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[阅读小分队] 【每日阅读训练第四期——速度越障20系列】【20-01】科技

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发表于 2013-6-4 23:21:30 | 显示全部楼层 |阅读模式
大家好,欢迎来到第20期阅读小分队!今天的内容都是一些关于基因的科学研究,专有名词比较多,不必太在意,采用首字母记忆的方法会比较好。不必太注重细节,了解整体结构更重要。
第一和第二
,还有第三和第四篇来自一篇文章,enjoy~
Part I: Speed
[Time 1]
Article 1
Italian scientists fight back on animal testing
Demonstrators call for public awareness of the rationales for using animals in the lab.
About 300 researchers and students from around Italy demonstrated in Milan on 1 June to increase awareness of the need for lab animals in biomedical research. The protest was a reply to what the researchers call a “witch-hunt” led by animal-rights activists.

A worrying disinformation is spreading — extremism by animal-rights activists has a huge media impact,” said Heather Bondi, a neurobiology doctoral student from the University of Insubria in Busto Arsizio. “We had never thought of talking about these controversial ethical issues to people, but now it is time to oppose the false truth propagated by extremists.”

In the largest event of its kind ever held in Italy, activists marching with the slogan 'Let's fight for research, let's fight for life' were summoned near Milan's central Piazza del Duomo by Pro-Test Italia, the Italian chapter of an organization started in response to animal-rights activism.

Speakers described how animal experiments are conducted in fields from neuroscience to surgery, and explained how clinical trials work. Among the speakers was Tom Holder, one of the founders of the first Pro-Test group, based in the United Kingdom. Students wearing white coats talked to passers-by and distributed pamphlets.

About 30 animal-rights activists provided a counterpoint to the protest, shouting, “Assassins!” Police looked on to prevent verbal exchanges from growing into physical skirmishes.
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[Time 2]
Get the word out
The demonstration was triggered by acts of force by animal-rights activists, most recently on 20 April, when five members of Fermare Green Hill (Stop Green Hill), an animal-rights group focused on shutting down the Green Hill dog-breeding facility in Montichiari, broke into an animal-research facility at the University of Milan. They mixed up cage labels and animals, and left with around 100 mice and one rabbit.

Institutions could do more. They should start a serious programme of scientific disclosure,” said Bice Chini, a molecular and cell biologist at the National Research Council's Institute of Neuroscience in Milan. “Researchers should not only open their laboratories, but also give out information outside supermarkets.”

Saturday's demonstration was born out of an initiative by students and young researchers who met on Facebook. “These guys realized that the public doesn’t know what research is, and what we do in our laboratories,” said Giuliano Grignaschi, who heads the animal care unit at the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan, and a spokesperson for the Basel Declaration Society in Switzerland, which promotes information about animal testing. “We are guilty too, for we don't give out information, and that is why researchers today are talking with people, trying to establish a dialogue,” said Grignaschi.

I hope that, starting from today, public opinion understands who lies, because we are not assassins,” said Gaia Gobbo, a graduate student in biotechnology at the University of Bologna.

Fermare Green Hill has scheduled a new demonstration on 8 June in front of the animal-research facility at University of Milan.

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[Time 3]
Article 2
US scientists chafe at restrictions on new stem-cell lines
California centre rethinks rules in wake of discovery.
The announcement last month of a long-awaited breakthrough in stem-cell research — the creation of stem-cell lines from a cloned human embryo — has revived interest in using embryonic stem cells to treat disease. But US regulations mean that many researchers will be watching those efforts from the sidelines.

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH), which distributes the majority of federal funding for stem-cell research, prohibits research on cells taken from embryos created solely for research — a category that includes the six stem-cell lines developed by Shoukhrat Mitalipov, a reproductive-biology specialist at the Oregon Health and Science University in Beaverton, and his colleagues1. The team used cloning techniques to combine a donor cell with an unfertilized egg whose nucleus had been removed, creating a self-regenerating stem-cell colony that is genetically matched to the cell donor.

Mitalipov’s cell lines are also off limits to researchers funded by the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), which was created in part to support stem-cell work that is restricted by the NIH. CIRM funds cannot be used for studies that pay women for their eggs or rely on cell lines produced using eggs from paid donors. That rules out Mitalipov’s lines, because his team paid egg donors US$3,000–7,000 each, says Geoffrey Lomax, senior officer to the standards working group at CIRM, which is based in San Francisco. That amount “is above and beyond any out-of-pocket costs” to donors, he says.

