【Native Speaker每日综合训练—39系列】【39-05】 科技

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公益申请名额，每月一名

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Part I: Speaker

Urban Growth Defines This Century
How existing cities expand and new cities emerge will determine how humanity fares in the 21st century. David Biello reports

More than half of the world's seven billion people live in cities, 54 percent to be specific, or 3.9 billion people. That's according to new figures released by the United Nations on July 10th.
Cities in China, India and Nigeria, the world’s first, second and seventh most populous countries, are expected to grow the most by 2050.
India alone will add more than 400 million people to its cities, or the equivalent of 20 Mumbais, just in the next three decades. By 2030, New Delhi is likely to have 36 million residents.
How these cities in Asia and elsewhere grow and get built will determine how humanity fares in the 21st century. Housing, energy and transportation are all major challenges, whether in sprawling megacities or relatively small towns of a million or so inhabitants.
The health and environmental consequences of wasteful infrastructures could be devastating. Cities are now responsible for more than 70 percent of the greenhouse gases causing global warming, which has impacts on everything from growing food to water supplies. And most at risk from sea level rise are all those folks in coastal cities. The future is urban—for better or worse.

—David Biello

Source: Scientificamerican
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/urban-growth-defines-21st-century/

[Rephrase 1, 1:36]

zxppx

Part II: Speed

Mars probe to get rare view of comet
BY Alexandra Witze | 14 July, 2014

[Time 2]

Astronomers will have a virtual front-row seat to study a pristine comet in October, when it squeaks past Mars and a flotilla of spacecraft orbiting the red planet. NASA scientists are finalizing their plans to observe the rare event.

On 19 October, Comet Siding Spring will swoop just 135,000 kilometres above the Martian surface. That’s less than half the distance between Earth and the Moon. And because the comet is on its first trip to the inner Solar System, the gas and dust that have been frozen to its surface for billions of years are finally warming up and spraying off.

“This is our first chance to see the nucleus of a long-period comet up close,” says Richard Zurek, chief scientist for the Mars programme office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “Mars will be right at the edge of the debris cloud.”

Zurek leads a team that has been analysing whether dust particles flying off the comet could damage spacecraft around Mars. Three probes currently orbit the red planet (NASA’s Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and the European Space Agency’s Mars Express), and two more are slated to arrive in September (NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission and India’s Mars Orbiter Mission). Cometary dust is zipping towards Mars at a relative speed of 56 kilometres per second — fast enough to ding protective shielding.

[230 words]

[Time 3]

But observations this spring from the Hubble Space Telescope, the asteroid-hunting Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer spacecraft, and other telescopes show that the comet is not spewing out quite as much debris as astronomers had feared, says Zurek. New modelling studies suggest that the most dangerous period will come about 1.5 hours after the comet’s closest approach to Mars, when the planet whizzes within just 27,600 kilometres of the comet’s path. During the most crucial half-hour when the comet dust comes fast and furious, all the orbiters will hunker down on the other side of Mars.

MAVEN, which was built to study the Martian atmosphere, is planning to take science data two days before and two days after the comet’s closest approach. Its ultraviolet spectrometer will take images and spectra of the comet, and other instruments will monitor any changes in the upper atmosphere before and after the comet hits. It’s possible that the comet may dump enough hydrogen into the atmosphere to be seen, says mission leader Bruce Jakosky, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

“It’s going to be a spectacular data set,” he says. Jakosky spoke to Nature during a Mars conference this week in Pasadena, California.

As seen from the Martian surface, the comet’s dust cloud will cover a huge amount of sky. The Opportunity and Curiosity rovers will attempt to take pictures of it, but it will be daytime from the rover perspective. They may have a shot at seeing meteors the night before or after the comet passes, Zurek says.

Discovered in January 2013 by astronomers in Australia, Comet Siding Spring is on its first trip to the inner Solar System. More than a million years ago, gravitational interactions probably kicked it out of the frigid cometary reservoir at the edge of the Solar System known as the Oort cloud. It has been travelling towards the Sun since; after this pass it won’t return for about 1 million years.

[330 words]
Source: nature
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2014/07/mars-probe-to-get-rare-view-of-comet.html


Hardcore pot smoking could damage the brain's pleasure center
BY Lizzie Wade  | 14 July, 2014

[Time 4]

It probably won’t come as a surprise that smoking a joint now and then will leave you feeling … pretty good, man. But smoking a lot of marijuana over a long time might do just the opposite. Scientists have found that the brains of pot abusers react less strongly to the chemical dopamine, which is responsible for creating feelings of pleasure and reward. Their blunted dopamine responses could leave heavy marijuana users living in a fog—and not the good kind.

