【Native Speaker每日综合训练—30系列】【30-09】科技

zxppx

Official Weibo: http://weibo.com/u/3476904471
大家好!胖胖翔来了! 今天的文章比较多样性，地球是否有一个双胞胎呢？三星最近的smartphone业务如何？蕴藏在黄石公园里的超级火山何时爆发？在新西兰发现的沉船有何秘密？答案近在咫尺~

Part I：Speaker

【Rephrase1】
Article 1
In Gaming, A Shift From Enemies To Emotions

[Dialog, 4: 19]

Source:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/01/07/255247261/in-gaming-a-shift-from-enemies-to-emotions

zxppx

Part II：Speed

【Time 2】
Article 2
Earth-mass exoplanet is no Earth twin
Gaseous planet challenges assumption that Earth-mass planets should be rocky.

Astronomers have discovered an extrasolar planet with the same mass as Earth, but the resemblance ends there. Not only is the planet too warm for liquid water to exist on its surface, but it also has a radius 60% larger than Earth, suggesting a vast, puffy atmosphere of hydrogen and helium.

“You’ve got a very small planet that is probably not rocky at all, and that’s frightening,” says Jacob Bean, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago in Illinois.

What is scary, he says, is how the finding challenges the assumption that an Earth-mass exoplanet would have an Earth-like composition. With its thick atmosphere, the exoplanet is more like a scaled-down Neptune or Uranus, he notes. Its surprising density suggests that it will be even more important in future campaigns to measure both the size and the mass of exoplanets. Density, the ratio of mass and size, is known for only about 150 of the more than 3,000 known exoplanets.

“We can’t be sure that we have Earth 2.0 until we have both pieces of information,” says astronomer David Kipping of the Harvard‒Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who announced the finding on 6 January at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society near Washington DC.


【Time 3】


Kipping and his colleagues used NASA’s Kepler spacecraft to detect the planet, one of three orbs that closely circle a dim, red dwarf star some 60 parsecs (200 light-years) from Earth. Kepler normally measures only the size of a planet, which can be inferred by the amount of light it blocks each time it transits, or passes, in front of its parent star. But the planet, dubbed KOI-314c, orbits so close to one of its siblings, KOI-314b, that the gravitational tug of the two bodies periodically delays or advances the moment of their transit. These timing variations can be used to calculate mass.

KOI-314c, with an estimated surface temperature of 104 °C, circles its red-dwarf parent every 23 days. Its sibling, KOI-314b, is even hotter and has a closer-in orbit 14 days long. KOI-314b has a similar size to the Earth-mass planet but is about four times heavier.

But KOI-314c is the enigma. It is surprising how a planet only as massive as Earth could have enough gravity to retain such a vast atmosphere, something that disturbs Sara Seager, a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “I would want more precise measurements before having to accept the interpretation,” she adds. Because light from the parent star can filter through the planet's thick atmosphere every 23 days, its composition should be ripe for study with the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to launch in 2018, says Kipping.

Kepler’s planet-hunting mission ended in May when its telescope could no longer be aimed precisely. Kepler researchers are now awaiting NASA’s decision on other uses for the craft (See “NASA ponders Kepler's future”). A final verdict is expected in June.


字数[280]
Source:
http://www.nature.com/news/earth-mass-exoplanet-is-no-earth-twin-1.14477


【Time 4】
Article 3
Samsung to report profit decline as phone sales lag
Samsung is on track to report lower operating profit for the first time in more than two years amid increased competition in the smartphone market.

South Korea-based Samsung said Tuesday that it would report operating profit of around $7.8 billion for the final three months of the year -- an 18% decline from the previous quarter. Analysts had expected the company to post a profit closer to $9.4 billion.

Fourth-quarter sales were also lower than the previous three months, falling slightly to around $55 billion. The figures are a preliminary forecast, and Samsung will release an official report later this month.

Samsung shares were flat in morning trading in Seoul, but the stock has declined almost 5% so far this year. Over the past three months, shares are down almost 9% as the company faces a stronger Korean won, which makes Samsung products more expensive for overseas buyers.

The company is also facing increased competition from Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500), especially in China. The iPhone maker struck a deal late last year with China Mobile, which boasts 700 million users and is the world's largest carrier by number of subscribers.

The pressure on Samsung is part of an industry-wide trend driven by declining margins and growing saturation in the smartphone business. While Samsung can rely on sales from other parts of its business including semiconductors and other technology to buffet smartphone losses, competing phonemakers haven't been so lucky.
Taiwan-based HTC is another hard-hit victim of the trend. The company said earlier this week that it eked out a profit of $10 million in the fourth quarter, a number that was significantly worse than analysts had expected.