The end result, says Mitalipov, is that a dozen or so universities are struggling to negotiate ‘material transfer agreements’ to receive the new cell lines without running afoul of CIRM or the NIH. Interest in the new cell lines is high, especially since the identification of errors in images and figures in Mitalipov’s research paper shortly after its publication in Cell. But regulations would require laboratories to use only dedicated, privately funded equipment to study the new cells, a condition that only a few researchers — such as George Daley, a stem-cell expert at Boston Children’s Hospital in Massachusetts — will be able to meet.

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[Time 4]
That concerns Daley, who calls the NIH stem-cell policy “a frustrating limitation that will preclude federal dollars being used to ask many important questions” about how Mitalipov’s cell lines compare with induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS), which are created by reprogramming adult cells to an embryonic state. “Most labs will take the path of least resistance and continue working with iPS cells unless someone shows that there is a clear and compelling reason to change course,” Daley says.

Mitalipov also worries that his cell lines won’t be sufficiently analysed, which he says could hamper efforts to understand how epigenetic changes — modifications to chromosomes that determine how genes are expressed — affect stem cells' ability to transform into a wide array of mature cell types. “We just don’t have that much expertise at looking at all aspects of epigenetics,” he says.

But some scientists say that the impact of US stem-cell restrictions is overestimated. Alexander Meissner, a developmental biologist at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says Mitalipov's cell lines will not reveal much about how stem cells transform. That work can be done only with eggs that are easy to come by, allowing scientists to examine the reprogramming process at many points. In practical terms, that means relying on eggs from mice instead of humans. “Everything is over by time you derive those cell lines,” he says of Mitalipov’s cells. “There is no signature that would tell you what has happened. It’s the wrong species.”

In the meantime, CIRM — which has an annual budget of $3 billion — is re-examining the rules that govern the research its supports. The institute is not likely to alter the restrictions against funding studies that pay cell donors, but it might overturn the rules against using cell lines produced in such studies, Lomax says. The original policy was set in 2006 to address concerns that arose in the wake of fraud and ethical violations by Woo Suk Hwang, then a researcher at Seoul National University.

But there is no word on when CIRM will complete its review. Lomax would not give a timeline.

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[Time 5]
Article 3
Gene switches make prairie voles fall in love
Epigenetic changes affect neurotransmitters that lead to pair-bond formation.
Love really does change your brain — at least, if you’re a prairie vole. Researchers have shown for the first time that the act of mating induces permanent chemical modifications in the chromosomes, affecting the expression of genes that regulate sexual and monogamous behaviour. The study is published today in Nature Neuroscience1.

Prairie voles (Microtus ochrogaster) have long been of interest to neuroscientists and endocrinologists who study the social behaviour of animals, in part because this species forms monogamous pair bonds — essentially mating for life. The voles' pair bonding, sharing of parental roles and egalitarian nest building in couples makes them a good model for understanding the biology of monogamy and mating in humans.

Previous studies have shown that the neurotransmitters oxytocin and vasopressin play a major part in inducing and regulating the formation of the pair bond. Monogamous prairie voles are known to have higher levels of receptors for these neurotransmitters than do voles who have yet to mate; and when otherwise promiscuous montane voles (M. montanus) are dosed with oxytocin and vasopressin, they adopt the monogamous behaviour of their prairie cousins.

Because behaviour seemed to play an active part in changing the neurobiology of the animals, scientists suspected that epigenetic factors were involved. These are chemical modifications to the chromosomes that affect how genes are transcribed or suppressed, as opposed to changes in the gene sequences themselves.

Love potion
To look for clues of epigenetic agents at play in monogamous behaviour, neuroscientist Mohamed Kabbaj and his team at Florida State University in Tallahassee took voles which had been housed together for 6 hours but had not mated. The researchers injected drugs into the voles' brains near a region called the nucleus accumbens, which is closely associated with the reinforcement of reward and pleasure. The drugs blocked the activity of an enzyme that normally keeps DNA tightly wound up and thus prevents the expression of genes.

The team found that the genes for the vasopressin and oxytocin receptors had been transcribed, and as a result the nucleus accumbens of the animals bore high levels of these receptors. Animals that had been permitted to mate also had high levels of vasopressin and oxytocin receptors, confirming the link between bond formation and gene activity.