After high-profile legalizations in Colorado, Washington, and Uruguay, marijuana is becoming more and more available in many parts of the world. Still, scientific research on the drug has lagged. Pot contains lots of different chemicals, and scientists don’t fully understand how those components interact to produce the unique effects of different strains. Its illicit status in most of the world has also thrown up barriers to research. In the United States, for example, any study involving marijuana requires approval from four different federal agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Administration.

One of the unanswered questions about the drug is what, exactly, it does to our brains, both during the high and afterward. Of particular interest to scientists is marijuana’s effect on dopamine, a main ingredient in the brain’s reward system. Pleasurable activities such as eating, sex, and some drugs all trigger bursts of dopamine, essentially telling the brain, “Hey, that was great—let’s do it again soon.”

Scientists know that drug abuse can wreak havoc on the dopamine system. Cocaine and alcohol abusers, for example, are known to produce far less dopamine in their brains than people who aren’t addicted to those drugs. But past studies had hinted that the same might not be true for those who abuse marijuana.

[292 words]

[Time 5]

Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Bethesda, Maryland, decided to take a closer look at the brains of marijuana abusers. For help, she and her team turned to another drug: methylphenidate (aka Ritalin), a stimulant known to increase the amount of dopamine in the brain. The researchers gave methylphenidate to 24 marijuana abusers (who had smoked a median of about five joints a day, 5 days a week, for 10 years) and 24 controls.

Brain imaging revealed that both groups produced just as much extra dopamine after taking the drug. But whereas the controls experienced increased heart rates and blood pressure readings and reported feeling restless and high, the marijuana abusers didn’t. Their responses were so weak that Volkow had to double-check that the methylphenidate she was giving them hadn’t passed its expiration date.

This lack of a physical response suggests that marijuana abusers might have damaged reward circuitry in their brains, Volkow and her team report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Unlike cocaine and alcohol abusers, marijuana abusers appear to produce the same amount of dopamine as people who don’t abuse the drug. But their brains don’t know what to do with it. This disconnect could be “a key mechanism underlying cannabis addiction,” says Raul Gonzalez, a neuropsychologist at Florida International University in Miami who was not involved with the research. The study “suggests that cannabis users may experience less reward from things others generally find pleasurable and, contrary to popular stereotypes, that they generally feel more irritable, stressed, and just plain crummy. This may contribute to ongoing and escalating cannabis use among such individuals.”

[278 words]

[Time 6]

But do marijuana abusers smoke a lot because they feel crummy, or do they feel crummy because they smoke a lot? Volkow doesn’t know. Not being able to tease out cause and effect “is a limitation in a study like this one,” she says. Perhaps the abusers already had less reactive dopamine systems and started smoking a ton of pot to cope with their general malaise. Or maybe prolonged marijuana abuse is actually damaging their brains’ reward circuitry, leading to the apathy and social withdrawal that marijuana abusers often experience.

The lessons for recreational users of marijuana, if any, are unclear. This study used “hardcore volunteer” who were “using quite a lot of cannabis,” says Paul Stokes, a psychiatrist at Imperial College London who wasn’t involved in the research. As such, “it probably tells you more about cannabis dependence than about recreational use.” But when he did a similar brain imaging study of people who smoked marijuana no more than once a week, he observed “similar themes” when it came to dopamine.

All of these are important questions to answer, Volkow says. As availability of the drug increases, she says, it’s something “we all need to know.”

[200 words]
Source: new.sciencemag
http://news.sciencemag.org/brain-behavior/2014/07/hardcore-pot-smoking-could-damage-brains-pleasure-center

zxppx

Part III: Obstacle

First Modi budget spells austerity for Indian science
Funding drops in real terms, but researchers hopeful things will improve.
BY K. S. Jayaraman | 11 July, 2014

[Paraphrase 7]

The Indian government's first budget has not delivered the good days, or achhe din, promised by new prime minister Narendra Modi. A below-inflation funding increase has disappointed scientists, but many are optimistic that the government will come up with the funds eventually.

Finance minister Arun Jaitely presented the 2014–15 budget on 10 July, just 45 days after the formation of the government. He tempered expectations by saying that it would be wise not to expect much in the face of a two-year slowdown in the Indian economy. And indeed, research received 362.69 billion rupees (US$6.04 billion): a 4% increase over last year, compared with inflation of 8% (see 'Budget allocations').

The Department of Science and Technology (DST) has been given 35.44 billion rupees — an 11% jump — but other ministries have fared less well. For example, the allocation for the Department of Biotechnology has risen by just 0.9%, at 15.17 billion rupees. Space and atomic energy each saw roughly a 6% rise in this year's budget.   

