【Native Speaker每日综合训练—46系列】【46-04】科技

Going · 发表于 2014-12-16 20:28:22

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Part I: Speaker

Blood Test Forecasts Concussion Severity
Levels of a protein fragment in the blood paralleled how long head injuries benched hockey players.
December 15, 2014 |By Ingrid Wickelgren

Confusion is one symptom of a concussion. But confusion may also characterize decisions about how soon to let an athlete play after taking a hit to the head. Sizing up symptoms such as dizziness and nausea is subjective, after all. Now a study suggests that a blood test could objectively determine whether or not the damage is bad enough to put a player on the bench. The work is in the Journal of Neurotrauma.

A strong blow to the head causes chemical changes within nerve cells that damage their structural proteins. Among the debris is a protein fragment called SNTF—which in more severe cases, spills into the bloodstream.

The new study followed 20 professional hockey players who got concussions with symptoms that lasted six days or more. And blood levels of SNTF were much higher one hour to six days later than were levels of the protein fragment in eight other athletes who had gotten concussions that cleared up within five days. Levels were also low in 45 non-concussed players tested during the pre-season.

A blood test for SNTF might thus forecast recovery time from a head injury. Combined with other neurological tests, levels of this molecule could help doctors tell athletes when it’s safe to suit up again.

Source: Scientific America
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/blood-test-forecasts-concussion-severity/

[Rephrase 1, 1:36]

Going · 发表于 2014-12-16 20:28:23

Part II: Speed

Entrepreneur Changes Life in Uganda by Turning Waste Into Fuel
Emerging Explorer Sanga Moses tackles social problems and deforestation with cooking briquettes.
Susan Daugherty Published December 15, 2014

[Time 2]
Sanga Moses grew up in bare feet in a small Ugandan village of thatched roofs that lacked electricity. Yet he became his clan's first college graduate and took a bank job in Kampala.

Returning home for a visit from the Ugandan capital in 2009, he met his 12-year-old sister on the road. "She stood there crying, with a heavy bundle of wood on her head," Moses remembers. "She was upset because, like most rural girls, she missed days of school each week searching for fuel wood."

"My sister … was losing the only opportunity she had to make her life better—education."

It wasn't the only change Moses noticed in his hometown. "When I was young, our home was surrounded by national forests," he says. "Now all those trees are gone, and children must walk longer and longer distances to gather wood."

Searching for a solution to problems born of burning wood, Moses quit his job and began learning everything he could about renewable resources. Eventually he came across the increasingly popular practice of turning organic waste into fuel.

"I looked out my window and saw a huge pile of sugar cane debris," he says. "Uganda is primarily agricultural, but farm waste is just abandoned."

So Moses began working with engineering students to design kilns and briquetting machines.

Four years later, 2,500 farmers use his kilns to turn farm waste—coffee husks and waste from sugar cane and rice—into charcoal. A company that Moses founded, called Eco-Fuel Africa, buys the char and turns it into briquettes for cooking that burn cleaner and cost less than wood.

The company takes those briquettes to market, providing fuel for more than 19,000 Ugandan families.

"Burning fuel wood not only destroys Uganda's trees," Moses says, but it also affects "the health and educational opportunities of our poorest people.

"We're giving them an alternative."
[310 words]

[Time 3]
Wood Burning Takes a Toll

The problems that wood burning created for Moses's family and in his hometown can be seen across sub-Saharan Africa. Eight in ten people in the region depend on wood to cook and to heat their homes. As more forests are destroyed to feed that demand—in Uganda, 70 percent of protected forests are gone—families must walk more miles every day to buy increasingly scarce and costly wood.

Families in the developing world spend up to 40 percent of their income on cooking fuel. Besides leaving children with less time for education, it means that poor farmers are less able to afford fertilizer, causing harvests to suffer and malnutrition to rise.

And wood burning takes a huge toll on human health, creating smoky indoor air that leads to respiratory diseases that kill more women and children each year than HIV/AIDS.

Moses's cleaner-burning green charcoal reduces indoor air pollution and has already saved more than three million dollars in energy-related expenses for Ugandans. "Families use that money to pay school fees for their children, afford three meals a day, and finance new income-generating activities," he says.

