【Native Speaker每日综合训练—36系列】【36-04】科技

cherry6891

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

Part I: Speaker

Chilly, Chilly, Little Star

Call this story, “A star is stillborn.”

The object is a brown dwarf, which started off the same way that more conventional stars form, but which lacked the mass required for nuclear fusion to ignite and radiate starlight. What resulted was a body somewhere in between a star and a planet.

It was spotted recently by NASA’s WISE and Spitzer space telescopes. And it’s been dubbed WISE J085510.83-071442.5. So let’s not say its name again, okay?

At only about three to 10 times the mass of Jupiter, this WISE guy is small even for a brown dwarf. It’s the fourth-nearest star system, just 7.2 light-years away. And it’s freezing—about as cold as the North Pole. K.L. Luhman, Discovery of a ~250 K Brown Dwarf at 2 pc from the Sun, in Astrophysical Journal Letters]

Temperatures on this body range from a frosty minus 54 to plus 9 degrees Fahrenheit. For comparison, the sun’s surface is a toasty 10,000 Fahrenheit.

Noticing such a cold object in space that radiates almost no light would be impossible with visible-light telescopes. Its dim thermal glow was just barely discernible to the infrared eyes of WISE and Spitzer. And its name ensures mostly continued anonymity.

Source:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/cold-brown-dwarf/


[Rephrase 1      1:27]

cherry6891

Part II: Speed

Article2

Exoplanet spin measured for first time

Time2
Astronomers have measured the rotation of an exoplanet for the first time. A day on the planet Beta Pictoris b is roughly eight hours long — shorter than on any planet in our solar system, the researchers report in the May 1Nature.

Beta Pictoris b orbits a young star 63 light-years away in the constellation Pictor. To measure the planet’s rotation, Ignas Snellen, an astronomer at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, and colleagues analyzed the planet’s spectrum. The spectrum reveals certain wavelengths of light that are absorbed by carbon monoxide in the planet’s atmosphere. By measuring how much the absorbed wavelengths are Doppler shifted by the rotating atmosphere, the researchers determined how quickly the planet spins.

In our solar system, more massive planets spin faster. Beta Pictoris b, which is about 11 times as massive as Jupiter and roughly 1.65 times as wide, continues that trend, with a spin of 25 kilometers per second. But Snellen’s team expects that the young exoplanet — a mere 21 million years old — will pick up even more speed as it ages. The planet will contract and spin faster, much like figure skaters who pull in their arms to twirl more rapidly. [207]

Source:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/exoplanet-spin-measured-first-time

Article 3

Viruses buoy life at hydrothermal vents

Time3
In the deep, dark ocean, viruses have won safe harbor through thievery.

With stolen genes that make sulfur-digesting enzymes, viruses provide metabolic backup to bacteria feasting on the sulfur plumes of hydrothermal vents, researchers propose May 1 in Science. In return, the viruses secure a host in the harsh depths of the sea.

Though the oceans are rife with bacteria-infecting viruses, called bacteriophage, researchers know little about the ones that invade sulfur-oxidizing bacteria. These bacteria are key sources of energy for organisms that live in hydrothermal vents. But the bacteria are difficult to study because they don’t grow in labs.

Geomicrobiologist Gregory Dick of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and colleagues spotted the genetic looters in samples from vents in the western Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of California. By sequencing DNA in each sample, the team found the genomes of sulfur-oxidizing bacteria and 18 types of viruses.

Fifteen of these viruses, the researchers found, had snatched and held onto bacterial genes involved in converting elemental sulfur to sulfite, a necessary step in energy production. By toting these filched metabolism genes, the authors suggest, the viruses bolster the host bacteria’s energy output. [198]
Source:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/viruses-buoy-life-hydrothermal-vents?mode=topic&context=60

Article 4

The gene patenting decision from a plaintiff’s point of view

Time4
Arupa Ganguly is pleased with the outcome of her day in court. “I’m ecstatic,” she says. “I feel like a tiger that has been released from a cage.”
Ganguly, who directs the Genetic Diagnostic Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania’s hospital in Philadelphia, is one of numerous plaintiffs who sued a company calledMyriad Genetics over patents the corporation held on genes that raise breast cancer risks. On Thursday the Supreme Court unanimously decided the case in her favor.