Inadequate funding
"I was expecting much more from the Modi government," says C. N. R. Rao, who was head of the Scientific Advisory Council to former prime minister Manmohan Singh. Rao has repeatedly blamed poor performance by Indian scientists on “inadequate” funding. "I'm upset that no new national mission has been announced for energy or water management," he told Nature.

"The budget does not present any exciting new possibilities for education in general and for science and technology in particular," says Subhash Lakhotia, a biologist at Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi.

However, Jaitely did announce funding for two new agricultural-biotechnology research hubs; a national centre for Himalayan studies; huge solar-power plants; and canal-side solar parks that will each produce 1 megawatt of electricity.

He also announced cash to set up five new research and education centres in the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) group, five new Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and four institutions similar to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi.

Rao is sceptical. "Existing IITs are in bad shape and they need strengthening instead of creating new ones,” he says.

Lakhotia agrees: "Hundreds of existing universities and colleges are languishing in the absence of resources and material, as well as good faculty.”

International collaborations
The frugal spending this year is raising doubts over the fate of several big-money projects that were earlier approved by the government's Planning Commission but are awaiting funding from the DST and the Department of Atomic Energy.

These include a 4.6-billion-rupee supercomputer facility, a 13.24-billion-rupee underground India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO), the US$250-million Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory to be set up as an Indo–US venture, and the Indian Synchrotron for Materials and Energy Research, which is estimated to cost 7 billion rupees.

In addition, India is expected to provide funds for its part in international science collaborations including the Thirty Metre Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii; the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope in Australia and South Africa; and the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research near Darmstadt, Germany.   

But despite budget concerns, many in the science community remain hopeful. Krishnaswamy VijayRaghavan, secretary of the DST, says that people should not worry about a budget prepared "under difficult circumstances". The figures will be revised in September when departments make their mid-term revisions of requirements, and more money will be found, he says. "After all, these programmes are spread over time. I am optimistic."

Naba Kumar Mondal, spokesperson for the INO project, agrees: "I expect a breakthrough by September."

And Narayanaswami Balakrishnan, who heads the supercomputer project at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, is also stoical. "There will be a delay, but our project will come through," he says.

[618 words]
Source: nature
http://www.nature.com/news/first-modi-budget-spells-austerity-for-indian-science-1.15542

小蘑菇开始打怪

嗯哼占座~~THX ppx！~~
-------------
先写上点儿免得被删。。

speaker:

the population of the urban is going to increase

the challenge of healthcare and traffic need to be solved

the future of urbane, good or bad

time2:

analyzing whether dust particles flying off the comet could damage spacecraft around Mars

time3:

collect data to monitor the change of comet

the dust of comet will cover a huge amount of sky

time4:

people can get access to marijuana easier

abuse marijuana may bring bad influence on dopamine which is responsible for creating feelings of pleasure and reward

time5:

marijuana abusers produce the same amount of dopamine but they do not know how to react on it

they may not feel the happiness and pleasure as the people do not use the drug

time6:

the scientist cannot tease out the relationship between cause and effect

another research show a similar brain imaging of people use marijuana no more than once a week

time7:

the scientific department does not get enough funding from the government

some plans of new research

despite budget concerns, many in the science community remain hopeful

疏离无罪

板凳~~~~~~~~

Speaker: More people will go to cities in the future few decades,especially in Asia.And the increase of urban population may be a disaster.But it still unknown whether it will be better or worse.

01:01
A good chance to observe the nucleus of a long-period comet.And scientists worried that the dust particles flying off the comet could damage spacecraft around Mars.

01:43
New data showed that it won't affect those spacecraft servely as feared before.Scientists want to study how this comet will influence the Mars.This comet won't return in 1 million years.

01:28
New study found that abusing pot may make people react less strongly to the chemical dopamine,which is responsible for creating feelings of pleasure and reward.

01:38
Marijuana abusers might have damaged reward circuitry in their brains,which makes them feel more irritable, stressed, and just plain crummy.

01:05
Whether these people damage their reward system first than abuse pot or damaging the system by abusing pot is still unknown,which is the limitaion of the test.

02:50
The newly released 14-15 Budget showed the cut in fund for education in general and for science and technology.Though the budget has some plans in building some new buildings and facilitis for science,most scientists thought that it is meaningless and not proper.And this budget showed more international corporation in many aspects.Some sceintists are optimistic to this budget because it still can be changed before it is really started.