Indeed, farmers who work with Eco-Fuel Africa have tripled their incomes by selling char from kilns. The coarser, leftover char is used as fertilizer, which can increase harvests by more than 50 percent and create surplus crops to sell at market.

Moses's group also battles deforestation, investing profits into planting 12,000 new trees and partnering with local schools to make reforestation part of environmental education.

"Today young people who graduate from college come to us and say, 'I don't care how much you pay me; I want to join you because I believe so strongly in what you do,' " Moses says.

Eco-Fuel Africa also looks for employees among Uganda's widows and single mothers, who often struggle after husbands die of HIV/AIDS.

"They value the opportunity to become machine operators and retailers," Moses says, "bringing unbelievable commitment, dedication, and hard work to our project."

"Many times when I visit villages," he continues, "a woman will grab my hand and say, 'Six months ago I could barely feed my family. Now I've been able to enroll my daughter in school and buy a solar panel and mobile phone.' "

Eco-Fuel Africa has received interest from Rwanda, Kenya, and Zambia, but Moses wants to "get our business model right and then expand to new countries."

Funding from National Geographic recently helped the organization develop a briquette-making machine that can run without electricity, so it's workable in remote rural areas.

"Now we can micro-franchise in villages far off the power grid," Moses says. "We identify entrepreneurs, supply training and support, and provide technology on a credit basis so they can start sustainable businesses, create jobs, and meet local energy needs."

All while improving Ugandans' health—and saving their forests.
[476 words]

Source: National Geography
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/12/141215-sanga-moses-uganda-energy-wood-burning-fuel/#at_pco=cfd-1.0&at_ab=-&at_pos=11&at_tot=4&at_si=undefined

Twisted, Tangled and Turbulent: Magnetic Fields in the Milky Way
by Nadia Drake

[Time 4]
If the Milky Way were strewn across a swath of silk and set aflutter in the breeze, it would look something like the rippling images in the gallery above.

But these are representations of our home galaxy, produced from nearly 1,500 days of observations made by the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite. Each of the images above corresponds to a numbered section in this map of the Milky Way:

The colors represent the density of galactic dust emission, from a sparse blue to intense red, and the ripples reveal the orientation of the Milky Way’s magnetic field. There are filaments and clouds, regions of chaos and cohesion, hints about how matter and magnetism interact to shape the interstellar medium, and clues about the mysterious origin of magnetic fields.

Combined, the swirling dust, hot stars, and explosion remnants look a lot more like a post-Impressionist painting than your typical astronomical data dump.

But these aren’t just pretty pictures.

“These vivid images are like a storyboard,” says astrophysicist Marc-Antoine Miville-Deschenes of the French National Center for Scientific Research, who made the images using data gathered by Planck. “For us, they are instrumental in revealing the role of the magnetic field in the way matter is organized, and in how matter evolves toward the formation of stars.”

Launched into space in 2009, the Planck satellite spent nearly 4.5 years trying to read the oldest, faintest signatures sewn into the fabric of the cosmos. These inscriptions include the remnants of radiation produced during the Big Bang, and clues to the composition of matter in the universe. Last week, at a meeting in Ferrara, Italy, Planck scientists began to slowly reveal their latest data, which will be released to the public on Dec. 22.

Included in those data are these images of the galactic magnetic field. Scientists can’t see magnetic fields, but they can carefully study the orientation of light emitted by dust grains in the Milky Way. Most of these grains aren’t spherical, but are elongated, and they tend to align with local magnetic fields. “Think of them as tiny magnetic rice grains,” says astronomer Bryan Gaensler of The University of Sydney.
[358 words]

[Time 5]
Scientists use the orientation of light emitted by dust to infer the direction of local magnetic fields. And because the Planck instruments are so sensitive and stare at the whole sky, they’re treating scientists to a better view of galactic magnetism than ever before.

“In the past, we’ve had lots of individual measurements at particular points on the sky,” Gaensler says. “It’s like before we were looking at the sky through a black curtain with a lot of pinholes in it, but now the curtain has been dropped.”

