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Cassidy大洁洁

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Part I: Speaker

Synthetic Fabrics Host More Stench-Producing Bacteria
You've probably noticed that synthetic t-shirts stink more after a workout, compared to cotton. But hey—it's not the fabric's fault. It's the microbes that hang out on synthetics, that create that characteristic stench. That's according to a study in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology. [Chris Callewaert et al: Microbial odor profile of polyester and cotton clothes after a fitness session]

Twenty-six volunteers—half men, half women—worked out on spinning bikes for an hour. And they did so outfitted with shirts of cotton, polyester, or a cotton/synthetic blend. Then researchers stuffed the sweaty shirts into plastic bags. The next day, a trained panel sniffed them, rating their funk. Unlucky job. Because yes—the polyester shirts were indeed more musty, sour, and ammonia-like than the cotton.

DNA analysis revealed that Micrococcus bacteria were to blame. They aren't actually all that common in the armpit itself. And they don't flock to cotton. But researchers say they thrive on the open-air lattice of synthetic fibers—where they sit chomping on the long-chain fatty acids in our sweat, turning them into shorter, stinkier molecules.

These findings might just explain one of the most vexing questions of adolescence: why do stinky shirts smell so unpleasantly different from the body odor in the armpits themselves? Could be because your favorite shirt has a microbiome of its own.

Source: Scientific American
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/synthetic-fabrics-host-more-stench-producing-bacteria/

[Rephrase 1, 1:38]

Cassidy大洁洁

Part II: Speed

Animal source of Ebola outbreak eludes scientists
By Tina Hesman Saey | 2:30pm | August 11, 2014

[Time 2]
Along with struggling to stem the deadly outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, scientists are racing to figure out where it came from. The outbreak came as a surprise because the strain that is killing people in urban areas in West Africa had previously  struck people in rural, forested parts of Central Africa.

If researchers can figure out which animal carries Zaire ebolavirus, and how the virus made the leap to people in West Africa, they may be able to suggest strategies to prevent or contain future outbreaks.

The outbreak started last December in a village in the rainforest of eastern Guinea. At first, no one recognized the disease as Ebola. Symptoms of Ebola can resemble those of many other diseases, and Ebola had never been seen in West Africa before.

So far fruit bats have taken the brunt of the finger pointing as the possible source of the outbreak, says Kevin Olival, a disease ecologist at EcoHealth Alliance in New York City. Some of the evidence implicating bats comes from a study in the April Viruses by Olival and David Hayman of Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand. The researchers mapped the ranges of fruit bat species that might carry Ebola or related viruses. Some of the bats’ ranges include both West African and Central African countries such as Democratic Republic of the Congo, where Ebola has appeared in the past. The finding opens the possibility that the virus could have traversed vast distances via bats.  
[248 words]

[Time 3]
Still, Olival says, “the evidence is scant that bats are to blame for the West African outbreak.”

Other animals may also pass along the disease. Great apes and species of forest-dwelling antelope may catch Ebola and infect hunters or anyone who eats tainted bush meat, he says.

Hoping to find the animal source, in April, Fabian Leendertz, an epidemiologist and disease ecologist at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, led a 17-member team to Guinea. The group collaborated with ecologists who monitor forest animals and captured bats for testing. He declines to reveal his unpublished findings, but he says there were no obvious epidemics among animals that might have spread the Ebola virus to humans. “We didn’t stumble across any dead animals,” he says.

But that doesn’t rule out local animals as a source of the outbreak. Even though the team pulled together quickly and got its start just a month after the World Health Organization’s first alert on the outbreak, “We were still three months late,” Leendertz laments. “Many things may have changed in the meantime.”

The disease may have burned itself out already within the forest animals; migratory animals carrying the virus may have moved out of the area; or other environmental changes, such as rising or falling moisture levels, may have affected the spread of the virus.