In 1995, Ganguly and Haig Kazazian, now of Johns Hopkins, began offering DNA tests to determine whether women carry faulty copies of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, which raise the risk of developing breast cancer. In 1998, Myriad sent the Penn group a letter demanding it cease and desist the testing. Myriad owned the patent on breast cancer genes, the letter said, and nobody else had the right to examine those genes even if they were using methods different from those Myriad uses. In 1999, the group got another more strongly worded letter that Penn’s own patent lawyers urged them to heed. Ganguly and Kazazian stopped their testing.

“I hope no other lab director will ever get a letter like that,” Ganguly says. “It took the ground out from under my feet.”
Myriad’s patent claim meant that doctors could not look for mutations in the breast cancer genes except by ordering the company’s test. They also could not pass along information gleaned by accident when sequencing a person’s entire genome, unless they paid Myriad, says Ada Hamosh, a clinical geneticist at Johns Hopkins University. The company also locked away data on the mutations that strike the breast cancer genes, she says. Doctors need to know that kind of information in order to determine how a mutation is likely to affect a patient’s health.   [323]


Time5
In 2008, Ganguly and Kazazian signed on to an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit against Myriad, and other researchers followed.
This year on April 15, Ganguly hopped an early morning train to Washington and sat in the courtroom as the justices heard the case. “It was pretty clear to me that it would go our way,” she says. She never suspected it would go so far in her favor, though.

In a rare unanimous decision, the Supreme Court ruled June 13 that naturally occurring genes are not eligible for patent protection. The court also said that companies can patent synthetic versions of genes known as cDNAs. That bit of the ruling has researchers, investors and just about everyone else scratching their heads a bit.

In their natural form, genes are composed of DNA, the chemical units of which are designated by the letters A, C, G and T. Some combinations of those letters can produce proteins, which do much of the work inside cells. The strings of letters used to build proteins are arranged along a chromosome in chunks called exons, and interspersed by bits of DNA called introns, which don’t encode proteins. It is as if sheets of nonsense text were stuck between the pages of an instruction manual. Cells copy the entire gene — nonsense text and all — and then discard the extraneous information, stitching the exons into a coherent protein-building blueprint called messenger RNA, or mRNA. Other cellular machinery reads the mRNA and constructs proteins accordingly.

In the laboratory, scientists and technicians can isolate the mRNA and make a DNA copy of that molecule. The result is a cDNA, or complementary DNA. Because cells don’t normally make cDNAs, the court decided that those synthetic molecules are fair game for patenting.
Only Justice Antonin Scalia expressed any doubts about the decision — he agreed that genes can’t be patented but was a little fuzzy on the molecular biology.[329]

time6
It turns out that Scalia was right to express a little skepticism, says Kazazian. Nature makes cDNAs, too. Retroviruses, such as HIV, store their genetic information as RNA and then have to make DNA copies of themselves — for all intents and purposes cDNAs — that will then be inserted into the host’s genome. And the human genome contains more than8,000 natural cDNAs, which are (mostly) now-defunct copies of genes known as processed pseudogenes.

The provision on cDNAs was probably included to appease the biotechnology industry, but it’s not clear how the decision will affect research on these quirky components of the genome or on retroviruses.

Striking down gene patenting opens the way for other companies and researchers like Ganguly to develop a wide variety of tests for breast cancer risks and other diseases. Many of the tests may be cheaper than Myriad’s $3,000 offering.

“Everybody gets to do business now,” says Hamosh. “It’s an open market.”
Meanwhile, Myriad still has protection for the methods it uses to test the genes, and probably gets to retain the database of information it has amassed about mutations.

“Because of that database it could be that Myriad won’t lose much business,” Kazazian says.
Although he is delighted that companies can no longer patent genes, the ruling doesn’t benefit him personally and he has no plans to test breast cancer genes again. “It’s been nearly 15 years. I’m not going to go back and do this.”

Both sides are claiming that the verdict as a victory (even though it is clear the decision breaks Myriad’s hold on the genes). But Ganguly says that people at risk of genetic diseases are the biggest winners because they will have more than one company to turn to for testing. And they may not have long to wait; the afternoon after the ruling came down, a company called GeneDX announced that it would begin BRCA1 and BRCA2 testing later this summer. [349]
Source:
https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/deleted-scenes?mode=topic&context=60

cherry6891

Part III: Obstacle

A Cambrian moment

ABOUT 540M YEARS ago something amazing happened on planet Earth: life forms began to multiply, leading to what is known as the “Cambrian explosion”. Until then sponges and other simple creatures had the planet largely to themselves, but within a few million years the animal kingdom became much more varied.