The images reveal that while the Milky Way’s magnetic field across large scales is ordered and smooth, it’s a tangled, turbulent mess on smaller scales. Local fields are perturbed by such things as stellar winds, explosions, and turbulence, which disrupt long-range symmetries and can have dramatic effects on processes like star birth and cosmic ray acceleration. Though scientists have known about these incongruities since the 1940s, they are now on the cusp of being able to clearly see what’s going on.

“These images are not about cosmology, they are about the complex dynamical processes that turn interstellar matter into stars and back,” Miville-Deschenes says. “The cycle of matter and the way stars form in a galaxy like the Milky Way is not well understood.”

And, those silky ripples could also tell Gaensler and his colleagues something fundamental about where magnetism came from in the first place – a question that is far from being resolved. Did it arise during those first few moments after the Big Bang? Was it cooked up in stars and black holes later on? Generated by a primordial cosmic battery?

“The shape of the Milky Way’s overall magnetic field is a direct descendant of the magnetic cloud from which the Galaxy formed, billions of years ago,” Gaensler says. “Which is in turn a key clue about where all the magnetism in the Universe came from in the first place.”
[320 words]

Source: National Geography
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/12/08/magnetic-milky-way/#at_pco=cfd-1.0&at_ab=-&at_pos=15&at_tot=4&at_si=54900bc8f90addb4

Microbes exploit their killer
Triclosan promotes antibiotic resistance
By Beth Mole December 15, 2014

[Time 6]
25 Microbes have turned our pharmaceutical weapons into allies. This year, triclosan, an antimicrobial agent, topped the list of chemical traitors, aiding rather than deterring germs.

Leaked from products such as toothpaste and hand soap, low doses of triclosan promote drug resistance in germs that cause difficult-to-treat infections. In the environment, the chemical can disrupt hormone regulation in some animals, such as fish. (Data are lacking on health effects in humans.)

Despite the ongoing battle against antibiotic-resistant microbes, triclosan remains omnipresent in household and personal care products. Humans take up the anti-microbial agent by ingesting it or absorbing it through skin. Washed down the drain, triclosan amasses in sewage and seeps into the environment.

In people, the chemical shows up in blood, urine, breast milk, umbilical cords and snot. The health risks of prenatal doses of triclosan are unknown. In the nose, however, researchers found that triclosan-laced snot helps Staphylococcus aureus bacteria invade the body. Such invasions increased the risk of staph infections, which can cause pneumonia.

In wastewater treatment plants, triclosan can sabotage the microbial cleaners responsible for breaking down sewage, killing off some beneficial microbes and spurring drug resistance in others.

Some of the 100 metric tons of triclosan that enters U.S. sewage plants each year lingers after treatment. Treated waste-water and sewage-based fertilizers can then spread the antimicrobial chemical. When such treated water is used on farmland, small amounts of triclosan accumulate in vegetables.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is reviewing the use of triclosan in personal care products. But some legislators and manufacturers aren’t waiting. In May, Minnesota banned triclosan from certain products, effective in 2017. And Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble plan to remove the antimicrobial agent from their products.
[288 words]

Source: Science News
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/year-review-microbes-exploit-their-killer?tgt=nr

Going · 发表于 2014-12-16 20:28:24

Part III: Obstacle

Mali’s Lush Wetlands Drained by Foreign Agribusiness
Subsistence lifestyles and diverse wildlife hang in the balance.
Fred Pearce in Mali Published November 30, 2012

[Paraphrase 7]
Mayor Daouda Sanankoua had traveled overnight by boat to see me, through flooded forests and submerged banks of hippo grass. There was no other way.

Sanankoua's domain, the district of Deboye in the heart of Mali in West Africa, is on the edge of the Sahara. Yet Sanankoua's homeland is mostly water. His people live by catching fish, grazing cattle, and harvesting crops in one of the world's largest and most fecund wetlands, a massive inland delta created by the meandering waters of one of Africa's mightiest waterways, the Niger River.

Nearly two million Malians live on the delta. "Everything here depends on the water," said the mayor. "But"—and here he paused gravely, pushed his glasses down an elegant nose, and began waving a long finger—"the government is taking our water. They are giving it to foreign farmers. They don't even ask us."

