【Native Speaker每日综合训练—29系列】【29-01】科技

捉妖

Official Weibo: http://weibo.com/u/3476904471

大家好，新的一周又开始了，新的一期又开始了~
speaker科学家又倒腾了wearable battery，以后是不是可以“爱他，就电他一下呢”~

Part I：Speaker

Clothing Fabric Could Contain Gadget Batteries
Researchers have built a battery from a conductive, nickel-coated polyester fabric, so that your phone battery could be sewn into your shirt. Christopher Intagliata reports.
[Rephrase 1]

[Dialog, 1:14]


Transcript hided

More than half of all Americans carry smartphones. Smartwatches and smartglasses may not be far behind. What's not all that smart are the rigid batteries that power our gadgets. But some may soon be replaced by ultra-thin, flexible batteries, sewn right into your clothes.

Researchers built a prototype out of conductive, nickel-coated polyester fabric. They applied lithium compounds to create the anode and cathode, and separated them with a spandex-like material. The finished battery was just half a millimeter thick, with a capacity of 510 milliampere-hours per cubic inch—about a quarter that of the battery in an iPhone 5. And the tighter the knit, the higher the capacity.

Of course, fabric wrinkles. But this battery can too. Even after being folded 5500 times, the battery kept trucking. Thin foil batteries, on the other hand, took just 70 folds to become really foiled. The findings appear in the journal Nano Letters. [Yong-Hee Lee et al, Wearable Textile Battery Rechargeable by Solar Energy]

You don't even have to disrobe to charge this wearable battery. Researchers tacked flexible solar cells to it, so it can charge on the go. Might be just the thing to make polyester current again.

—Christopher Intagliata

Source: Scientific American
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=clothing-fabric-could-contain-gadge-13-12-05

捉妖

Part II：Speed

How sexual harassment changed the way I work
As a flurry of interest in workplace discrimination subsides, efforts to raise awareness and eliminate abuses continue, says Kathleen Raven.
04 December 2013

[Time 2]
In 2012, my male editor suggested that he would like to have sex with me. I politely declined. Many apologies later, he explained that he really just wanted to be friends. A friendship seemed feasible yet frightening. We worked for the same company, and a power differential existed between us. I told him as much, not that it helped. For a year and a half, as often as I defined my boundaries, he trampled over them. One by one, I shut down our avenues of communication. “Who is this guy who 'likes' everything you write on Facebook?” my parents asked. I quit Facebook. But to remove myself from the situation would have meant leaving my chosen profession, science writing.

Women who choose careers in male-dominated domains such as politics, engineering, publishing, business, mathematics, computer science and science writing know that sexual harassment is par for the course. Unlike most of them, I did not keep quiet. As a simple Google search reveals, the editor who harassed me was Bora Zivkovic, who resigned from his position as blogs editor of Scientific American after I and other women complained publicly about his behaviour.

After I spoke out, other women privately shared with me their stories of harassment by men. Their relief felt palpable. On Twitter, men and women responded with overwhelming support. Yet at the meeting of the US National Association of Science Writers in Gainesville, Florida, last month, I felt anxious when I spoke at a panel dedicated to raising awareness of how women still struggle in the industry: how far behind they remain in terms of winning awards or getting blogging gigs with leading publishing brands. I did not enjoy being the public face of a flurry of interest in the problem of sexual harassment.
[295 words]

[Time 3]
Even the phrase 'sexual harassment' is dangerous. Men may run away in fear and assume that any interaction with women can be wrongly interpreted. Women may not know that they are protected against certain actions, and may be nervous about speaking out because of the implications for themselves or for other women.

A few mostly anonymous commenters on Twitter and in the blogosphere have criticized my method of coming forward. I never doubt I did the right thing, but I do not want to set a precedent. History has never looked kindly on witch hunts. Today's self-publishing environment means that defamation can be only a few keystrokes away. My public comments — in a blog post I wrote — could have been avoided. I realize now that if I challenge an offender either directly or through confidential official channels, then both women and men will listen and look out for me. I did not know that before.

