【Native Speaker每日综合训练—34系列】【34-18】科技

cherry6891

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

Hi 大家好! 这是神马节奏啊，一不小心把应该周一发的帖子发表了，本来是因为楼主要出差，怕周一来不及发帖，哎，发帖不易，且发且珍惜，赶紧占座哈，给各位一直泡在CD小伙伴的福利，微博周一发，哈哈！

Part I: Speaker

Illustrated Story Teaches Young Kids Natural Selection

Seven- and eight-year-olds successfully learned basic evolution concepts via a story illustrating differential reproduction rates of fictional animals due to selection pressures. Karen Hopkin reports

Once upon a time, there was an animal called a pilosa that caught insects with its trunk. Some pilosas had wide trunks. Others had skinny trunks. When habitat changes caused their dinners to tunnel underground, pilosas with wide trunks began to starve and die. The pilosas with thin trunks could still reach the bugs. So they stayed healthy and had babies that also had thin trunks. Eventually, all pilosas had skinny trunks and they lived happily ever after. Or they might have, if they were real.


Pilosas were made up by researchers who were exploring whether kids could grasp the concept of natural selection. They found that parables like the plight of the pilosa enabled even kindergartners to get evolution. The study is in the journalPsychological Science. [Deborah Kelemen et al, Young Children Can Be Taught Basic Natural Selection Using a Picture-Storybook Intervention]


Children enjoy explanations, so much so they often invent their own—like, giraffes must grow long necks so they can reach high branches. But after reading about the pilosa, all of the seven- and eight-year olds in the study could correctly explain that the species changed over time because the better-adapted creatures outreproduced those that were less fit.

Maybe early exposure to such complex concepts could help science literacy evolve.


Source:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/kids-learn-natural-selection/
[Rephrase 1, 1:15]

cherry6891

Part II: Speed

Article2

Lost sleep could mean lost neurons

Time2
Most of us wish we got more sleep. Every night, something — whether it’s children, work or the Internet — seems to keep us up late. Sometimes it keeps us up all night. Often we comfort ourselves with the thought that if all else fails, we can make it up with a few solid nights of sleep on the weekend.

But new research shows that the brain may not be as forgiving as we hoped. While a few extra hours on the Internet may be absolved, all-nighters like those associated with shift work (not to mention parenting) may end up killing off neurons.

There is no question that sleep is important. It cleans our brain cells and helps consolidate our memories. Lack of sleep is blunts our ability to focus, makes us dangerousdrivers and can make us eat too much. Jing Zhang and her
colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia were interested in the effects of sleep loss on the brain. “Many of us have pulled long nights and/or all-nighters, and we think we’re OK,” says Sigrid Veasey, a neurobiologist at Penn and coauthor on the study. “But what is the effect? Is there a compensatory mechanism? Or does the brain pay a price for repeated sleep loss?”

The researchers were particularly interested in the locus ceruleus, an area of neurons deep in the brain stem. The locus ceruleus plays an important role in attention, “fight or flight” and our sleep-wake cycles. But the locus ceruleus is also very sensitive to stress. And late nights can make those cells very frazzled indeed.

To examine how the brain might respond to decreased sleep, Zhang and colleagues put mice in new, interesting environments with other mice to play with and plenty of things to explore. With this mouse playground, the researchers could keep the animals up far past their bedtimes. The scientists looked at mice with normal sleep schedules, mice that stayed up three hours later than normal and mice with a night-shift schedule kept awake during the day for three days straight. In all cases, the mice could get as much sleep as they wanted during the night, their normal active period.

In a paper published March 19 in the Journal of Neuroscience, Zhang and her group showed that three hours of lost sleep in the mouse playground produced an increase in Sirtuin3, or SIRT3, a protein in a cell’s mitochondria. SIRT3 has a lot of functions, and one of them is reducing chemicals called reactive oxygen species. These molecules are capable of binding to and disrupting all sorts of cellular processes. ROS are a natural by-product of a cell’s daily life, but too many accumulating in the cell can get dangerous as the molecules bind to normal proteins, causing damage and eventually cell death.[484]

Time3
By increasing SIRT3 protein when mice stay up late, the brain cells in the locus ceruleus are ready to deal with the ROS. But when the mice partied all night long, the situation reversed. SIRT3RNA levels went down, while ROS levels continued to increase. With three days of eight-hour sleep deprivation, the neurons in the locus ceruleus actually began to die. Napping didn’t make up for the sleep lost.