What is happening here in Mali is happening all over the world. People who depend on the natural flow of water, and the burst of nature that comes with it, are losing out as powerful people upstream divert the water.

As the mayor talked in the schoolyard of Akka village, on an island in the heart of the Niger inland delta, women rushed around putting straw mats on the ground, and bringing bowls of food. By torchlight, we savored a supper of smoked fish, millet porridge, and green vegetables, all products of the waters around us.

Life-Giving Delta

This aquatic world, a green smudge on the edge of the Sahara 250 miles (402 kilometers) across, seemed well. It is a major wintering ground for millions of European birds. On the way to Akka, I constantly grabbed binoculars to watch birds I knew from back home. In England, kingfishers are rare; here they seemed to be everywhere. There were other European water birds in profusion, like cormorants and herons, along with endangered local birds such as the black crowned crane.

Out there too were hippos, the odd crocodile, and, snoozing on the bottom, the little-known and largely nocturnal African manatee.

Without being too romantic, there seemed to be a remarkable degree of harmony between nature and human needs. I saw the Bozo people, the delta's original inhabitants, ply their canoes from dawn to dusk, casting nets that catch an estimated 100,000 tons of fish a year—from the ubiquitous Nile perch and bottom-living cichlids to favorite local species that live only amid roots in the flooded forests.

The Bambara, founders of the great 13th-century Mali Empire, planted millet and rice in the delta mud as the waters receded. By the early 19th century the Fulani arrived from across West Africa to graze their cattle and goats on the aquatic pastures of hippo grasses. There have been disputes, of course, but for the most part, by concentrating on different activities, the different groups have been able to respect each other's rights to harvest the wetland over generations. All the scientific evidence suggests that nature thrived too—until recently.

For the mayor was clear that the waters are receding. Fish catches are down. The flooded forests are being left high and dry. He fears his world could soon be gone. His people are doing their best to cope.

The following morning, I watched the women of Akka scrape channels in caked and cracked soils on the edge of the village, in an effort to persuade water from the lake to reach their kitchen gardens. Each year, it got harder, they said.

Diverting the Niger River

Some blame failing rains and changing climate for this crisis on the delta. Not so, said the mayor. Upstream diversions of water are to blame.

Back on dry land, I found the source of the mayor's ire just a few miles away, where engineers were constructing concrete barrages to tame the Niger River's flow and digging canals to divert its water just before it enters the wetland.

The aim is to provide water for Chinese sugar farms, Libyan rice growers, and German-, French-, and American-funded agricultural development schemes, in a region managed by a government irrigation agency called the Office du Niger. The government sees such development as the route to modernizing its agriculture through encouraging foreign investment. But critics say ministers in Bamako, the capital, are oblivious to the shortage of water that is a critical constraint on achieving this goal.

The Office du Niger already presides over a quarter of a million acres (roughly 100,000 hectares) of irrigated rice fields. That land takes 8 percent of the river's flow, according to the agency's records. That figure can rise to 70 percent in the dry season, says Leo Zwarts, a Dutch government hydrologist who is a leading authority on the Niger River.

The local engineer in charge of the main diversion structure on the river, the Markala barrage, agrees. Sitting on the riverbank beside the massive dam-like structure, Lansana Keita told me that he and his colleagues often failed to ensure the release of 1,413 cubic feet (40 cubic meters) a second, the official minimum flow of water downstream into the wetland. "We do our best, but irrigation has priority," he said.

That was evident. During the dry months, there is often more water in the canals that lead from the barrage to the fields than there is in the river itself as it heads for the delta.

As a result, the delta is already diminishing. Zwarts estimates that existing abstractions—diversions—have cut the area of delta that is flooded annually by an average of 232 square miles (600 square kilometers), killing many flooded forests and expanses of hippo grasses. He has a pair of graphs that show how the amount of fish sold in local markets goes up and down with the size of the delta inundation the previous year. In recent years, both have been declining.

But that is just the start. Behind Keita was a large metal sign displaying a map of the domain of the Office du Niger. It showed small areas painted green where there is already irrigation, and much larger areas painted yellow to show where irrigation is planned. All three main canals from the barrage were being enlarged during my visit.