“Women may not know that They are protected, and may be nervous about speaking out.”

I have endured various types of sexual harassment throughout my career, from the relatively harmless to the illegal. When I was 16, the editor at my first newspaper job told me he loved me. His habit of stroking my calf muscles communicated that he meant this romantically — not as a compliment on my reporting. A male executive of a different publishing company habitually stopped by my desk, to lightly massage my shoulders and tell me: “What a great smile you have!”

Zivkovic was certainly not the first. But I can say with confidence that he was the last. The experience changed the way I interact with men in professional settings. I am ready to tell them immediately if they step over a line. And if that does not work, then I will simply walk away. The situation has provided me a sort of shield, too, in the way that men may interact with me. If I am labelled as the 'woman who writes about sexual harassment' and kept at arm's length, then so be it.
[345words]

[Time 4]
By now, many in the science community have moved on from discussions of this problem. But the work of raising awareness of and eliminating sexual harassment has not stopped. It continues very vividly in a core, but growing, group of female science writers whom I know and admire. And I continue to ask my female colleagues about their workplace environments. For example, I helped one of my colleagues to send a letter to her supervisor, who was making quite subtle sexual comments. After the letter, the comments stopped. Women and men can seek such small victories every day.

Throughout the conversation, some have claimed that modern women are being overly sensitive. Do we read stories about Marie Curie, Rosalind Franklin or, more recently, Rita Levi-Montalcini or Mae Jemison complaining about sexual harassment? We do not. But for these women, legal protection did not exist or had only just begun.

The law in the United States now is simple enough: “Harassment can include 'sexual harassment' or unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature,” states the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on its website. The real work begins when a woman is confronted with a situation and must define it. (I focus on women here because, out of the nearly 11,400 sexual-harassment complaints filed to the commission in 2011, only about 2,000 came from men.) That definition can be boiled down to a simple rule that men must follow when they interact with female colleagues. Ask the question: “Would I say this to a man?”
[263 words]

Source: Nature
http://www.nature.com/news/how-sexual-harassment-changed-the-way-i-work-1.14293

Not all species deteriorate with age
by Virginia Gewin 08 December 2013

Researchers claim that some buck trend in mortality and fertility, challenging evolutionary theory.

[Time5]
Guppies and water fleas live only days or weeks, but their mortality increases sharply with age, as is the case in longer-lived animals such as humans. But other animals — such as the hermit crab, the red abalone and the hydra, a microscopic freshwater animal that can live centuries — buck that trend, enjoying near constant levels of fertility and mortality.

A comparison of standardized demographic patterns across 46 species, published today in Nature1, suggests that the vast diversity of ‘ageing strategies’ among them challenges the notion that evolution inevitably leads to senescence, or deterioration of mortality and fertility, with age, says Owen Jones, a biologist at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, who led the study.

“By taking a grand view and doing a survey across species, we found plenty of violations of this underpinning theory,” says Jones.

To compare fertility and mortality patterns, the authors assembled published life-history data sets for 11 mammals, 12 other vertebrates, 10 invertebrates, 12 vascular plants and a green alga, and standardized the trajectories — dividing mortality rates at each point in the lifespan by the average mortality rate.

They found no association between the length of life and the degree of senescence. Of the 24 species showing the most abrupt increase in mortality with age, 11 had relatively long lifespans and 13 had relatively short lifespans. A similar split in lifespan occurred in the species that had a less abrupt increase in mortality.

When the researchers organized the species along a senescence continuum, mammals were clustered at one end of the spectrum, among the organisms that have an abrupt shift in mortality, and plants, which boast vastly lower relative mortality, populated the other end. Birds and invertebrates were scattered throughout.