SIRT3 appears to be a key protein for protecting neurons from damage from ROS molecules during late nights. In mice lacking the gene for the SIRT3 protein, even three hours of sleep deprivation resulted in neuron injury from ROS.

“We didn’t think the brain got injured from sleep loss,” Veasey says. “Now we know it does.” She explains that the next step will be to see if there is similar damage in humans who have done large amounts of shift work, perhaps by examining post-mortem brains. Veasey also plans to see if increasing SIRT3 can protect against the effects of all-nighters.

While it is interesting to see a new role for SIRT3 in sleep, Matthew Hirschey, a cell biologist at Duke University, says that it’s not necessarily surprising. “SIRT3 is a mitochondrial protein, he says, “and mitochondrial function touches so much of biology.” In addition, because every cell in the body has SIRT3 in its mitochondria, increasing SIRT3 might have more effects than protecting your neurons from a late night.  “Generally,” Hirschey says, “it appears to be a good thing, but some cancer cells have high SIRT3 as well.”

It will also be important to see if the locus ceruleus can recover from neuron loss, and if it even matters. Zhang’s group did not run behavioral studies to see if the sleep-deprived mice had deficits in attention or memory, or if these reversed with recovery sleep. They also don’t know if neuron loss continues over long-term shift work, or if the brain can adjust. But Veasey says the current findings are scary enough: “All of us in the lab take sleep a lot more seriously than we used to!”[371]

Source:
https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/scicurious/lost-sleep-could-mean-lost-neurons

Article 3

The Human Nose Can Distinguish Between One Trillion Different Smells

New research says our olfactory system is far more sensitive than we thought

Time4
You may have heard this one before: Humans, especially compared to animals such as dogs, have a remarkably weak sense of smell. Over and over again, it's reported that we can only distinguish between about 10,000 different scents—a large number, but one that's easily dwarfed by that of dogs, estimated to have a sense of smell that's 1,000 to 10,000 times more sensitive than ours.


It may be indisputable that dogs do have a superior sense of smell, but new research suggests that our own isn't too shabby either. And it turns out that the "10,000 different scents" figure, concocted in the 1920s, was a theoretical estimate, not based on any hard data.

When a group of researchers from the Rockefeller University sought to rigorously figure out for the first time how many scents we can distinguish, they showed the 1920s figure to be a dramatic underestimate. In a study published today in Science, they show that—at least among the 26 participants in their study—the human nose is actually capable of distinguishing between something on the order of a trillion different scents.

"The message here is that we have more sensitivity in our sense of smell than for which we give ourselves credit," Andreas Keller, an olfactory researcher at Rockefeller and lead author of the study, said in a press statement. "We just don't pay attention to it and don't use it in everyday life."

A big part of the reason it took so long to accurately gauge our scent sensitivity is that it's much more difficult to do so than, say, test the range of wavelengths of light the human eye can perceive, or the range of soundwaves the human ear can hear. But the researchers had a hunch that the real number was far greater than 10,000, because it was previously documented that humans have upwards of 400 different smell receptors which work in concert. For comparison, the three light receptors in the human eye allow us to see an estimated 10 million colors. [342]

Time5
Noting that the vast majority of real-world scents are the result of many molecules mixed together—the smell of a rose, for instance, is the result of 275 unique molecules in combination—the researchers developed a method to test their hunch. They worked with a diverse set of 128 different molecules that act as odorants, mixing them in unique combinations. Although many familiar scents—such as orange, anise and spearmint—are the results of molecules used in the study, the odorants were deliberately mixed to produce unfamiliar smells (combinations that were often, the researchers note, rather "nasty and weird").

By mixing either 10, 20 or 30 different types of molecules together in varying concentrations, the researchers could theoretically produce trillions of different scents to test on the participants. Of course, given the impracticality of asking people to stand around and sniff trillions of small glass tubes, the researchers had to come up with an expedited method.

