSD has caused the cassava to be damaged.whitefiles is the third largest source of destroying thecassava. the international agriculture organizations began to take some measures to protect the cassava from the diseases.

3. 2.43m
D  is a severe diseases that have been caused so many children to die.and in recent years, the society cannot acquire the mortality of the diseases and the precise effects on children because of the diseases.3 scientists do some researches to know the new effcts of the diseases.

4. 3.15m

scientists is experimenting an assumption that controlled explosion can cause a volcano to blast.

obstacle:
6.45m
1.scientists need some help from public to account the amonunt of the carbon emissions and encourage power plants to decrease their pollutants

2.G's team is planing to use the Google earth application to inspire the citizen provide information of power plants where they live.

3.success is not guranteed, however scientists think that it will take some time to reach the goal they want.they believe themselves.



发表于 2013-5-14 20:43:30 | 显示全部楼层
发表于 2013-5-14 21:02:53 | 显示全部楼层
今天好累呀,坚持!加油!
发表于 2013-5-14 21:56:34 | 显示全部楼层
多谢楼主的辛勤工作!我来交作业喽。看了2012Michelle的帖子,今天开始边看边记笔记了,虽然速度慢了,但确实读得比以前明白了。
速度:
1.03
2.00
1.58
3.14
2.58

越障
5.32

G team need public help to collect carbon emission data all over the world.
Now they finally ready to public database of global carbon emission.  It took them 7 years to collect data.
NASA will set up a model to monitor globle carbon emission and support other sicience research.
发表于 2013-5-14 22:35:28 | 显示全部楼层
谢谢LZ,辛苦了
                       
153(1&2)-113-223-214-507
People actually know less abut the fossilefule than they think they did. Researchers are trying to know more about the global warming. However, in order to learn the carbon emmission, the researchers need to access to data around the world, but it is impossible under today's circumerstance.
Solution: Google earth allow everyone to provide information about the carbon emmission. P-P research in NASA and the monitor system which can capitalize the carbon.
There may be risks for all this solutions but all the efforts will be paid off one day.



发表于 2013-5-14 22:49:55 | 显示全部楼层
谢谢胖胖翔~
1:03
1:47
1:47
3:04
3:28

obstacle
4:51
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