The authors suggest that the diversity of ageing strategies across the spectrum should challenge theoreticians. “The [evolutionary] theories we have are applicable in lots of situations — but they can’t explain some cases,” says Jones. “It’s not about throwing out old theories; it’s about modifying theories to work on all species.”
[336 words]

[Time6]
Species salad
This is the first attempt to standardize cross-species comparisons of mortality and survivorship, but it has several scientists scratching their heads because, they say, the diversity of life strategies is well established. More importantly, they question the biological basis of the comparison.

At issue is the validity of comparing lab-raised, sometimes inbred, populations to field studies, some of which go on for decades.  “This approach is like making a fruit salad and imagining it can tell you something about evolution of the orange,” says Steven Austad, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio. “This comparison of demographic trajectories across the tree of life is completely divorced from biology and ignores the impact of the environment,” he adds.

Laurence Mueller, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California at Irvine, agrees. “Organisms in the field die from a lot of causes — for example, predation or disease — other than ageing,” he says. “Unfortunately, the unknown source of mortality in field-data sets confounds the age-related patterns of senescence, which is what we’re all interested in,” he adds.

Study co-author Hal Caswell, a mathematical ecologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, says that attempting to distinguish whether or not deaths are senescence related is a mistake. “An increase in mortality with age represents a decline in the ability to deal with hazards of death, regardless of their source, and is defined as senescence,” he says.

But the critics interviewed by Nature say that they doubt this paper presents a formidable challenge to evolutionary theory. “This study is a useful reminder that the patterns of ageing are diverse, but it is not a refutation of existing theory,” says Stephen Stearns, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. “That would require difficult empirical measures of the trade-offs between reproduction and mortality, which haven't yet been done.”
[313words]

Source:Nature
http://www.nature.com/news/not-all-species-deteriorate-with-age-1.14322

捉妖

Part III： Obstacle

(left) USDA; (right) U.S. Department of Defense
Disastrous connection. A simple model of forest fires, slightly modified, could help explain the distribution of the sizes of earthquakes and their aftershocks.

Do Earthquakes Spread Like Wildfire?
Posted In: Earth Physics
[Paraphrase 7]
A simple model of forest fires could help explain the distribution of the sizes of earthquakes and their aftershocks, a theoretical physicist says. Geoscientists say they have reservations about the accuracy of the bare-bones model, but they welcome the effort to account for aftershocks.

"The basic approach has merit," says Donald Turcotte, a geophysicist at the University of California, Davis. "I’m not aware of anybody else who has done aftershocks."

Earthquakes show a striking statistical regularity. Larger ones occur less often than smaller ones do, and for more than half a century scientists have known that earthquakes of magnitude 2 occur roughly one-tenth as often as those of magnitude 1; those of magnitude 3 occur at one-tenth the rate of those of magnitude 2; and so on. That Gutenberg-Richter relation can be mathematically recast to show that the frequency of earthquakes decreases with increasing size or seismic moment—a different quantity from their magnitude—in proportion to that size raised to an exponent or power. Data show that that exponent is between -1.8 and -1.5.

But where does that number come from? Earlier statistical models of earthquake faults couldn’t explain it, says Eduardo Jagla, a theorist with Argentina's National Atomic Energy Commission in Bariloche. Instead, researchers adjusted parameters to get the right exponent, he says. Moreover, those models left out the aftershocks that follow a big jolt—a major omission, he says.

Now, Jagla says he can both incorporate aftershocks and explain the value of the exponent by tweaking a model of how forest fires spread. In the so-called Drössel-Schwabl model, trees sprout at random on a square grid like a vast checkerboard. Once the forest gets dense enough, lightning sets a random tree on fire, and fire spreads instantaneously among trees that occupy adjacent squares. The conflagration continues until there are no more neighbors to jump to. Then, the process starts all over again.

In Jagla’s model, the “forest” is the plane of a fault cutting through Earth’s crust, divided into a 10,000-by-10,000 grid. Sprouting trees correspond to the buildup of stress along the fault; burning areas, to the part of the fault that moves during a quake.