Leendertz thinks one bad bush meat carcass may have sparked the current epidemic. Bats, great apes, other primates and antelopes known as duikers are commonly eaten but also are among the animals most likely to be infected with Ebola, he says. The Guinean government banned eating bush meat at the end of March, but by that time, the disease was already spreading among people.
[284 words]

[Time 4]
In the case of bats, Olival says, people could have come into contact with an infected animal’s urine, feces or saliva. As West Africa rainforests are cleared to make way for farms and housing, people may have begun to interact more with bats because the animals may turn to houses as roosting places when trees are destroyed, Olival says.

If bats turn out to be the virus carriers, he says, “the right answer is never to kill all the bats.” That would be an ecological disaster because bats pollinate plants and devour insects. Bat hunts would also only increase human contact with potentially infected animals.

Instead, researchers need to learn more about the environmental and biological conditions that lead to outbreaks. For instance, researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that bats in caves in Uganda, where, in 2007 and 2008, miners and tourists had contracted the related Marburg virus, give off more virus during twice-yearly birthing seasons.

Most human cases of the disease coincided with those birthing seasons, the researchers reported in PLOS Pathogens in 2012. If fruit bats in West Africa follow a similar pattern, one way to avoid exposure to Ebola would be simply to steer clear of bats during birthing seasons, Olival says.
The Ebola epidemic may have started with a single interaction between a person and an infected bat or bush meat, but researchers agree that humans brought Ebola out of the rainforest to cities. People catch the virus after coming into contact with infected body fluids and then pass the disease on to others through close contact.
[267 words]

Source: ScienceNews
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/animal-source-ebola-outbreak-eludes-scientists

Killer bug behind coconut plague identified
By Nsikan Akpan | 8:00 AM | August 18, 2014

[Time 5]
Old-school taxonomy has solved a case of mistaken identity involving an insect pest threatening the coconut industry in the Philippines, the world’s No. 2 producer, scientists report July 23 in Agricultural and Forest Entomology.

Stopping the pest requires knowing the right perp. When the first of an estimated 1.2 million coconut palms started dying five years ago, authorities in the Philippines initially blamed an insect called Aspidiotus destructor. This pest has caused prior coconut die-offs in Indonesia. But researchers’ detective work led them to conclude that a closely related bug, A. rigidus, has been doing the dirty work.

The true killer A. rigidus, an invasive species, has few native enemies in the Philippines. It also lives 1.5 times as long as the wrongly accused A. destructor. Transferring an A. rigidus predator – a type ofladybug -- from its native habitat quelled an outbreak that hopped between Indonesian islands in 2005. The study authors believe this tactic could end the infestation in the Philippines.

Five years ago, flat circular bugs called scale insects began sapping life from coconut trees in the Philippines. As many as 60 million of the insectscan encrust the lower leaf surfaces of a single tree. “The infestation rate was so fast that the local government was caught flat-footed, and poor farmers lacked the resources to cope,” says entomologist Candida Adalla of the University of the Philippines Los Banos College of Agriculture, a coauthor of the study.
[238 Words]

[Time 6]
Covering 10 percent of the nation’s land area, farmed coconuts are the Philippines’ leading agricultural export and supply half the world’s coconut oil.

Fruit yields have plummeted. If the pest continues unabated, the Philippines could lose 60 percent of its coconut crop, denting its $1 billion in annual export earnings, according to Philippines government estimates.

Insect biosystematist Gillian Watson of the California Department of Food and Agriculture in Sacramento thought A. destructor an unlikely culprit.

“A. destructor has lived in the Philippines for over 100 years and has been controlled by natural predators for a very long time,” says Watson, who led the study. Adalla shipped Watson preserved samples of the insect affecting Philippine coconuts.

By comparing the insects to specimens kept in California and London, Watson learned that A. destructor stood falsely accused. She examined scale insects gathered across Southeast Asia, looking for subtle differences in shape and flexibility.