At this week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Samsung highlighted its diverse product line, including a new line of curved televisions and a tablet computer designed for business use.  


字数[281]
Source:
http://money.cnn.com/2014/01/06/technology/samsung-earnings/index.html



【Time 5】
Article 4
Huge Magma Pocket Lurks Beneath Yellowstone Supervolcano
The supervolcano beneath Yellowstone National Park is more than twice as big as previously thought.

"We found it to be about two-and-a-half times larger than we thought," said analysis team scientist James Farrell of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. "That's not to say it's getting any bigger. It's just that our ability to see it is getting better."

The size finding, presented at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting in San Francisco last Thursday, has big implications for the extent of the volcano's impact when it next erupts. (See "When Yellowstone Explodes.")

The supervolcano underneath the national park last erupted on a massive scale some 640,000 years ago, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). It is a potential supervolcano, capable of spewing more than 240 cubic miles (1,000 cubic kilometers) of magma across Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, with global climate effects.

"We believe it will erupt again someday, but we have no idea when," Farrell said.

More Magma Measured
In the new analysis, Farrell and his team calculated the size of the volcano's magma reservoir by analyzing earthquake measurement data collected from 1984 to 2011 from about 40 seismometers installed around Yellowstone.

Yellowstone National Park is located in a very seismically active region and experiences between 1,500 to 2,000 earthquakes a year. Most of the temblors are too small to be felt by humans, but occasionally "you will have a large earthquake like the magnitude 7.3 one that we saw in 1959," Farrell said.

The team used software to calculate how long it takes for the seismic waves to travel from the epicenter of an earthquake to the surface seismometers. They next analyzed the data to find regions where the seismic waves appeared to slow down, which is a sign that the waves were traveling through magma.

"Seismic waves travel slower through molten material," Farrell said.

The team used that information to create a map of the underground magma reservoir beneath Yellowstone. Farrell likened his team's technique to the medical scanners doctors use to image inside the human body. "It's the exact same technique. It's just that we use seismic waves, and we do it on a much bigger scale," he said.


字数[351]


【Time 6】


The team's map revealed that Yellowstone's magma reservoir is not arranged vertically, as once thought, but rather it is tilted in a northwest to southeast direction. It's also much bigger than previously thought, measuring about 55 miles by 20 miles (90 by 30 kilometers) on each side and about 6 miles (10 kilometers) deep.

The new size estimate means the current magma reservoir is roughly equal to what it was when the supervolcano last erupted, about 640,000 years ago.

"What we're seeing now agrees with the geologic data that we have about past eruptions," Farrell said. "And that means there's the potential for the same type of eruption that we've seen in the past."

Scientists think that after each eruption, the magma reservoir is emptied, and it takes a long time for it to refill again.

Global Catastrophe
Scientists predict that when the Yellowstone supervolcano does erupt, it will have global consequences. Large amounts of ash and pulverized rock from the eruption will get lofted into the atmosphere and then fall back slowly to Earth.

"You'll get ashfall as far away as the Great Plains, and even farther east," Farrell said.

Furthermore, volcanic material and gases that linger in the atmosphere will block sunlight, resulting in a global temperature decrease.

There will be nothing humans can do to prevent the eruption from happening, Farrell said, but at least with the instruments in place there should be ample warning before the volcano erupts. The Yellowstone Volcano Observatory partnership of state, federal, and academic experts regularly monitors the volcano.

"I think we'll have anywhere from weeks to months of warning that magma is moving up into the shallow crust and [that] something is going on," Farrell said.

As catastrophic as an eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano would be, Farrell said it's not an imminent threat, nor the one people should be focusing on. The USGS puts the annual odds of a super-eruption at 1 in 730,00.

"The most likely hazard in Yellowstone is from large earthquakes," he said. "A lot of people say that the Yellowstone volcano is overdue to erupt, but there's no evidence that it is overdue. We can't say when the next eruption is going to happen."


字数[368]
Source:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/12/131218-yellowstone-supervolcano-eruption-magma-reservoir/

zxppx

Part III： Obstacle

【Paraphase7】
Article 5
Shipwreck points to 18th-century race to colonize New Zealand
Vessel buried off North Island coast sank more than 50 years before James Cook's discovery expedition.

Scraps of wood salvaged off New Zealand’s coast probably come from a Dutch ship built in the early 1700s, a study based on carbon dating, tree rings and historical research reports. The recovered vessel is the country’s oldest-known shipwreck — dating more than 50 years before Captain James Cook’s landing — and hints at a 'space race' among colonial powers to reach the remote isles.

