【Native Speaker每日综合训练—31系列】【31-02】科技

捉妖

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

大家好,今天的speed是大脑套餐，配搭了一点baby
话说现在一发baby就感觉有新闻里面插广告的赶脚~~

Part I：Speaker

Brain-Training Games May Not Improve Overall Intelligence
Brain-training games seem to temporarily improve specific tasks, but claims that they can improve overall brain function have yet to be proved. Christie Nicholson reports
[Rephrase 1]

[Dialog, 1:22]


Transcript hided

   Brain-training games claim that testing memory, attention and other forms of cognition will improve one’s overall intelligence and brain function.

And it’s probable that such games do improve performance on a specific task. But it’s unlikely that there’s a general improvement. That’s according to a study in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Sixty men and women played a computer game that tested their ability to withhold an action. The subjects saw a “go” signal—an arrow pointing either left or right—and they had to press a key, as quickly as possible, that corresponded to the signal’s direction. But 25 percent of the time a beep sounded just after the arrow appeared—which meant to not press the key.

Compared with a control group that never got the inhibitory beep, the game players’ exhibited heightened levels of activity in regions of the brain that control inhibitory action and emotion. But researchers found no change in other areas, for instance those that support working memory.

The researchers write that while brain-training games might temporarily improve a specific task, in this case inhibitory control, they may not lead to a general improvement in overall brain function. But they may still be fun.

—Christie Nicholson

Source: Scientific American
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=brain-training-games-may-not-improv-14-01-14

捉妖

Part II：Speed
  

Thinking hard weighs heavy on the brain
  by Laura Sanders 10:22am, January 17, 2014   
[Time 2]
When the mind is at work, the brain literally gets heavier.

That fact may be surprising, but it isn’t new: In the late 1880s, Italian scientist Angelo Mosso built an intricate full-body balance and reported that mental activity tips the scales. Now, a modern-day version of Mosso’s “human circulation balance” backs him up. Compared with a brain at rest, a brain listening to music and watching a video is indeed heavier, David Field and Laura Inman of the University of Reading in England report January 9 in Brain.

While teaching a course about brain-imaging techniques, Field grew curious whether Mosso’s general approach would work. So he and some students decided to find out. “It was a bit of a mad idea, to be honest,” Field says.

At the heart of both balances lies a simple seesaw lever. As weight shifts in a body, presumably from blood moving, the lever tilts the head or the feet downward, Mosso observed. Field and Inman’s contraption doesn’t actually tip. The researchers put a sensitive scale under the head end, which would register changes in force.

After lots of troubleshooting, which involved eliminating signals created by bodily processes that move blood such as breathing and heart beats, Field and Ingram were able to test mental tasks. Fourteen participants were asked to lie still on the lever, and listen to music or listen to music and simultaneously watch a video of colorful geometric shapes. The part of the brain that detects sound is relatively small, Field says, so the audio plus video test was used to activate a wider swath of the brain and increase the chances of a measurable blood shift.

Right after a two-second blip of either audio or audio and video, blood leaves the brain, as measured by a drop in force, Field and Inman found. This quick dip in blood volume, a phenomenon that’s also seen in functional MRI, may represent the brain preparing for work by shunting waste-ridden blood out via the jugular vein. Seconds after that, a surge of new blood enters the brain, increasing the force measured by the scale.
[351 words]

[Time 3]
These changes in force were very small — about 0.005 newtons — and most prominent in the people who both listened to music and watched a video, Field says. It’s hard to calculate how much blood rushes into the brain with each mental task. To know that value, scientists would need to know the distance of the head from the lever’s fulcrum, which could be easily measured, and exactly where the blood came from, which is nearly impossible to know.  

In his original experiments, Mosso found that tasks that required more mental energy made the brain heavier. Reading a page from a mathematics manual seemed to tip the balance more than reading a page from a newspaper. Strong emotions also tipped the scales: When a subject read a letter from an angry creditor, Mosso wrote, “the balance fell at once.”

Until recently, Mosso’s scientific manuscripts had not been described in detail. But Stefano Sandrone of King’s College London unearthed Mosso’s papers in archives and published a description in Brain in 2013.