The correct identification of scale insects almost always depends on morphological details, says evolutionary ecologist Penny Gullan of the Australian National University in Canberra, who wasn’t involved in the study. Limited DNA information exists for the approximately 7,500 scale insect species, making genetic identification impractical, Gullan continues.

Watson discovered that the true culprit wasn’t A. destructor. The insects causing the coconut die-off carry a more rigid cuticle, she found, pointing toward its ID as A. rigidus. In pictures of the scale insect taken in the Philippines, she discovered a crescent shape in the laid eggs, another characteristic of A. rigidus.

Scale insects kill coconut palms by injecting a chemical that destroys the chlorophyll in their leaves, leaving the plant unable to absorb energy from sunlight. Both A. destructor and A. rigidus have caused coconut plagues in Indonesia, although flare-ups involving the latter happen less often, with decades passing between occurrences.
[300 words]

source: ScienceNews
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/killer-bug-behind-coconut-plague-identified?mode=topic&context=60

Cassidy大洁洁

Part III: Obstacle

In innovation quest, regions, seek critical mass
By Antonio Regalado | July1, 2013

[Paraphrase 7]
There is a spot just off the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that is home to what may be the world’s densest concentration of startup companies. There, near the edge of Kendall Square, the founders of more than 450 startups crowd into nine floors. Some occupy common rooms where the rule is “Grab any seat you can.”

On a heat map of innovation, the place is glowing bright red. Sharing the same elevator banks are venture capital firms that collectively manage funds totaling $8.7 billion. Fifteen years ago, the local tech scene was anemic and there were few investors. Now Kendall is a beacon that’s drawing more and more technology companies. Amazon has moved a mobile development team to the area, Google has expanded quickly into new buildings, and drug companies are piling in, too.

Kendall has become what economists call a cluster, a concentration of interconnected companies that both compete and collaborate. There’s economic value in that, as the price of office space attests: rents have spiked to $70 per square foot from half that a decade ago, similar to what you’d pay in midtown Manhattan. “Rents don’t lie,” says Tim Rowe, head of the Cambridge Innovation Center, the shared office space where most of the startups are located.

There’s value to the region as well. Cities used to try to win jobs by “smokestack chasing,” or luring big industries. But large existing firms tend to shed jobs, research has found. At least in the United States, net job growth comes from startup companies, especially the kind that explode from a few employees to several thousand. In technology, those winners have a way of producing more winners. The process reaches critical mass in the web of intertwined companies, resources, advantages, ideas, talent, opportunity, and serendipity that defines a technology cluster.

It’s clear that what’s essential is proximity to human talent and new ideas. Jean-François Formela, a venture capitalist at Atlas Venture who invests in early-stage biotechnology startups, says he visits Boston-area academic labs several times a week, trying to find the next invention that he can license and turn into a company. And because there are so many PhDs and MDs in the area, he can start a company and build a team remarkably fast. “People don’t even have to change buildings,” he says. “They just switch floors.”

The big questions in this month’s MIT Technology Review Business Report are why technology clusters arise and what the ingredients are to create one. Unhappily for regions that have spent billions attempting to become the next Silicon Valley, the answers to these questions are still in debate. “Clusters exist—it’s empirically proven,” Yasuyuki Motoyama, a senior scholar at the Kauffman Foundation, told me. “But that doesn’t mean governments can create one.”

What’s certain is that they are trying. The largest such effort we know of is the Skolkovo complex outside Moscow, where $2.5 billion is being invested in a university, a technology park, and a foundation. Another, in Waterloo, Ontario, aims at gaining a lead in a particular advanced technology, quantum computing. The price tag there: more than $750 million.

The problem for governments is that they often try to define where and when innovation will occur. Some attempt to pick and fund winning companies. Such efforts have rarely worked well, says Josh Lerner, a professor at Harvard Business School. Governments can play a role, he says, but they should limit themselves mostly to “setting the table”: create laws that don’t penalize failed entrepreneurs, reduce taxes, and spend heavily on R&D. Then get out of the way.