They did so by using the same principles that political pollsters use when they call a representative sample of voters and use their responses to extrapolate to the general population. In this case, the researchers sought to determine how different two vials had to be—in terms of the percentage of different odorant molecules between them—for participants to generally tell them apart at levels greater than chance.

Then the work began: For each test, a volunteer was given three vials—two with identical substances, and one with a different mixture—and asked to identify the outlier. Each participant was exposed to about 500 different odorant combinations, and in total, a few thousand scents were sniffed.

After analyzing the test subjects' success rates in picking the odd ones out, the authors determined that, on average, two vials had to contain at least 49 percent different odorant molecules for them to be reliably distinguished. To put this in more impressive words, two vials could be 51 percent identical, and the participants were still able to tell them apart.

Extrapolating this to the total amount of combinations possible, merely given the 128 molecules used in the experiment, indicated that the participants were able to distinguish between at least a trillion different scent combinations. The real total is probably much higher, the researchers say, because of the many more molecules that exist in the real world.

For a team of scientists that have devoted their careers to the oft-overlooked power of olfaction, this finding smells like sweet vindication. As co-author Leslie Vosshall put it, "I hope our paper will overturn this terrible reputation that humans have for not being good smellers." [442]

Source:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/

Article 4

When stressed, the brain goes ‘cheap’

Time6
When we’re not under pressure, we have time to reflect on the best course before making a decision. In times of stress, however, we fall back on quick and dirty decision making. A new study attempts to clarify how stress changes the way we perform working memory tasks.


Say you are thinking of getting a new car. You have a car but it’s getting old, and it’s time to move on. You might examine different models, check out the miles per gallon in hybrids, save up money and look at different financing methods.


Then your car breathes its last. You can’t get to work. You can hitch a ride for a few days, but you have to do something. Screw miles per gallon and financing. You run out and buy the car you can get the quickest, just like you did the last time this happened. It’s barely within your budget and it’s not as ecofriendly as you’d hoped. It’s probably not what you would have picked when you had ample time to consider. Is it the best decision?


That example shows two different kinds of decision making. Model-based decision making takes all the options into account. You examine the potential consequences of actions, look around at the environment and study all the possibilities. Model-free decision making is more “primitive” in style. Instead of carefully evaluating all the possible choices and outcomes, you just go with what worked best last time. Model-based decision making takes more focus and thought, while model-free decision making takes less. [273]

Source:

https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/scicurious/when-stressed-brain-goes

cherry6891

Part III: Obstacle

Ten Ancient Stories and the Geological Events That May Have Inspired Them

Myths have fed the imaginations and souls of humans for thousands of years. The vast majority of these tales are just stories people have handed down through the ages. But a few have roots in real geological events of the past, providing warning of potential dangers and speaking to the awe we hold for the might of the plan


These stories encode the observations of the people who witnessed them, says geoscientist Patrick Nunn, of the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia, who has studied the links between natural hazards and stories told in the Pacific.

There's no way of telling which came first, the disaster or the story. But tales can provide clues to the past and even help fill in gaps in scientific knowledge about long-ago geological phenomena.

Here are ten ancient stories from around the world and the geology that may have influenced them:

Noah's Ark

In the well-known story told among Christians, Jews and Muslims (and in movie theaters this week), God chose to destroy the Earth with a great flood but spared one man, Noah, and his family. On God’s command, Noah built a huge boat, an ark, and filled it with two of every animal. God covered the Earth with water, drowning everyone and everything that once roamed the land. Noah, his family and the animals on the ark survived and repopulated the planet.

Science: Similar flood tales are told in many cultures, but there never was a global deluge. For one, there’s just not enough water in the Earth system to cover all the land. But, Nunn says, “it may well be that Noah’s flood is a recollection of a large wave that drowned for a few weeks a particular piece of land and on that piece of land there was nowhere dry to live.” Some geologists think that the Noah story may have been influenced by a catastrophic flooding event in the Black Sea around 5,000 B.C.

There’s a natural tendency for people to exaggerate their memories, to turn a bad event into a far worse one. And a global flood is one explanation for something like the discovery of fossil seashells on the side of the mountain, says Adrienne Mayor, a historian of ancient science at Stanford University. We now know, though, that plate tectonics are responsible for lifting up rocks from the ocean floor to high elevations.