“It was a period of European expansion and exploration, and there were many countries that were competing against each other, particularly for resources,” says lead author Jonathan Palmer, a climate scientist who studies tree rings at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. The research has been published in the current issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science.

Dutch explorer Abel Tasman put New Zealand on the map in 1642, but he never landed on the isles and Cook is credited being the first European to land there, in 1769. “There’s nothing written about that intervening time period, and that to me has always been a bit of a mystery,” says Palmer. “Why hadn’t anybody gone in the intervening 130 years? Maybe there were some efforts and maybe this was an example of one that didn’t return home.”

His team analysed wood recovered in 1983 by Noel Hilliam, an employee at a local maritime museum, who was alerted by a fisherman who had noticed a mussel-laden structure jutting out of the treacherous waters near the North Island’s Kaipara Head (see Report on unidentified shipwreck remains). Following the fisherman’s directions, Hilliam and his team found a 25-metre-long, 7-metre-wide ship and recovered two pieces of wood from it. Hilliam applied for a permit to salvage the rest, but the government turned him down. Storms later reburied the ship in sand underwater, making further exploration all but impossible.

Palmer heard about the wreck a few years ago, when he contacted Hilliam about different wood samples from a bog on Hilliam’s farm. Most of the salvaged wood had been lost over the last 30 years, but Palmer and Hilliam located two samples at the museum that had inherited the timbers and kept them in storage.

Earlier voyages
Their team identified different kinds of wood: teak and Lagerstroemia, another tropical species. Combined carbon dating and tree-ring analysis suggested that the outermost layer of the Lagerstroemia wood grew between 1663 and 1672. Palmer’s team estimates that the ship was built in the early 1700s, on account of the time it would have taken to build the ship and of the fact that the wood's youngest layer — the outer ring, known as sapwood — was missing.

The ship is most likely to be Dutch, Palmer and his team conclude. The tropical woods come from Southeast Asia, where the Dutch East India Company operated throughout the 17th century. Mention of copper sheathing in Hilliam’s initial report on the wreck also point to a Dutch origin, the researchers say, as copper protection was common on Dutch vessels as early as the 1670s, but not used by the British Royal Navy until the mid-to-late18th century.

There are no records of a Dutch expedition to New Zealand in the late 17th or early 18th century, but Palmer suggests that competition among naval powers might have meant that many voyages were kept secret. In fact, decades after his voyage, Cook claimed that native Maori told him that they had killed and eaten other Europeans who had preceded him.

Excavating the wreck would be the only way to determine the vessel’s identity, says Palmer, whose team pinpointed the location of the ship underwater using magnetic instruments and report these coordinates in their manuscript. They hope to entice an underwater archaeologist to do a proper excavation — before someone else gets to it. “Any cowboy could go in with a digger and get at some of the wreck,” Palmer says. “The worry is that you get these people who see gold or seek something and they just go in and raid the area.”

Brendan Foley, an underwater archaeologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts, doubts that the ship holds much in the way of buried treasure. Accessing the ship would require shoring up large volumes of sand, but its shallow depth means that an excavation would be feasible. “They might be able to do it for some tens of thousands of dollars rather than hundreds of thousands or millions.”


字数[747]
Source:
http://www.nature.com/news/shipwreck-points-to-18th-century-race-to-colonize-new-zealand-1.14464

sherlock1992

Thx,  PPX~.       是啊，疏离很久没沙发了〜

Speaker:  
Developers of video games gradually shift their attention from mechanics to storytelling, a higher level to spark emotions.

Speed:
1'25''
1'29''
1'49''
2'22''
2'17''

Obstacle-4'01''
MI: the shipwreck found near NZd's coast probably come from a Dutch ship built in the period of European expansion and exploration. And the identifying process is still going.
*treacherous: If the ground or sea is treacherous, it is extremely dangerous, especially because of bad weather conditions.
*tree ring: one of the rings that you can see in a tree trunk if you cut through it, which shows one year's growth.

疏离无罪

占~~~~最近沙发轮流坐啊。。THX PPX

Speaker:a new game that has no violence or horrible things but telling story which is full of good emotions.

00:55
A new dicovery of a exoplanet shows that a planet with the same mass as earth doesn't mean it has the same composition as earth does.Scientists also need to assure its size.

01:21
Two planets that have similar size as earth.One of it have 4 times the gravity of earth,which raise scientists' curiosity.

01:30
Samsung is facing profit declining.Several reasons:the rasing prices,the competition from apple and the industry trend.HTC  is another victim of this trend.

00:58
A team of scientists calculated the size of the supervolcano by anaylsising the earthquake data.

01:14
The size and the direction of the volcano is a little different from previous thought.The eruption will be a disaster to the earth because the ash and earthquake brougt by it.