Still, there’s no recipe that guarantees success. One reason is that some hard-to-copy ingredient—a fluke of history or culture—often helps explain the vibrancy of a technology hub. Take Israel, where per capita venture capital investment is the highest of any country. Most young people go through compulsory military service, where they are exposed to advanced technology and learn teamwork. Google chairman Eric Schmidt, after visiting last summer, was impressed by Israel’s unique “live for today” attitude toward taking entrepreneurial risks.

Even so, a wider group of cities and regions now aspire to become technology hubs. One reason is that the Internet has spread both the ideology of startup culture (you, too, can be Mark Zuckerberg) and the means of participating through apps and Web software. Now every place from Chile to Iceland to Adelaide, Australia, seems to have created a startup program in an effort to jump-start its own technology scene without expensive laboratories or even a top university.

One proponent of this idea is Brad Feld, a partner at Foundry Group and a creator of the technology company accelerator TechStars, who developed what he calls the “Boulder Thesis” based on his experiences in Colorado. It is a four-point plan for how entrepreneurs—not governments or universities—can organize and create what he terms “entrepreneurial communities” in any city. Feld says the startup movement is now an “enormous global community with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of people around the world.”

But can entrepreneurs succeed in creating clusters where governments have had so much difficulty? “The conflict now is between two logics on how to create an ecosystem,” says Fiona Murray, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School, who consults as a kind of therapist to clusters, including London’s TechCity. One is “a government logic that says it’s too important to leave to entrepreneurs, and that you that need specialized inputs, like a technology park.” The other is “purely focused on people and their networks.”

Murray believes the answer lies somewhere in the middle. Governments are good at organizing but poor at leading. One popular approach these days is to pair entrepreneurship programs with urban revitalization projects. In this issue, we visit Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, who is trying to morph Las Vegas’s depressed downtown into a scene for startups. He’s trying to make it a cool place to be, and because Las Vegas is so spread out, he’s reserved 100 Tesla electric sedans to ferry entrepreneurs around town. That way, he says, he’ll increase the odds of serendipity.

The risk of all these plans is that economists still don’t agree on exactly what levers must be pulled to create a technology cluster. But there is one finding they agree on. Centers of innovation do move, sometimes rapidly, and they tend to go where the latest mousetrap was invented. Boston gave up its lead in computing to Silicon Valley in the 1980s, after the personal computer was developed. But who knows? One of those 450 startups in Kendall might just hit upon something big. That’s a reason that any place can still hope—with a few decades of effort, and plenty of luck—to become a Silicon Valley too.
[1158 words]

source: MIT Technology Review
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/516501/in-innovation-quest-regions-seek-critical-mass/

psychoarya

time2+time3+time4 5:41

Scientists want to find the source of Ebola. The scientists could come up with strategies if they figure out the source.

The possible sources of Ebola, such as fruit bat, local animals and bush meat.

The government prohibited people from eating bush meat, but it was too late.

The right to solve the problem is not to kill all the bats.

Scientists also wanted to study the environmental and biological conditions that lead to outbreaks. during bat’s birthing season, the virus spreads more quickly.

time5+time6 4:02

scientists have solved the problem of mistaking the previous killer for the true killer.

At first, scientists fought the natural predator would stem the population of A. destructor. However, there are more and more dead coconut trees.

Then thanks to detailed observation and genetic analysis, scientists finally find the true killer- A. rigid us.

obstacle 7:53

450 star-ups are gather in Kendall. the benefits Kendall receives from such movement.

the reasons why governments always fail  to develop a successful tech company.

Internet is the most possible reason why more cities are becoming tech hubs.

an approach is to connect entrepreneur with local place. instance: Zappos and Las Vegas.

the tech hub is constantly moving.