The Oracle at Delphi

In ancient Greece, in the town of Delphi on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, there was a temple devoted to the god Apollo. Within a sacred chamber, a priestess called the Pythia would breathe in sweet-smelling vapors emanating from a crack in the rock. These vapors would send her into a state of frenzy during which she would channel Apollo and speak gibberish. A priest would then turn that gibberish into prophesies.

Science: The temple was a real place, and scientists have discovered two geologic faults running beneath the site, now in ruins. Gas was likely emanating from those fissures when the oracle was in action. But researchers have been arguing over the contents of the euphoria-causing gaseous mix. Theories include ethylene, benzene or a mix of carbon dioxide and methane.

Atlantis

Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher, wrote of a great civilization called Atlantis founded by a race of people who were half god and half human. They lived in a utopia that held great naval power. But their home, located on islands shaped like a series of concentric circles, was destroyed in a great cataclysm.

Science: Atlantis probably wasn’t a real place, but a real island civilization may have inspired the tale. Among the contenders is Santorini in Greece. Santorini is now an archipelago, but thousands of years ago it was a single island—a volcano named Thera. Around 3,500 years ago, the volcano blew up in one of the biggest eruptions in human history, destroying the island, setting off tsunamis and blowing tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere where it lingered for years and probably caused many cold, wet summers. Those conditions would have ruined harvests in the region and are thought to have contributed to the quick decline of the Minoans, who had dominated the Mediterranean from nearby Crete.

The city of Helike in Greece has also been suggested as inspiration for Atlantis. The ancient metropolis was wiped off the map by an earthquake and tsunami in December of the year 373 B.C.

Pele, Goddess of Kilauea

Pele came to Hawaii with her sisters and other relatives. She started in Kauai. There she met a man, Lohi’au, but she did not stay because there was no land hot enough for her liking. She eventually settled in the crater at Kilauea on the big island of Hawaii and asked her sister Hi’iaka to return for Lohi’au. In return, Hi’iaka asked that Pele not destroy her beloved forest. Hi’iaka was given 40 days for the task but did not return in time. Pele, thinking that Hi’iaka and Lohi’au had become romantically entangled, set the forest on fire. After Hi’iaka discovered what had happened, she made love to Lohi’au in view of Pele. So Pele killed Lohi’au and threw his body into her crater. Hi’iaka dug furiously to recover the body, rocks flying as she dug deeper. She finally recovered his body, and they are now together.

Science: What seems like a celestial soap opera actually describes volcanic activity at Kilauea, say scientists. The burning forest was probably a lava flow, the largest the island experienced since its settlement by Polynesians. Lava flowed continuously for 60 years in the 15th century, covering some 430 square kilometers of the island of Hawaii. “If any flow were to be commemorated in oral tradition, this should be the one, because the destruction of such a large area of forest would have impacted Hawaiian life in many ways,” U.S. Geological Survey volcano scientist Donald A. Swanson wrote in the Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research in 2008. Hi’iaka’s furious digging may represent the formation of the volcano’s modern caldera that occurred in the years after the lava flow.

Rama's Bridge

In the Hindu epic the Ramayana, Sita, the wife of the god Rama, is kidnapped and taken to the Demon Kingdom on the island of Lanka. Bears and monkeys help Rama and his brother Lakshman by building a floating bridge between India and Lanka. Rama leads an army of monkey-like men and rescues his wife.

Science: Satellite images reveal a 29-kilometer line of limestone shoals that stretches between India and Sri Lanka that would have been drowned when sea level rose after the last ice age. It is possible that people were able to cross over the bridge until about 4,500 years ago. But Rama’s Bridge is not the only mythological site buried along India’s shores.