“We have been neglecting Mosso and his work for so many years. It’s good that someone has begun to find interest in the papers that he wrote,” Sandrone says of the modern-day experiment. He and his colleagues are working on an exhibition of Mosso’s original balance.

Many neuroscientists use functional MRI to detect changes in blood flow in the brain. Usually, fMRI spots regional differences, as when a little blood moves from one part of the brain to another. In contrast, the balance describes overall changes in brain workload, Field says.

The balance is not going to replace modern neuroimaging as a way to see what happens inside the brain. But with refinements, it might ultimately prove to be useful, Sandrone says. “The more measures we have, the more we can approximate the complexity of the brain.”
[307 words]

Source:Science News
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/thinking-hard-weighs-heavy-brain

Baby-cam captures an infant’s world
  by Laura Sanders 5:52pm, January 13, 2014   
[Time 4]
If you’re curious about what your cat sees all day, you can strap a cat-cam to its collar. The tiny video camera assumes the vantage point of the cat as it swishes through tall grass, sits at the window and laps up water. These cameras aren’t just for kitties, either. The artist Sam Easterson has used the tiny head-mounted cameras to capture the perspectives of turkeys, tarantulas, buffalo, armadillos and even a wayward tumbleweed.

So it seems funny to me that no one had thought to slap a head camera on a newborn baby. Luckily, researchers from Ryerson University in Toronto are on it. Nicole Sugden and colleagues recently developed the arguably cutest cam in existence: a happy face camera affixed to a headband for tiny little babies. “While we had parents’ perspectives on what infants are exposed to, we didn’t have any idea about what the world looked like from an infant perspective,” Sugden says.

Their study, published in November in Developmental Psychobiology, recorded the first-person perspectives of 14 1-month-old babies and 16 3-month-old babies for two weeks. Parents were asked to put the headbands on the infants whenever Baby was awake and not fussy.

Compared with a tumbleweed’s thrilling existence, much of the baby footage was pretty boring: changing, feeding and playing. But these mundane moments were occasionally punctuated with excitement: The baby goes out to dinner in a restaurant! The baby drops in to see her sister’s recital! The baby hits the library! These cameras caught it all, amassing an impressive collection of people pulling hilarious faces to make babies smile. Some scenes suggested that the families forgot the cameras were rolling. Judging from some questionable attire choices, Sugden suspects that some moms forgot to tell the dads when the cameras were on.

After the footage made it back to Ryerson University, the scientists noticed that of many of these different scenes had a common element that loomed large in the infants’ field of vision: faces. Babies spent a whopping quarter of their time in the presence of a face, the researchers found. In contrast, adults are exposed to real faces only about 7 or 8 percent of their time (T.V., Facebook and billboard faces didn’t count), Sugden says.
[372 words]

[Time 5]
Most of the faces belonged to adult women of the same race as the baby, usually the mother. Notable exceptions came from babies with older brothers, a baby with a really involved father and one baby boy who spent marathon sessions gazing at himself soothingly in mirrors. (This little guy’s own face accounted for more than 90 percent of his face-viewing time.)

This extensive face gazing probably helps babies perceive faces better. And not just any faces. Babies are born pretty good at discerning a wide variety of faces. But as they get older, babies lose this general ability through a process called perceptual tuning. Through their experience with their environment and caregivers, babies learn that some faces are more important than others, and focus their attention on them. This process makes them worse at discriminating features on faces they rarely see.

Sugden and her colleagues think that the faces they caught on their baby-cams are probably tuning these infants’ brains, keying them in to features on familiar faces, a skill that ultimately comes at the expense of perceiving other faces. It would be interesting to know how these babies ultimately fare, and whether the babies who saw a more diverse crowd of faces had different perceptual tuning effects later on.