The government eventually wants to irrigate ten times more land than today, and is bringing in foreign companies to do it. They are offered free land and as much water as they need. Zwarts predicts that the diversions could soon take the entire flow of the Niger River during the dry season. Add to that the impact of a hydroelectric dam planned farther upstream by the government of Guinea, and Zwarts says the delta could dry up every fourth year.

The Mali government does not confirm this analysis, but its own figures show that a fall in water levels of just one foot would dry out half of the delta. In an interview, the (now former) head of the Office du Niger said the government's targets for minimum flows will protect the delta. But he also said his office is tasked with increasing irrigation for agriculture. When I pointed out these two goals seem to be in contradiction, he declined to comment.
[1199 words]

[The rest]
Mali's Water Deals

This won't all happen overnight. Political unrest in the north of Mali in recent months has discouraged foreign investment. A multiyear aid scheme funded by the U.S. government's Millennium Challenge Corporation to irrigate some 35,000 acres and turn herders into rice farmers was terminated a few months early, although many Malians did receive farm supplies.

But a 50,000-acre sugar scheme masterminded by the Chinese state-owned China Light Industrial Corporation for Foreign Economic and Technical Co-operation is close to completion. And other projects are expected to follow once peace returns, including the biggest of them all, a Libyan plan to grow rice on a quarter-million acres (roughly 100,000 hectares). The huge diversion canal for what is known as the Malibya project is already dug and full of water.

Critics of these megaprojects say the government of Mali is blind to the damage the water abstractions will do to the wetland, a mysterious region where officials seldom go. "The government is so obsessed with getting investment for its agriculture that it cannot see when that investment will do more harm than good to its people," Lamine Coulibaly of the National Coordination of Peasant Organizations of Mali told me.

Jane Madgwick, head of Wetlands International, a science-based NGO based in the Netherlands that is working with people on the delta, agrees. Far from filling the bellies of Malians, "these projects will decrease food security in Mali, by damaging the livelihoods of those most vulnerable," she says.

Water Grabbing: A Global Concern?

The situation in Mali may be part of an emerging global pattern. From the papyrus swamps of Lake Victoria in East Africa to the flooded forests of Cambodia's Great Lake, from the dried-up delta of the Colorado in Mexico to the marshes of Mesopotamia, those living downstream have been at the mercy of those they call water grabbers.

Some—like those in the Niger Delta—worry that they may become victims of the "next Aral Sea," the doomed body of water in central Asia that was once the world's fourth largest inland sea. Half a century ago, Soviet engineers began to grab its water to grow cotton. Over a few decades, they largely emptied the sea and created a giant new desert. Today, the formerly profitable fishing fleets and fertile wet-delta pastures are all gone. The surrounding region is poisoned by salt blown from the dried-up seabed, the climate is changing, the people are departing, and most of the sea is a distant memory.

Madgwick of Wetlands International says that what Mali plans for the inner Niger Delta would be similar, "a human catastrophe as vicious and shameful as the drainage of the Aral Sea." Out on the delta today, the Bozo and Bambara and Fulani people await news of their fate.
[463 words]

Source: National Geography
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/12/121214/mali-wetlands-drained-foreign-agribusiness-water-grab/

LUCY小可 · 发表于 2014-12-17 01:38:28

2  2'34
3  3'47
4  3'36
5  2'51
6  2'39

obstacle: 11'22

Thank you!

cyndichiang · 发表于 2014-12-17 07:27:41

Speaker
Confusion is one sympton of concussion(脑震荡） and brain test can determine whether damage is bad enough.
A experience: test:chemical change in protein SNTP subject:pateints have concussion for 6 days/ non-concussion people
outcome: blood level is much higher 1h-6days later than blood level of people whose concussion has been cleared up within 5 days Blood level of non-concussion is low
Significance: it's helpful to forecast recovery time

Obstacle 4'32''
Government takes water from Mali to foreigners, water that original inhabitants rely on
It seems that residents there are harder to use the water
Irrigation is the priority in Mali