A more recent natural event, the tsunami in the Indian Ocean on December 26, 2004, revealed the truth of the legend of Mahabalipuram, a port city on India’s northeast coast that was said to be home to seven pagodas. Today, only one pagoda, the Shore Temple, exists. But the great tsunami removed centuries of sediment from the ocean floor just off the coast, revealing several submerged temples.[1251]

Source:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ten-ancient-stories-and-geological-events-may-have-inspired-them-180950347/

小蘑菇开始打怪

什么节奏！
------------
谢谢楼主！~

speaker:

children can learn natural selection even they are young through stories

time2:2:16

it is no use to stay up late in night and want to sleep in weekends to compensate the sleep time

if you stay up late for a long time, it may do harm to your brain

time3:2:21

napping do not make up for the sleep lost

the next step of the experiment is to see whether the result will happen in human brain

sleep lost will have influence on SIRT3 a kind of protein for protecting neurons from damage from ROS molecules during late nights

after the experiment, all the staff pay more attention to their sleep

time4:2:16

human can distinguish almost a trillion different scents by nose

the process of the experiment

time5:2:13

the vast majority of real-world scents are the result of many molecules mixed together

even use the same kind of molecules with just different mixed method,people can distinguish them

the different between two scents must over 49 percentages

there are even more scents we can distinguish because there are more molecules we do not know in the world

time6:1:16

when you feel stressed, you are more likely to make bad decision, for example the car story

there are two kinds of decision making model,one is model-based decision which will make the best decision after many consideration, the other is model-free decision making takes less thinking

time7:7:04

there are some links between the tales and geology, but it is difficult to distinguish

some stories the geology may influence on

the story of noah's ark, some exaggeration

a celestial soap opera actually describes volcanic activity

the great tsunami removed centuries of sediment from the ocean floor revealing several submerged temples

晓野的野

DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD
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掌管 5        00:01:33.04        00:10:57.25
掌管 4        00:02:35.62        00:09:24.20
掌管 3        00:02:05.73        00:06:48.57
掌管 2        00:01:59.74        00:04:42.84
掌管 1        00:02:43.10        00:02:43.10
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被主页菌催工了 T T
补完坑，跑步去勒

xiaofan0205

占个首页~~~

Speaker:
Children can learned basic evolution concepts via a story illustrating differential reproduction rates of fictional animals due to selection pressures. Use pilosas as an example, they could explain that the species changed over time because the better-adapted creatures outreproduced those that were less fit.

Time2: 3'08"
Time3: 2'01"
New research shows that lost sleep may end up killing off neurons.
There is no question that sleep is important. It cleans our brain cells and helps consolidate our memories. Lack of sleep is blunts our ability to focus, makes us dangerousdrivers and can make us eat too much.
We don’t know if neuron loss continues over long-term shift work, or if the brain can adjust, but the current findings are scary enough.

Time4: 2'02"
Time5: 3'08"
New research suggests that our olfactory system is far more sensitive than we thought.
Noting that the vast majority of real-world scents are the result of many molecules mixed together, so the pariticipants were asked to distinguish different vials in the study, and  two vials could be 51 percent identical, and the participants were still able to tell them apart.

Time6: 1'30"
Model-based decision making takes all the options into account.Model-free decision making is more “primitive” in style. Model-based decision making takes more focus and thought, while model-free decision making takes less

TaoRs92

谢谢！！速度的最后一篇好像以前读过？越障特别喜欢，准备找剩下的看看~~

time:2:33.17
Many people lose sleep and even choose to stay all night.But our brain will actually be harmed by this choice--our neutrons may be damaged.
Locus is sensitive to stress.Cells may receive harm because of lack of sleep.
Experiment to study the influence of losing sleep on our brain.Mouse lose three hours sleep--an increase of a protein S--S deals with ROS,which when exceed normal rate,will bond with other ones and damage cells.
_________________
time:1:48.73
But when the mouse stay all night,S will not have enough ability to deal with ROS,and ROS will damage neurons and cells of Locus.
Significance--losing sleep has damage to our brain.
Futher finding--cancer cells have high S.
Flaws and other things to be explored--whether brain can recover from the damage of locus.whether this is matter(no experiment to study whether those mouse lose memory or..).whether brain can adjust by itself.
_________________
time:1:32.49
Human nose is more sensitive than people usually think.From 10000 to a trillion different smells.The old one is only estimated number,not based on data.
Part of the reason why people didn't notice the possibility is that,it is more difficult to find out the exact number of smells human nose can distinguish,compared with the different light human eyes can seperate.
_________________
time:2:29.73
All things are combination of different molecules.Use combination,30 molecules can create much more mixture of smells.
Prcatical experiment--use probability and small samples to represent the general public.
Result--two vials 51% identical,people can still distinguish them.51% is the most identical rate--so human nose can at least distinguish a trillion different smells.
__________________
time:1:13.60
The example of choosing cars in two different situations--free time and stressed.
Two patterns of thinking:
model-based,take all options into account,need focus and thought
model-free,go for choices work best last time,take less focus and thinking
___________________
time:6:25.36
Tales and its related scientific evidence.
Noah's Ark--not a global flood,but a flood that drowned a particular piece of land--exaggerate.
Oracle in a temple--two faults in ruins,gas which its components are not fully discovered yet.
Atlantis--not a real place,but may be a real civillization that once existed and ruined by volcano erupption.
Pele and her sister--volcano activities,forest fire.
Rama's bridge--sea level rose and geological bridge.