Mating activates this brain area which leads to partner preference — we can induce this same change in the brain with this drug,” Kabbaj explains.
Interestingly, the injection alone cannot induce the partner preference. “The drug by itself won't do all these molecular changes — you need the context: it’s the drug plus the six hours of cohabitation,” says Kabbaj.

This is a study I myself wanted to do years ago,” says Thomas Insel, who heads the US National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. “If mating causes the release of the neuropeptide, how does this kick into a higher gear for the rest of the animal’s life? This study for me really is the first experimental demonstration that the epigenetic change would be necessary for the long-term change in behaviour.”
This paper really shows that there is an epigenetic mechanism underlying pair bonds — we ourselves have looked for that and not found it,” says Alaine Keebaugh of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, who also studies the neuroscience of prairie voles.

Kabbaj says he hopes that the work could ultimately lead to an enhanced understanding of how epigenetic factors affect social behaviour in humans — not only in monogamy and pair bonding, but also in conditions such as autism and schizophrenia, which affect social interactions.

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Part II: Obstacle
Article 4
A Better Predictor of Autism
Without a way to forecast whether the early warning signs of autism will develop into severe impairment, parents of children with the disorder are left with one harrowing option: Wait and see. Now, a new study suggests that a distinct ripple of brain waves measured while toddlers listen to words can reliably predict how they will fare in a range of cognitive areas up to age 6—the longest-term forecast yet achieved. In addition to pointing toward more effective treatments, the discovery could help reveal how early social abilities facilitate the development of language.

Many children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have begun to display telltale social and language deficits by the time they're toddlers; they fail to play or make eye contact with others, for example, or to say short sentences such as "drink milk." Although scientists have long considered the brain systems that govern these two types of deficits as separate, a growing body of evidence suggests that they are actually deeply intertwined, says Patricia Kuhl, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Washington, Seattle, and lead author of the new study.

One of Kuhl's first important clues that social deficits might hinder language acquisition in autism came from her 2005 study of "Motherese"—the exaggerated, sing-song baby talk that parents instinctively shower on their children. When given the choice between listening to samples of Motherese or computer-generated tones, Kuhl found that preschoolers with autism "actually preferred the Robovoice," she says. This lack of interest in human speech not only correlated with the severity of a child's autistic symptoms, Kuhl notes, but with a lack of typical brain response to subtle changes in syllables, such as the switch from "ba" to "da." That's bad news, she says, because "picking up these tiny changes means the difference between learning language or not."

Previous studies have shown that when a typically developing 20-month-old child hears a word that she doesn't know, a characteristic uptick in brain waves in the left hemisphere of the brain can be detected through electroencephalography (EEG), a noninvasive method of measuring the brain's electrical activity. To see if EEG responses to this language task would also track with social ability in children with autism, Kuhl brought 2 dozen 2-year-olds with ASD into her lab. While monitoring each child's brain activity through sensors attached to nylon caps, she and her team asked each child's parents which words he or she was familiar with, such as "car," "book," or "shoe," and listed those words along with unfamiliar ones such as "pint," or "guide."

On average, the children did not show the signature uptick in brain activity in response to unknown words, Kuhl says. When she divided them into two subgroups based on their scores on a standard test of social cognition, however, she saw a striking pattern. Children with the lowest scores on the social cognition tests showed atypical responses to the unknown words—no response at all, for example, or activity in a different part of the brain, while those with the higher scores showed a more typical pattern of brain activation in the left hemisphere, the authors report online today in PLOS ONE. What's more, a follow-up study found that more typical brain responses correlated "with near perfect accuracy" with higher scores on a range of cognitive tests at age 4, and even higher scores at age 6, Kuhl says.

The fact that Kuhl's team has discovered a brain measure that increasingly correlates with outcomes over time is "really exciting," says neuroscientist Kristen Gillespie-Lynch of the College of Staten Island in New York. "It shows that there could be brain signatures that predict who's going to do well." Ideally, "this information could be used to tailor treatment interventions from earlier ages than currently possible with behavior alone," adds neuroscientist Elizabeth Redcay of the University of Maryland, College Park.

The results fit well with other studies of how sociality can influence language skills, says Debbie Mills, a cognitive neuroscientist at Bangor University in the United Kingdom. In people with Williams syndrome, which is characterized by a strong drive for social interaction, she says, one sees an opposite electrical brain response to similar linguistic tests than that seen in people with autism.