This special report will argue that something similar is now happening in the virtual realm: an entrepreneurial explosion. Digital startups are bubbling up in an astonishing variety of services and products, penetrating every nook and cranny of the economy. They are reshaping entire industries and even changing the very notion of the firm. “Software is eating the world,” says Marc Andreessen, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist.

This digital feeding frenzy has given rise to a global movement. Most big cities, from Berlin and London to Singapore and Amman, now have a sizeable startup colony (“ecosystem”). Between them they are home to hundreds of startup schools (“accelerators”) and thousands of co-working spaces where caffeinated folk in their 20s and 30s toil hunched over their laptops. All these ecosystems are highly interconnected, which explains why internet entrepreneurs are a global crowd. Like medieval journeymen, they travel from city to city, laptop not hammer in hand. A few of them spend a semester with “Unreasonable at Sea”, an accelerator on a boat which cruises the world while its passengers code. “Anyone who writes code can become an entrepreneur—anywhere in the world,” says Simon Levene, a venture capitalist in London.

Here we go again, you may think: yet another dotcom bubble that is bound to pop. Indeed, the number of pure software startups may have peaked already. And many new offerings are simply iterations on existing ones. Nobody really needs yet another photo-sharing app, just as nobody needed another site for pet paraphernalia in the first internet boom in the late 1990s. The danger is that once again too much money is being pumped into startups, warns Mr Andreessen, who as co-founder of Netscape saw the bubble from close by: “When things popped last time it took ten years to reset the psychology.” And even without another internet bust, more than 90% of startups will crash and burn.

But this time is also different, in an important way. Today’s entrepreneurial boom is based on more solid foundations than the 1990s internet bubble, which makes it more likely to continue for the foreseeable future. One explanation for the Cambrian explosion of 540m years ago is that at that time the basic building blocks of life had just been perfected, allowing more complex organisms to be assembled more rapidly. Similarly, the basic building blocks for digital services and products—the “technologies of startup production”, in the words of Josh Lerner of Harvard Business School—have become so evolved, cheap and ubiquitous that they can be easily combined and recombined.

Some of these building blocks are snippets of code that can be copied free from the internet, along with easy-to-learn programming frameworks (such as Ruby on Rails). Others are services for finding developers (eLance, oDesk), sharing code (GitHub) and testing usability (UserTesting.com). Yet others are “application programming interfaces” (APIs), digital plugs that are multiplying rapidly (see chart 1). They allow one service to use another, for instance voice calls (Twilio), maps (Google) and payments (PayPal). The most important are “platforms”—services that can host startups’ offerings (Amazon’s cloud computing), distribute them (Apple’s App Store) and market them (Facebook, Twitter). And then there is the internet, the mother of all platforms, which is now fast, universal and wireless.

Startups are best thought of as experiments on top of such platforms, testing what can be automated in business and other walks of life. Some will work out, many will not. Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, calls this “combinatorial innovation”. In a way, these startups are doing what humans have always done: apply known techniques to new problems. The late Claude Lévi-Strauss, a French anthropologist, described the process as bricolage(tinkering).

Technology has fuelled the entrepreneurial explosion in other ways, too. Many consumers have got used to trying innovative services from firms with strange names (which, unavoidably, will abound in this special report). And thanks to the web, information about how to do a startup has become more accessible and more uniform. Global standards are emerging for all things startup, from programming tools to term sheets for investments, dress code and vocabulary, making it easy for entrepreneurs and developers to move around the world.
Invent yourself a job

Economic and social shifts have provided added momentum for startups. The prolonged economic crisis that began in 2008 has caused many millennials—people born since the early 1980s—to abandon hope of finding a conventional job, so it makes sense for them to strike out on their own or join a startup.

A lot of millennials are not particularly keen on getting a “real” job anyway. According to a recent survey of 12,000 people aged between 18 and 30 in 27 countries, more than two-thirds see opportunities in becoming an entrepreneur. That signals a cultural shift. “Young people see how entrepreneurship is doing great things in other places and want to give it a try,” notes Jonathan Ortmans of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which organises an annual Global Entrepreneurship Week.