洋沫沫

2'02
2'22
2'20
2'11
3'29
Obstacle:10'09
Kendall becomes a startup hub.
the hub has many benefits for both government and entrepreneurs.
how startup hub can be created?
some economists don't agree that the hub can be built intentionally and thinks that it grows up naturally.
culture is more important, example: Israel
some people try to build the startup hub, having some impact. example: Las Vegas.
Finally, economists agree that things changes quickly. any city can be the next Silicon Valley.

cyndichiang

Speaker:
A study shows that synthetic fabrics contain more bacteria than cotton does

Time2 0'51''
Time3 1'31''
Time4 2'12''
Ebola virus may come from fruit bats by studying their flying ranges in Africa
The possiblity that other animals account for the infection of ebola cannot be eliminated,such as bush meat form other animals.
If fruit bats are the answer to the origin of ebola, hwo to cope with them

TIme5 0'59''
Time6 1'55''
A. rigidus,a bug was discovered to be the true killer of the coconuts'
A study showed that A distructor was falsely accused

Obstacle; 8'06''
Kendall is a setup hub,which many companies compete and collaborate
Advantages and dasadvantages
The idea  the government cannot garuantee to create the one since it occured naturally
Reason: hard to copy ingredients
The risk of planning a urban revitalization by creating tech cluster

cynthia.bai

Time2 248words 1min35
Researches try to find out the source of Ebola- bat, they began experiment

Time3 284words 2min17
The research has been too late. the disease has spread out, making it hard to find the source.
Current outcome: no obvious epidemics spread from animals to humans;  L thinks one bad bush meat may trigger the epidemic.

Time4 267words 2min16
Rainforest→farms→bat near to ppl, but it is bad to kill off bats. Researchers find out bat carry disease when in birth seasons→ measure: ppl keep away from bats when they in birth seasons

Time5 238words 2min22
Scientists find out the source of large-scale dead coconut palms in Philippines---A.r, an invasive species

Time6 300words 2min36
The financial loss of died coconut trees is huge. A.d is not blamed( at first the local govern blame this species), instead A.r. A.r carry a chemical, which prevents trees from absorbing energy.

小蘑菇开始打怪

谢谢Cassidy&Going~
-------------

Speaker:

Smell on cloth

Fabrics,micrococcus bacteria, microbiome

Time7:

Innovation

Small technologycompanies->big companies, eg…

Human talent&newideas

Government

Economists’sconcerns

cherry6891

41-10
Thanks ~jiejie & going
time2
Ebola may be carried for long distance by bats from conga
Time3
A research team with epidemiologist and disease ecologist came to Ginl to find out the virus-carrier animal,but they miss out the best timing
Time4
If bats carry the virus,don't kill all bats because they pollinate plant and devour insects. Just steer clear of bats at birthing season.one agreement is that humans bring virus from rainforest to cities
Time5
Killer bug threaded the coconut industry is virus. Before a insect are blamed mistakenly
Time6
The correctly identify culprit by morphological method
Both insect and virus lead to the production decrease but the way they work is different

Obstacle
Densest startups located in K, the companies compete and collaborate with each other. U can find the specialist and create a company quickly.
Why technology cluster raise and what is the ingredients to create one?
Governments efforts of trying to create one is invain and no recipe guarantee the success.
The reason why government can not create a startups cluster like K

Still it is hard for me to grasp the logical line of this article... Read it again later

Doris800

Time 2 1'05
Researchers are trying to find out which animal carries out a virus.
Time 3 1'41
An ecologist with a group start an experiment to prove whether bat is the one to blame.
Time 4 1'52
Further research is still needed. And if bats are the virus carriers, people should not kill all of them because...

Time 5 1'39
People blamed the wrong insect of killing coconut in Philippines.
Time 6 2'02
The lost in coconut industry of Philippines is huge. Scientists compare reasons of coconut dead in different areas to solve the problem.

Obstacle 7'54
Values to cluster and region
Questions that still debated are why technology clusters arise and what the ingredients are to create one.
There are some difficulties for the governments, and the entrepreneurs.
Economists are agreed that centers of innovation do move...