Beyond faces, there’s no telling what else these baby-cams could detect. The baby-cams could capture how language skills relate to the vocabulary a baby hears, how allergies relate to pet exposure, how motor skills relate to time spent rolling around on the floor. And parents themselves might want in on the action. “Outside of science, parents could actually do this themselves to get a glimpse of their baby’s view of the world,” Sugden says. “I would imagine it being a nifty addition to anyone’s baby book.”
[297 words]

Source:Science News
https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/growth-curve/baby-cam-captures-infants-world

Life at the Speed of Light
  by Alexandra Witze 10:20am, January 16, 2014   
[Time 6]
Biology has come a long way from the days of mixing things in petri dishes and hoping something interesting happens. In his new book, Venter introduces readers to a future of precise biological engineering, guided by DNA and targeted to create life forms never before thought possible.

Venter has the scientific chops to back up these claims. His first book related the story of how he led a private effort that raced a government-funded consortium to decipher the DNA sequence that makes up the human genome. His second book focuses on a later lab triumph: the creation of Synthia, the first life-form with a synthesized genome.

Synthia, announced in 2010, is a bacterial mash-up. Venter’s team stitched together a genetic code for one bacterial species from scratch, then inserted it into a second species and booted it up. The result was a living, self-replicating cell that essentially cribbed synthetic DNA to function.

In relating Synthia’s story, Venter illuminates the twists and turns that are a hallmark of modern science. Time and again the researchers go down blind alleys, only to start again using a different tack — such as ditching one simple but slow-growing bacterial species in favor of another more complex one that will replicate faster in petri dishes.

This description of science-as-process is perhaps the most notable aspect of Life at the Speed of Light. Venter embeds the story of Synthia in the deep history of molecular biology, laying out discoveries by previous generations of scientists and clarifying how those advances made way for modern investigations. It’s a story with many blind turns and dead ends, but one that triumphs in the end.
[274 words]
Source:Science News
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/life-speed-light

捉妖

Part III： Obstacle

Genomes of Modern Dogs and Wolves Provide New Insights On Domestication
The story is based on materials provided by University of Chicago Medical Center.

[Paraphrase 7]
Dogs and wolves evolved from a common ancestor between 9,000 and 34,000 years ago, before humans transitioned to agricultural societies, according to an analysis of modern dog and wolf genomes from areas of the world thought to be centers of dog domestication.

The study, published in PLoS Genetics on January 16, 2014, also shows that dogs are more closely related to each other than wolves, regardless of geographic origin. This suggests that part of the genetic overlap observed between some modern dogs and wolves is the result of interbreeding after dog domestication, not a direct line of descent from one group of wolves.

This reflects a more complicated history than the popular story that early farmers adopted a few docile, friendly wolves that later became our beloved, modern-day companions. Instead, the earliest dogs may have first lived among hunter-gatherer societies and adapted to agricultural life later.

"Dog domestication is more complex than we originally thought," said John Novembre, associate professor in the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Chicago and a senior author on the study. "In this analysis we didn't see clear evidence in favor of a multi-regional model, or a single origin from one of the living wolves that we sampled. It makes the field of dog domestication very intriguing going forward."

The team generated the highest quality genome sequences to date from three gray wolves: one each from China, Croatia and Israel, representing three regions where dogs are believed to have originated. They also produced genomes for two dog breeds: a basenji, a breed which originates in central Africa, and a dingo from Australia, both areas that have been historically isolated from modern wolf populations. In addition to the wolves and dogs, they sequenced the genome of a golden jackal to serve as an "outgroup" representing earlier divergence.

Their analysis of the basenji and dingo genomes, plus a previously published boxer genome from Europe, showed that the dog breeds were most closely related to each other. Likewise, the three wolves from each geographic area were more closely related to each other than any of the dogs.

Novembre said this tells a different story than he and his colleagues anticipated. Instead of all three dogs being closely related to one of the wolf lineages, or each dog being related to its closest geographic counterpart (i.e. the basenji and Israeli wolf, or the dingo and Chinese wolf), they seem to have descended from an older, wolf-like ancestor common to both species.

"One possibility is there may have been other wolf lineages that these dogs diverged from that then went extinct," he said. "So now when you ask which wolves are dogs most closely related to, it's none of these three because these are wolves that diverged in the recent past. It's something more ancient that isn't well represented by today's wolves."

Accounting for gene flow between dogs and wolves after domestication was a crucial step in the analyses. According to Adam Freedman, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the lead author on the study, gene flow across canid species appears more pervasive than previously thought.