In the past, researchers didn't take the influence of social interaction on other aspects of cognition very seriously, Kuhl says. "It was considered soft, or just voodoo." Now, she says, scientists are recognizing that just being near a fellow human can profoundly influence how we act, perceive, and learn. "The whole world changes when you're in the presence of someone else."

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发表于 2013-6-4 23:26:52 | 显示全部楼层
速度:
1.1'07''
2.1'32''
3.2'06''
4.1'49''
5.3'02''
越障:4'27''
     Attitude:active
     Structure:
1.a new study pointed out more useful treatments to help autism children.
2.children with ASD began to have trouble in social behaviors since they are toddlers.
3.social dificits might have bad influences on language acquisition.
4.Kuhl's team discovered the measurement of brain, which was exciting for fitting well with other studies on sociality and language skills interaction.
发表于 2013-6-4 23:32:20 | 显示全部楼层
前排~~~~

————————————————————————————————————————
Speed
00:52
01:22
01:54
01:29
02:18

Obstacle
04:15
发表于 2013-6-5 00:04:21 | 显示全部楼层
01:14 Many people from all over the Italy gathered in Milan to protest the use of animal in scientific experiments.
01:19 The scientists should give more information to the public than they do now on how they do their experiments in order to clarify the misunderstanding of the public.
01:59 A breakthrough in stem cell has been discovered. However, the regulation upon the adoption of the paid women eggs forced some labs and universities to find new funds.
01:53 A scientist stated that most labs would not use the new discovery unless it became a must, and he worried as well that his discovery may not be studied roughly. However, the other scientist argues that the importance of this new discovery has been overestimated.
03:28 Mating caused some neuro things to transmit..
04:04 A scientist recently discovered a method to detect early symptoms that may lead to the fact that a toddler may has Autism.  
发表于 2013-6-5 00:06:00 | 显示全部楼层
这么靠前好开星~
发表于 2013-6-5 00:47:30 | 显示全部楼层
今天怎么人这么少捏!
TIME1: 01'13'' The animal protection organization demonstrate in Milan to protest against the use of animal in lab
TIME2:    01'25'' This strike is initiated by members of a research named green hill. And the member said that the information in the lab should be given out so that people will know what the researched do in the lab.
TIME3:   02'09''  A research on stem cell cloned from embryo is sidelined because the resarched violating the regulation to buy the female egg. This research team planned to gett off the current institue in which they do the research so that they can proceed with the research without limit. But the rare propor institute is only the one for the expert at Boston Children’s Hospital in Massachusetts
TIME4:   01'59''  The research team is worried that they can not get the true idea from theri own cell line since the structure is complex. Someone said that what the research team get is not the right one to disclose the secret of the cell. And it is said that the restriction is over applied. But it doesn't mean that the research team can go on their research. They still need to wait for the result
TIME5: How epigenetic factors affect the animal

Obstacle: 04'52''
Main idea: the relationship between brain and social cognitive
Attitude: active
Structure:
==> By measuring the brain reaction can foresee the social cognitive of a children without waiting for long time
==>  experiment is taken to verify the finding
==> autism children took the test. It appeared that the higher score the childern get, the more active reaction in the left part of the brain
==> this experiment verifies the hypothesis and matches with the theory that human behavor will be affected by the enviroment
==> in the past , the scientis did not take the atmosphere around people seriously to decide human's behavor. But now the scientists know the importance of this point
发表于 2013-6-5 05:01:33 | 显示全部楼层
第一次=.=
[Time 1] 00:02:21.30
Increasing awareness of the need for lab animals in biomedical research is demonstrated in Milan.
[Time 2] 00:01:53.00
Options on the acts of animal-rights activists
[Time 3] 00:03:38.15
Regulations will restrict the new stem cell research founding.
[Time 4] 00:03:37.98
Worries and options came from different scientists.
[Time 5] 00:05:39.83
How epigenetic factors affect social behavior in humans.
Part II: Obstacle 00:04:56.85
How sociality can influence language skills by mainly study with ASD.
发表于 2013-6-5 05:58:07 | 显示全部楼层
第20期了,占座。

1'45"
1'06"
2'03"
1'56"
3'45"

4'32"
发表于 2013-6-5 06:16:36 | 显示全部楼层
占~~ppx辛苦啦~

1.55        Researchers and students demonstrated to call for awareness of lab animals in biomedical research.

1.43        researchers should give information out to people.

2.37       

2.29

4.57        a paper report how epigentice factor affect social behavior.
发表于 2013-6-5 06:38:11 | 显示全部楼层
谢谢分享~~

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