yinghua9122

我说呢，怎么17没有，直接来了个18. 楼主辛苦，谢谢啦~~~~

Speaker
kids can understand complex concepts through your explaination. Researchers do a survey in the kidgarden, even 8 year old childen can get concept of evolution from the P- an animal- story.  P has two kinds of trunk, thin or wide, but after the environment changed, wide-trunk P couldn't get food, so they died. Thin-trunk P lived and have offsprings.

Article 2 4'28
There is no doubt that sleeping is important. But many of us who stay up or even not speep all night always have an idea that we can make it up in the later day. Now scientists have found that this idea is just a illusion. In the moce experiement, if mice are awake all night long, STR3 will get down, ROS increased, which will kill neurons cells later, and this situation can't be changed by napping.

Article 3 4'49
Human can distinguish one trillion dofferent smells. In the past, we think we can just distinguish 10,000 different scents, which is from satistics, not experiment or test. Now there are researchers do a experment to know the more exact number human can distinguish. This is a tough work.

Article 4  1'33
when our brain in stress, we always do model-free decisions which is not good enough, compared with the model-based decision.  We are forced to do the decision, because it's the ultimate time, we have no choices but to do.

Obstacle 8'02
美好的神话故事寓言故事，其实是在说真实的事，真实的灾难。
作者分别给出了5个故事，和5个对应的科学解释。

MAGGIEHE1993

首页！！！！！！！！！！！！！！！谢谢楼主~~~~~~~~~科技文看着轻松多了
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Speaker: By studying the living habits of pilosa, kids at kindergartners may be able to learn the natural selective process.

time2: 2min 56"
time3: 2min 19"
       Researchers have recently found that late night sleep deprivation can cause death of neurons. The expriments on mice
       have proven the finding. Further research is to be done to confirm whether human brain have the same mechenical
       as mice.
time4: 1min 47"
time5: 2min 33"
       Researchers have just found that human beings are able to distinguish a trillion of different smells, a finding that
       is very different from the estimate made in 1920s. Researchers used the extrapolate method and have found that human
       beings are more sensitive to odors than we thought to be.
time6: 1min 31"
       When we are under pressure, our brains are cheaper and make worse decision. The writer gave an example of making a
       car-buying decision. The example shows two different kinds of decision making: model-based decision and model-free
       decision.

Obstacle:  8min 27"
        The passage is about 5 myths and corresponding science explanation.

疏离无罪

这什么节奏。。。。

Speaker: New study shows that kids can learn the concept of natural selection much well by a story.

01:44
New study shows that decreasing in sleep may lead to the increase  of SIRT3,which can affect cell health,especially cells about the attention.

01:18
Decreasede sleep may increase SIRT3 and then decrease it sharply,which will make neuron be injured by ROS.Neuron may even die.Lack of sleep will harm our brain.

01:30
Human can distinguish more than one trillion scents.But we rarely use our ability in our daily life.And it is hard to test this ability as our vision and auditory.

01:35
Majority of scents are the mixture of may molecules.So with several molecules,scientists can creat many scents.Then describe the experiment made by researchers and how they get the conclusion.

00:39
Stress can relfect our performance greatly.People in high stress are more likely to make bad decisions.Stress can change our decision-make model.

05:31
Ten ancient tales that may influenced by ancient geological phenomena.These stories roots in realgeological events of the past.