Yvonne52585

首页~~~好久没占了~~我来了~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
time 2  1:10
a rare phenomenon that the distance of two comets shorten caused some influences.

time 3  1:17
the deep influences of the rare phenomenon

time 4  1:32
Smoking a lot of marijuana is bad for your brain.

time 5  1:11
Marijuana weakern a physical response of the brains of abusers.

time 6  1:11
the function of these drugs are under research.

obstacle 3:23
austerity  紧缩，朴素，严厉
Main idea: India's scientific funding is required more
Struture:
* overall situation of India's budget
* India's scientific areas need more funding.
  Instead of building more new department,improving the quality of existed ones is more important.
* Even though the funding is inadequate, the international collaborations are not decreased, and what's more, with a well prospect.

ffffionabear

感谢楼主~占ˋ( ° ▽、° ) (o(￣▽￣///(!!)今天把作业都补齐o(￣ヘ￣o＃)  
————感谢！！！嘿~你的作业~不，是你的作业~(￣_,￣ ) ~~~#作业天天见~~#~~~进击的阅读小分队~~~\(^o^)/~——————————————————
[speaker]
70% people live in cities.Cities are not only defines our culture and humanity,but also healthy and environment,thinking about the greenhouse gas we create which will cause global warming.The future is urban for better or worse.
[speed]
1'38
There will be a great event for astronomers that a Comet Siding will swoop above Mars,and its dust it spray off will certainly ding Mars' shielding.
1'42
But the telescopes show that the comet is further than scientists expect,and during the most crucial time,all orbiters will be on the other side of Mars.However,the data we get will be spectacular.
2'33
Study shows that drug,Cocaine and alcohol abusers have a less sensitive brain that produce far less dopamine which enable us to feel pleasure.
2'12
Both groups(controls experienced and the marijuana abusers) produced much extra dopamine after taking drug,but unlike the controls experienced which feel exciting,the marijuana abusers are just dumb,they might have damaged pleasure circuit in their brain.
1'06
The study still has limitation for that we don't know the cause and effect between the drug and being apathy.
[obstacle]
4'19
main idea:The Modi government's first budget disappointed the public for that the Indian economy did not alter for the better from shutdown.
reasons:inadequate funding--the budget doesn't focus on education or technology sides.
against:Some are optimistic for that they believe government will increase funding and those subjects already funded will benefit the whole India society.It's just a matter of time.

TaoRs92

首页~~~thx!

A comet will enter the solar system and be very close to Mars.
Preparation to observe the comet.
The comet's icy surface will warm up.
Study to try to figure out whether the dust of the comet will impact the spacecrafts around Mars.
---------------
The dust the comet will produce will not be as much as scientist feared. Details about how will the comet pass Mars.
This will be a spectacular data set.
The introduction and discovery of this comet.
--------------
New finding--smoking M too much can damage brain's D, which is responsible for creating pleasure.
The study towards drugs don't catch up with the speed they spread. Difficult to study. Much permission needed.
Important question--how does drug work on our brain?
Old view--some may produce less pleasure in people who are addicted to them than those who are not. But M maybe not. Really?
---------------
Study:
Use Me to make the experiment.
Finding:
Brains of people in both teams produce D.
But M abusers didn't experience many physical changes that non M abusers had.
Conclusion:
M abusers' reward circuitry were damaged.
-----------------
Limitation of this study--A leads to B or B leads to A? Unclear.
Another experiment--use people smoke M for less than a week as subjects. Similar results.
Questions remain to answer.
---------------
The first budget for science in India is not very good. Disappointed some, but many feel optimistic.
Not enough funds--
Funds for science and education are inadequate.
Launch for new programs.
But need to strengthen rather than create new.
International collaborations--
Funds for international programs.
Good expectation.
Optimistic, figures will rise in September and revive.

公元前334

T2-T6：1:45，2:45，2:40，2:10，1:25

Nice article about marijuana, the logical flow is cohesive, raising Q-answer Q relation is also good, thx!

cherry6891

39-05
Time2 -3
Astronomers got a chance to see comet close
They will wait there to watch the comet closest the Mars and also it is the dangerous part
They will collect spectacular data set

Time4
Marijuana abuser are blunt to the dopamine reaction
Marijuana involving studies need approval of four agencies which are barriers to study
Time5
The study found that both teams produce same dopamine but the team who took M  had less physical reaction
Scientists hypnosis that it may damage the reward circuitry in the brain
Time6
The limitation of this study is that it is hard to tease out the cause and effect

Obstacle
India government allocated a blew-inflation fund to science field which made the scientists angry
How to spend the money?
To set up new research center, build agriculture biotech centers and strength international collaboration