HaiqingYU · 发表于 2014-12-17 09:13:26

Thanks for sharing! The first one is so heartwarming~
[Time 2]02:03
Motivation for M to invent methods that turn farm waste into fuel.
[Time 3]02:28
Wood burning brought poverty and health pb to local pl. Thanks to the M's invention, the quality of their life has improved.
[Time 4]02:58
[Time 5]02:26
The newly drawn image of galaxy with advanced tech revealed more info about the university.
[Time 6]02:37
One antimicrobial agent turns out to benefit germs instead of deterring them. Some companies decided to ban the use of them in daily pharmacist product.
[Obstacle]06:57
For habitants who live on delta, the water is important;
Governmental priority on irritation for foreign agriculture development is killing the delta live.

yatina · 发表于 2014-12-17 10:52:06

THANKS Going!!! Glad to be back.

Speaker
Testing blood for SNTF would help doctors to forecast recovery time from concussion.
put sb on the bench

Time2 1'36
Inspired by his sister, who couldn't catch school for searching more fuels, SM, the only college graduate from his village in Uganda, quit his banking job to study how to turn farming waste into fuel.

Time3 2'00
The harm by burning woods, the advantages by using new energy and the situation now in SM's company.

Time4 2'06
Changing of maganetic fields of the Milky Way arouse scientists' attentions.

Time5 1'28
Findings indicate a clue to the origin of universe.

Time6 2'01
A microbe named T was been found to apply in human drug resistance promotion and breading down sewage. But due to that using T had risks, some legislations have been made to bann T from certain products.

Obstacle 6'33
Sanankoua local government is taking out water to thrive foriegn farmers without asking local people. This event do huge harm to biodiversity. What's more, diverting the Niger River for foreign plants is diminishing the delta. And the government is still increasing irragation, which damages the delta more.

apooolo · 发表于 2014-12-17 11:02:48

ostacle 00:09:24.96 1662 175wpm
delta is losing water, the goverment is draining the water to other places and projects, this movement will do great harm to local environment and eco-system. the people are resis ting. now the situation is getting better, some international group and other countries are helping, but the draining water frojects are not finished rightnow.
掌管 5 00:02:33.66 288 115wpm
掌管 4 00:01:44.86 320 192wpm
掌管 3 00:02:21.25 358 153wpm
掌管 2 00:02:34.35 476 186wpm
掌管 1 00:01:59.83 310 155wpm

wangziann · 发表于 2014-12-17 18:10:45

Time 2
In order to give the children more alternative when looking for fuel waste their education time, SM quit his bank job and try to turn the agriculture waste which was abandoned to fuel.
Time 3
By provide electric power using renewable energy, they also solve the problem so some unemployment for single mom and improve their life standard. This business model can be expanded to other countries.
The problem that… can be seen
Time 4
By studying data collected by satellite, scientists began to slowly reveal the magnetic field.
Time 5
Scientists use the orientation of light emitted by a dust to infer the local magnetic fields and point out how the magnetic influence cosmic process.
Time 6
It is found that a group of chemical traitors in product, such as tooth paste and hand soup, aid rather than deter germs.

KaterinaTse · 发表于 2014-12-17 18:28:22

Speaker
Blood test can forecast the concussion,some way can help doctor to deal with it.

Time 2
2'16'20 Moses realized that many children had to move the wood in a long distance so that it would influence thier time to study.Thus,he resigned and found that they could turned waste into fuel.Then it makes their poor people's life better.

Time 3
3'32'28 Before Moses made the eco-fuel Africa,people came across many difficulties in life. When Moses creates eco-fuel to Uganda,it benefits a lot to local people's life.And Moses also plants more trees and schools.

Time 4
2'50'29 Magnetic fields in the Milky Way is like a picture.

Time 5
2'27'25 The Milky Way's overall magnetic field is not about the cosmology but it is a key clue about the first place in the universe.

Time 6
3'08'42 Microbes exploits their killer. Finally,M was banned in the products.

Obstacle
9'26'70 The government sells the water and lands for foreign argibusiness without local people's agreements,they don't even know it.And some experts said that the environment will be worse with the foreign agribusiness.

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