04:24
Main Idea:A shipwreck shows the competition for the New Zealand in 18th century.
A shiprwreck was found in New Zealand which seems to be built in 1700s and belongs to Dutch.This shows the heavy competition among european countries and the period of exapnsion and exploration.
But there is no recourd of this exploration of New Zealand.One possible reason may be the military confict happened in that area ruined this ship.
A team analysised the shipwreck and tried to find out identity of this ship.But only excavating the whole wreck can assure whether it's Dutch origin.But the expense is huge.

Ra酱

1.7
2*1'49
3*2'33
4*2'18
5*2'47
6*2'51
obstacle*6'16  THX PPX!!! 最近刚好对三星感兴趣来着~~

小鱼上树

又是楼上楼下~

30-09

Speaker

There is a trend that games are not all about killing andshooting any more, game designers want to tell a normal story which may happento everyone and attract people who may not consider themselves gamer.

2 207 1min11

3 280 1min34

Astronomers have discovered an extrasolar planet with thesame mass as Earth, but it has a radius 60% larger than Earth and so muchwarmer. Now if we want to find Earth 2.0, we need to consider both the mass andthe density. KOI-314c will not be the one.

4 281 1min47

The sales, profits and stock price of sumsung all declinedin the fourth quarter. Strong Korean won made it more expensive for overseabuyers and the increasing competition in Chinese market with iphone.

5 351 1min33

6 368 1min42

wasuresaki

第三天~
感谢小分队辛勤工作~~

SPEED

1, 1'14''
2, 1'41''
3, 1'40''
4, 2'08'' （我的注意力真是硬伤……这个又想到雷神那去了orz……）
5, 2'02''

OBSTACLE

5'24''

wood dated earlier voyages than documented

Curious--->found a ship, sunk--->identify salvaged wood--->from Dutch--->new discovery, need proof--->need excavation

Talitha

2：1‘40
we though we found the planet that is similar to earth.
however it is not the case.

32'28:280
-several planets we discovered are similar and different from earth.
-further measuring needs to be done before conclusion.

4:2'30:281
-Samsung's operation profit declined the fourth quarter by 18%
-It's sale also declined.
-It's market share decreased by 5% over the year.
-reason is the strong competitor: Apple in Chinese market.
-Samsung tried to invent more advance technology to compete.

5:2'277:
-supervocano beneath Yellowstone National Park is 2 and half times bigger than we found before.
-It may erupt someday. It will affect many states.
-Measure the travel of the temblor waves.

6:3:368
-supervolcano  will erupt like the one back in 640000years ago.
-The effect will global wise
-we will get warning signs when it erupts. Nothing can stop the eruption.

dancingwind990

Speaker                                                                       
A new interactive game called "Gone Home" was presented by the author. Recently, some game designer focused on designing personal interactive games, in which the player don't think they are gamer. And the designer said the aiming consumers are those who appreciate good films and good literature.                                                                       
Time 2 1'40"                                                                       
Astronomers found an Earth 2.0 which has the same mass as Earth. But more data needs to be collected to see whether it is similar to Earth overall.                                                                       
Time 3 2'12"                                                                       
Kipping and his colleagues found two planet, dubbed KOI-314c and KOI-314b;KOI-314b has a same size to the Earth-mass planet but is four times heavier.                                                                       
Sara, a theoretical physist in MIT, is doubt about the interpretation that only Earth-mass planet could have enough gravity to retain such a vast atmoshpere                                                                       
Time 4 1'55"                                                                       
Samsung would report a decline in profit for the final three months of the year, about 18% decline from the previou quarter. And the Samsung share has declined almost 5% so far this year.                                                                       
                                                                       
The decline is due to increasing competition from Apple and declining margin of the smartphone market. HTC is another hard-hit victim of this industry trend.                                                                       
While, Samsung still try to show it's innovation such as curved television.                                                                       
Time 5 2'33"                                                                       
Many scientists engaged in the research of Yellowstond supervolcano. They installed plenty of seismometers around Yellowstone and collected information from them to analyse the size of the volcano's magma.                                                                       
                                                                       
Time 6 2'24"                                                                       
The team's map revealed that the size of the magma is larger that ever predicted. If the Yellowstone supervolcano erupted, it will significantly affact the climate, resulting in a globle temperature decrease. And the fact is, nobody can do anything to prevent it. And it is also hard to say when it will happen.                                                                       
                                                                       
Obstacle 4'49"                                                                       
There is a debate of who comes first to New Zealand. And archeologist linked this to a shipwreck and did a lot of research about it. Some think captain James cook made this shipwreck; however the author finally pointed out that this is unreasonable.