"If you don't explicitly consider such exchanges, these admixture events get confounded with shared ancestry," he said. "We also found evidence for genetic exchange between wolves and jackals. The picture emerging from our analyses is that these exchanges may play an important role in shaping the diversification of canid species."

Domestication apparently occurred with significant bottlenecks in the historical population sizes of both early dogs and wolves. Freedman and his colleagues were able to infer historical sizes of dog and wolf populations by analyzing genome-wide patterns of variation, and show that dogs suffered a 16-fold reduction in population size as they diverged from wolves. Wolves also experienced a sharp drop in population size soon after their divergence from dogs, implying that diversity among both animals' common ancestors was larger than represented by modern wolves.

The researchers also found differences across dog breeds and wolves in the number of amylase (AMY2B) genes that help digest starch. Recent studies have suggested that this gene was critical to domestication, allowing early dogs living near humans to adapt to an agricultural diet. But the research team surveyed genetic data from 12 additional dog breeds and saw that while most dog breeds had high numbers of amylase genes, those not associated with agrarian societies, like the Siberian husky and dingo, did not. They also saw evidence of this gene family in wolves, meaning that it didn't develop exclusively in dogs after the two species diverged, and may have expanded more recently after domestication.

Novembre said that overall, the study paints a complex picture of early domestication.

"We're trying to get every thread of evidence we can to reconstruct the past," he said. "We use genetics to reconstruct the history of population sizes, relationships among populations and the gene flow that occurred. So now we have a much more detailed picture than existed before, and it's a somewhat surprising picture."
[838 words]

Source:Science Daily
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140116190137.htm

疏离无罪

沙发~~~~~~感谢妖妖

Speaker:Experiments show that brain-training games may probably improve performance in specfic task temporarily ,but won't improve overall intelligence.

01:52
Thinking,listening to music and watching a video may make our brain heavier.An experiment shows that this phenomenon may causede by the raise of bolld volume.

01:41
Scientists try to find out how much blood rushes into the brain with each mental task. The balance in brain can help to approximate the complexity of the brain.

01:34
A baby camera was invented to find out what babies see.Baby spent a lot of time in the presence of a face.

01:53
Babies are born good at discerning a wide variety of faces.But they will lost it later.Baby-cams can be helpful in the study of baby.Out of science,parents can enjoy what their baby see.

01:41
Venter's new book introduces a kind of life form guided by synthetic DNA.He has some scientifuc back up to the claims.

05:14
Main Idea: the study of genome sequence of dogs and wolfes provide an new sight of the domestication of dogs.
The old idea is that dogs are domesticated from a kind of friendly wolves.But recent research on genome sequence shows that the domestication of dogs is more complex.Dogs may descended from an older wolf-like ancestor common to both species.And most dogs came from other wolf lineages which is extinct later.This assumation is based on the data from gene.
There is one gene that is critical to domestication.But this is not comprehensive.The early domestication is more complex.

苏错

地板以下咩？~~~谢谢妖妖~~

Speaker:
The study shows how using a mouse can affect nerve representation
of our movements. natural felt.
文稿不太对应的样子。。。

Speed:
Time2:1'47
Brain will gets heavier when it is at work.
Time3:1'37
changes in blood flow in the brain and the balance
Time4:1'52
research about the prespectives from babies
and it found out that babies pad much attention to faces
Time5:1'28
The face gazing helps recognizing people better, but this
ability will disappear when babies grow up.
Time6:1'10
Obstacle:4'08
Begin with the theory that dogs and wolves evolved from a common ancestor
The study of John shows that dog domestication is more complex that expected
New research about dogs and wolves refected the close relationship with the same kind animals
possible reasons for the results

sherlock1992

Refresh. Thx, Yao~
----------------------------------------------------Orion---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Speaker:
brain-training games might temporily improve a specific brain function, they may not improve the overall intelligence of a brain.

Speed:
2'05''
1'50''
2'09''
1'55''
1'56''

guagua13

谢谢妖妖～

Speaker
Brain training games might temporarily improve performance on specific tasks, but they may not lead to a general improvement of the overall brain function.