Lastly, startups are a big part of a new movement back to the city. Young people increasingly turn away from suburbia and move to hip urban districts, which become breeding grounds for new firms. Even Silicon Valley’s centre of gravity is no longer along Highway 101 but in San Francisco south of Market Street.

Describing what sorts of businesses these startups engage in would at best provide a snapshot of a fast-moving target. In essence, software (which is at the heart of these startups) is eating away at the structures established in the analogue age. LinkedIn, a social network, for instance, has fundamentally changed the recruitment business. Airbnb, a website on which private owners offer rooms and flats for short-term rent, is disrupting the hotel industry. And Uber, a service that connects would-be passengers with drivers, is doing the same for the taxi business. [1074]

So instead of outlining what these startups do, this special report will explain how they operate, how they are nurtured in accelerators and other such organisations, how they are financed and how they collaborate with others. It is a story of technological change creating a set of new institutions which governments around the world are increasingly supporting.

Startups run on hype; things are always “awesome” and people “super-excited”. But this world has its dark side as well. Failure can be devastating. Being an entrepreneur often means having no private life, getting little sleep and living on noodles, which may be one reason why few women are interested. More ominously, startups may destroy more jobs than they create, at least in the shorter term.

Yet this report will argue that the world of startups today offers a preview of how large swathes of the economy will be organised tomorrow. The prevailing model will be platforms with small, innovative firms operating on top of them. This pattern is already emerging in such sectors as banking, telecommunications, electricity and even government. As Archimedes, the leading scientist of classical antiquity, once said: “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the Earth.” [208]

Source:
http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21593580-cheap-and-ubiquitous-building-blocks-digital-products-and-services-have-caused

hysteries

哇哈哈哈哈哈终于又沙到发了(´>∀)人(∀ﾟ )ﾉ
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【Speaker】
A freezing brown dwarf between star and planet which is actually stillborn and has no visible light for observation.

【Speed】
time6         00:01:30.06       
time5         00:01:41.19       
time4         00:01:32.32       
time3         00:01:08.90       
time2         00:01:06.80       

【Obstacle】
00:06:27.26

wangweiyi5332

Speaker
Recently researchers have discovered a new celestial body whose mass lies between a star and planet .it is small even for a brown dwarf. This small object has a quite freezing surface that radiates almost no light. This phenomenon  reflects that the NASA's wise telescope is quite a smart technological equipment.
Timer2 1:14
Astronomers have measured the rotation of an exoplanet for the first time.By measuring how much the absorbed wavelengths are shifted by the rotating atmosphere,the researchers determined how quickly the planet spins.
Timer3 2:22
researchers have found a new type of viruses whose stolen genes helped it live in a host in the deep harsh sea.
Timer4 2:16
A women sued a company who own the patent of  the breast cancer gene  and banned any use of it ,and the result came to what the women want.
Timer5 2:33
with rare unanimous decision,the Supreme Court ruled that the naturally occurring genes are not eligible for patent protection.
Timer6 2:13
Although Surprume Court ruled that the natural genes are not eligible for patent protection, there are still some suspiction .Beacuse the CDNA exists in nature and also can be synthesised . the success of charge can best benefit the people who suffer breast cancer.

hemodata

赶上！练习完睡觉

Speaker: recently, an objective was spotted by NASA telescopes. This object is between a star and a planet, since the mass of it is too small to generate fusion and its temprature is very low as well.

SSS本身的小结，其中sit是熟词偏意：

A brown dwarf only about three to 10 times Jupiter's mass couldn'tget fusion goingand now sits/ to be situated or located / freezing in space, inthe nearby galactic neighborhood.

疏离无罪

占~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~·

Speaker: NASA recently discover a stillborn star which is a brown dwarf.It is between a star and a planet.It's is cold and dark.

01:01
Recently a group of astronomers succeeded to measure the rotation of an exoplanet for this first time.Describe their method.In our own solar system,the massive the planet is,the faster it spins.

01:08
The key energy resource in the at hydrothermal vents of deep,dark ocean is from the sulfur-oxidizing bacteria.And the main process of producing energy is helped by viruses.

01:57
A case about the breast cancer gene patent.The company who has the patent banned other researchers to study this gene by any kinds of method.And at this time.these scientists have won the lawsuit.