In this basic model, the size of the fires obeys a power law with the exponent -1.2—significantly higher than the number for real earthquakes. But then Jagla puts in a twist, as he reports in a paper published on 3 December in Physical Review Letters. He assumes that the trees come in two types: more common “A trees" that burn instantly and much rarer "B trees" that burn slowly and light their neighbors only after a delay. In the forest-fire model, the fire pauses when it has to pass through a single B tree.

The result is that the forest fire breaks into a "cluster" of smaller fires slightly separated in time, reducing the frequency of really big fires. Now, the size distribution of individual fires has an exponent of -1.8, just as in the observed distribution of earthquake sizes. "What would have been a single earthquake is now fragmented into a lot of smaller earthquakes that give the correct exponent," Jagla says. The fragments can be interpreted as aftershocks and the B trees as their epicenters on the fault, he says.

The key point, Jagla says, is that merely introducing an internal timescale—the delay in the B trees—drives the system to the correct exponent. As long as the delay is much longer than it takes the A trees to burn but much shorter than the time between lightning strikes, the exponent will be the same, because the B trees' effect is to break up the fire spatially, he says. In terms of earthquakes, the aftershocks must come slowly compared with the duration of each shock but quickly compared with the buildup of stress.

"I like the intuitive simplicity and clarity of his approach, and I admire that he is borrowing from the fire community to provide insights into ours," says Ross Stein, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California. "But," he cautions, "many phenomena can explain the Gutenberg-Richter power-law … so it's difficult to be sure that the slow-fire hypothesis is a key element." Turcotte says that many other researchers also claim to have explained the value of the exponent in the relation.

In his paper, Jagla suggests a way to test his scheme. In his model, the exponent for the main shocks and their first few aftershocks should start out relatively high—closer to the -1.2 of the original fire model with only one kind of tree. Then its value should decrease as more and more aftershocks occur. Jagla says data taken in southern California over 20 years shows that main quakes and aftershocks that occur within 30 minutes show an exponent of -1.35, whereas those for aftershocks coming 30 to 90 minutes after the main shock have an exponent of -1.7—just as predicted.

But both Stein and Turcotte note that the catalog of aftershocks in the first 30 minutes after a big quake is notoriously incomplete. So whether this is an earth-shaking advance remains to be seen.
[857 words]

Source:Science
http://news.sciencemag.org/earth/2013/12/do-earthquakes-spread-wildfire?rss=1

Dora7

占~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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TIME2：2'20''31
author's experience of being harassment and state that this situation exist most in male-dominated industry
she spoke out and hope to win award


TIME3：2'23''54
the author was criticized by some people but she think she did the right thing
author use her own experience to tell other women they are protected and speakout sexual harassment.


TIME4：1'43'12
how author help her colleagus to stop th comment
laws about Harassment that can protect women


TIME5：2'21''15
old:evolution lead sensscence with age
new:some species have no association between the length of life and degree of senescence
new theory not to refute the old but modify the old to adopt to all species


TIME6:1'44'31
the new theory was questioned by many scientist .
but the critic think that more study need to do


OBSATCLE:

最近真的是体验到了时光飞逝的感觉啊~~

叶晴豆

Obstacle 6:02
a simple modle help explain the aftershock and earthquake distribution
frequency of earthquake decrease with increasing size
earlier model omit aftershocks---incorporate; tweak model of forest fire---tree A; tree B(delay) single earthquake is now fragmented
introduce the internal timescle correct the system
difficult to be sure---catalog of aftershock is incomplete---whether it's advance remains to be seen

小鱼上树

新一期啦，这过的可真快啊

29-01

Speaker

Flexible battery-fabric battery can be fold 5500 times-foilbattery 70 times-use solar power to charge