Speed
Time2: 2:20:45 351
Brain gets heavier when the mind is at work. Weight shifts presumably from blood moving. Researchers use audio and video test to measure blood shift.
Time3: 1:54:46 307
It's hard to calculate how much blood rushes into the brain with each mental task.
Tasks that require more energy make the brain heavier. Strong emotions also influence the shifts of blood. MRI and fMRI can be used to detect changes in blood flows.
Time4: 2:38:65 372
Baby-cams are used on babies to see the world from their perspectives. Babies spent a quarter of their time in the presence of a face, whereas adults are exposed to real faces only about 7 or 8 percent of their time.
Time5: 2:14:82 297
Babies are very good at discerning a wide variety of faces. As babies grow older, they learn to focus their attention on the more important faces, making them worse at discriminating features on the faces they rarely see.
Time6: 2:09:47 274
Venter introduces a future of precise biological engineering, guided by DNA and targeted to create life forms that never thought possible, in his new book. The author then describes Synthia and its significance.

Obstacle 6:45:82 838
The study shows that dogs are more closely related to each other than wolves regardless of geographic origin and that wolves are more closely related to each other than dogs.
Dogs seem to have descended from an older, wolf-like ancestor common to both species. Populations of both dogs and wolves reduced as a result of the divergence from each other.
Amylase gene was critical to the domestication of dogs, but it was also found in wolves.
The study indicates a complex picture of early domestication.

晓野的野

DDDDDDDDDDDDDDD
-----------------------------------------
【SPEAKING】
brain moves hands movement
connection can be switched---->player--experienced quickly---teewks can control other---how use a mounth can---？？？
似乎又到了听到了单词不知道在讲什么的阶段....
捉妖，你的听力内容和文本内容，似乎不对应诶.....
-------------------------------------------
掌管 3        00:02:27.95        00:06:43.92
掌管 2        00:02:07.78        00:04:15.97
掌管 1        00:02:08.18        00:02:08.18

画画2013

2’16
Main idea: When mind is at work, the brain gets heavier.
But this surprising news is old.
And the article mentioned a test to find out how the brain works and how the blood shift when people listen to music and watch videos.
1’53
The brain changes of the people who listen to music and watch videos at the same time are hard to calculate.
Then the author talked about some finds of the original experiments.
Finally, the Mosso’s original balance will help scientists to approximate the complexity of the brain
2’38
In order to research how a new-born baby looks the world, the scientists put a small camera on each baby.
Tough some records of these babies are boring, but some different scenes still show to the researchers because parents of those babies always forgot there still had a camera on their babies.
The researchers find that babies spend much time on faces than adults.
2’07
Most faces of belong to women adults, especially mothers.
When babies get older, they will recognize some faces are more important than others, but they may worse at discriminating features on faces. This process is called-perceptual tuning.
Though the baby cameras could not tell us more things, but parents will be happy to record their babies world through the cameras.
2’05
Venter introduced a future of precise biological engineering to readers in his new book, and he had scientific chops to back up these claims.
And then the article mentioned how Venter processed his experiment and the meaning of the experiment.
6’07
Dogs and wolves evolved from a common ancestor.
Scientists used an experiment and found out dogs were more similar with each other than with wolves.
With the research goes further, the study paints a complex picture of domestication.

ieveline

Speak
first round, did not get the general idea.
Second  study use mouse training to get general mouse skill,
but it is not longtime skill got.

Speed
1--02:28 scientist try to test a theory that brain get heavier
when one is listening music or watching video.
The test shows there is circulation of blood. It moves in and out,
then new blood moves in.

2--01:53 The scale changes seems very tiny.
But MRI does help scientist more to understand how brain works.

3--02:49 Baby sees a lot of faces in the beginning of his/her life.

4--01:56 At the beginning, babay just to discrimniate different faces.
Then baby gets the store of all  more familiarand more important faces,
she losts the ability to discriminate the rest ones.

The camara also reflect other side of baby.

5--01:49 This artial talks about the meaing of a found of scientist.

Obstacle
06:06
Study genomes of modern dogs and wolves