01:54
The superme court ruled that genes are not eligible for patent protection.But cDNAs can be protected by patent,because it is artifical.However a justice this is fuzzy in biology.

01:39
The justice's idea may be right.Because the nature and human body also make cDNAs.And we still do not know whole of our DNA and cDNAs.How this judgement will affect the gene research in the future is still unknown.But it is no doubt that the market will open and people who have gene disease can benefit from this.

09:30
Main Idea: the entrepreneurial explosation in digital business
Now there is an entrepreneurial explosation.More and more digital start-ups are emerging.Software is reshaping many industries and raise the global movement.Many sizeable startup colonies are built to help start-ups.Anyone who can code now can be an entrepreneur.
Some people may think the current situation is like that of ten years ago.The internet bust will be a risk.However it is different now.Today's boom has a more solid fundation and building blocks:the snippest of free code and easy-to-learn programming framworks,many platforms that can help host and market start-ups.And consumers got used to try innovative services,which is a good market enviornment.Information about how to do a start-up is abundant on th internet.The economic and social enviornment urges people to join or be a start-ups instead of finding a good job.These digital start-ups are changing the strucutre built in old age.
Start-ups run on hype.It can be a advantage and also can be a shortage.The future model may be platforms with small, innovative firms operating on top of them.

xiaofan0205

占位~~~~~~

Speaker:
Recently NASA's WISE and Spitzer space telescopes spotted a brown dwarf, which was a body somewhere in between a star and a planet. It lacked the mass required for nuclear fusion to ignite and radiate starlight, and the temperatures on this body is very low. Such a cold object in space that radiates almost no light would be impossible with visible-light telescopes.

Time2: 1'22"
Astronomers have measured the rotation of an exoplanet for the first time. A day on the planet Beta Pictoris b is roughly eight hours long. By measuring how much the absorbed wavelengths are Doppler shifted by the rotating atmosphere, the researchers determined how quickly the planet spins.

Time3: 1'31"
In the deep, dark ocean, viruses have won safe harbor through thievery. But the bacteria are difficult to study because they don’t grow in labs. The research team spotted the genetic looters in samples from vents in the western Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of California, and found the genomes of sulfur-oxidizing bacteria and 18 types of viruses.

Time4: 2'10"
Time5: 2'35"
Time6: 2'08"
Ganguly is one of numerous plaintiffs who sued a company called Myriad Genetics over patents the corporation held on genes that raise breast cancer risks. On Thursday the Supreme Court unanimously decided the case in her favor.
In a rare unanimous decision, the Supreme Court ruled June 13 that naturally occurring genes are not eligible for patent protection.
Both sides are claiming that the verdict as a victory, even though it is clear the decision breaks Myriad’s hold on the genes. But Ganguly says that people at risk of genetic diseases are the biggest winners because they will have more than one company to turn to for testing.

cherry6891

Speaker: a dwarf ,which is 3 times of Jupiter,is between a star and a planet. The cold object radiates nothing. But its thermal glow was discernible to the eyes

Obstacle:8’20’’/ 1282

The new starups for now resembles the period of Cambrian moment,but few of them can last long

The difference between the 1999 internet bubble and this internet boom?

The reason why people like to start their business and what will be the result

Because of the economic crisis it is hard for who were born after 1980 to find a job

Time2  1’20’’

Scientists hav measured the rotation of an exoplanet by analyzing the planet’s atmosphere

Time3 1’40’’

Bacteriophage are rife with bacteria-infecting virus. That virus stolen genes that make sulfur-digesting enzymes to back up the bacteria feasting on sulfur stuff

Time4 2’40’’

G sued the company M that own the patent of gene related breast cancer

She got a letter form M that she need to buy the company’s test if she want to look for mutations in the breast cancer genes

Time5 6 4’46’’

In supreme court the court decided that the company can patent synthenic moleculaes --cDNA

Then he explained how genes work in cell and why only cDNA is synthenic

But S rebuted that nature makes cDNA --HIV virus that store information as RNA and make DNA copies by themselves

菜农人民

一做科技就死···

Time2 1:28
How the astronomers have measured the day of BPb

Time3 1:52
Geomicrobiologists have found that viruses live in a host deep oceans.

Time4 2:40
G won his case about examing the test of DNA which could raise breast cancer risks.

Time5 2:27````

Time6 3:02

Obstacle 7:34
some thing about social network````  T-T