2 295 1min22

3 345 1min34

4 263 1min02

The author’s experience of harassment-this happens a lot ina male-dominated industy-the author spoke out and gathered people with the sameexperience-women are protected and when we are treated unfairly we need to saysomething-start from ourselves-say no to sexual harassment

吐吐yeah

占个楼~谢谢捉妖~

Speaker
introduces a new kind of batteries to power our smart devices

掌管 6        00:05:12.78        00:14:59.82
掌管 5        00:01:40.56        00:09:47.04
掌管 4        00:02:14.00        00:08:06.48
掌管 3        00:01:40.81        00:05:52.48
掌管 2        00:02:13.59        00:04:11.67
掌管 1        00:01:58.07        00:01:58.07

Obstacle
main idea:A simple model of forest fires could help explain the distribution of the sizes of earthquakes and their aftershocks.
structure:
1.introduces some known facts about earthquakes
2.introduces Jagla's basic model
3.another geologist makes some comments

Talitha

2:1'55:295:
-Bora Zivkovic intended to have sex with the author.
-Author denied few times
-Author decided to speak up in the public to reveal Bora Zivkovic's intention.
-After public exposure many ladies emailed her about encountering similar situations.

3:2'24:345
-'sexual harassment' is dangerous
-way of exposure the incident.
-author had various ways of 'sexual harassment'by men since 16
- Author claimed that Bora Zivkovic will be the last one sexually harass her.

4:1'47:263
-author helped many women in the work place to stand up for sexual harassment.
-author explained why she felt it was not women over sensitive.

5:2‘20：332
many freshwater animals enjoy consistent level of fertility and mortality as ageing.
Author described a experiment and discussed the result.

6: 2'30:313:
-the problem of cross-species comparison.
-author explained the reasons.

lululavender

Part I Speaker
A new flexi battery, made by a kind of special fabric, the finished battery will be half centimeter thin. Moreover this battery can charge on go by using solar energy technique.

Part II Speed
2:59
The author talks about her own experience of sexual harassment, and states her altitude that she does not keep quiet, rather she wants to raise the public awareness about this problem in male dominated industry and change the situation.
3:08
The author suggests that fighting against sexual harassment directly or indirectly is the best way for women to protect themselves. Because the current situation of this issue is - on the one side, men fear that their interaction with women may be wrongly interpreted; on the other side, women may be afraid about speaking out because they don’t know that they are protected.
2:07
The author tries to raise the public concern of sexual harassment in workplace, and encourage women to fight for their rights. Ultimately, she presents the law in the US that define sexual harassment.
3:38
The scientists have find some species that violate the evolutionary theory that explaining the relationship between lifespan and mortality rate. However, the author suggest that the finding does not challenge the evolutionary theory rather it modifies the theory and makes the theory applicable for all species.
2:17
Scientists have different opinions upon the above finding, some question the validity of the research, while some point out the usefulness of the research.

Part III Obstacle
6:19
The existing model of earthquake gives us the relationship between earthquake frequency and its magnitude however it cannot explain where do these figures come from, and it ignores the aftershocks. Eduardo Jagla developed a new model to explain the distribution of the size of earthquakes and aftershocks - Drossel Schwabl model.

sherlock1992

Thx, 妖妖~

Speaker:
*polyester<n.>涤纶
*sew-sewed-sewn
An ultra-thin, flexible battery has birthed, which can be sewn into clothes.
The battery can keep trucking even when such cloth has been folded 5500+ times. Such cloth also has a good ability to wear.

Speed:
2'40''
2'15''
1'43''
2'44''
2'59''

Obstacle-7'01"
the study of aftershocks is still an unknown area.
the frequency of earthquakes has a strong statistical regularity.
the study of aftershocks is an omission part of earthquake study.
EJ try to explain the exponent value and combine after quakes with that value by adjusting a model of how forest fires spread.
B trees ->fire pauses in the forest-fire model->correct exponent->model adjusting.