【每日阅读训练第三期——速度越障1系列】【1-16】科技

xinnono

速度
计时1
A Possible Blood Test for Alzheimer’s Disease
摘自http://www.voanews.com/learningenglish/home/science-technology/A-Possible-Blood-Test-for-Alzheimers-Disease-142406775.html
JUNE SIMMS: This is SCIENCE IN THE NEWS, in VOA Special English. I’m June Simms.
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: And I’m Shirley Griffith. Today we tell about Alzheimer’s disease. More than a century after its discovery, Alzheimer’s disease is still destroying people’s brains. There is no known cure. But research may offer hope for the future.
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JUNE SIMMS: Alzheimer’s disease affects memory and personality - the qualities that make people individuals. The disease robs their ability to perform simple activities like putting on clothing or even swallowing. People with the condition begin to forget simple things, like where they left the key to their car. As time passes, they forget more and more. They may forget what a key is used for.
Victims of Alzheimer’s can forget the names of their husbands, wives or children. Then they forget who they are. Finally, they remember almost nothing. It is as if their brains die before the other parts of the body.
Alzheimer’s patients do die from its effects or conditions linked to it. But death may not come for many years.
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: An estimated thirty million people around the world have Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s affects people of all races equally. Women are more likely to develop the disease than men. This is partly because women generally live longer than men.
The disease generally develops differently in each person. Yet some early signs of the disease are common. The victims may not recognize changes in themselves. Or they may struggle to hide them.
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JUNE SIMMS: Media reports tell about older adults found walking far from their homes. They do not know where they are or where they came from. These people often are suffering from Alzheimer’s.
Victims of the disease can become angry and violent as the ability to think and remember decreases. They sometimes shout and move with no apparent purpose or goal. Or they may become very quiet.
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: Probably the most-common early sign of Alzheimer’s is short-term memory loss. People with the disease cannot remember something that happened yesterday, for example. Also, they have increasing difficulty learning and storing new information. Slowly, thinking becomes much more difficult. The victims cannot understand a joke, or cannot cook a meal, or perform simple work.
Another sign is difficulty solving simple problems. Alzheimer’s patients might not know what to do if they see food burning. They also may have trouble following directions or finding their way to places they have known all their lives.
Another sign is struggling to find the right words to express thoughts or understand what is being discussed. People with Alzheimer’s seem to change. Quiet people may become noisy and aggressive. They may easily become angry and lose their ability to trust others.
(MUSIC)
JUNE SIMMS: Alzheimer’s disease normally affects people more than sixty-five years old. But rare cases have been discovered in people younger than fifty.
Alzheimer’s is identified in only about two percent of people who are sixty-five. But the risk increases to about twenty percent by age eighty. By eighty-five or ninety, half of all people are found to have some signs of the disease.
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SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: About five million people in the United States have Alzheimer’s. That number is expected to more than double by the year twenty fifty as the number of older Americans increases. The Alzheimer’s Association says medicines approved for use are effective in half the patients who take them. Among those fifty percent, the drugs are effective for six to twelve months.
JUNE SIMMS: For years, scientists have been attempting to learn who may develop Alzheimer’s. If the condition could be identified before its worst signs appear, people might get at least temporary medical help.
The most widely-held belief about the cause of Alzheimer’s is that a protein - called beta-amyloid - builds up in patients’ brains. It has also been found in the spinal fluid of Alzheimer’s patients. Large amounts of this protein may destroy a person’s ability to think.
But some scientists question whether beta-amyloid causes the disease. They think that the protein build-up may result from it. Still, most researchers say thick tangles or plaques of the protein are responsible for the condition. Plaques are unusual clusters, or groups, of proteins. The researchers say beta-amyloid destroys communication links in the brain.
(MUSIC)
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: Among older people, Alzheimer’s is the most-common form of dementia - the loss of abilities needed to have a normal life. Other mental conditions may seem like Alzheimer’s. Those conditions need medical treatment that is different from treatment for Alzheimer’s. A correct diagnosis, or identification, is important.
The best way to diagnose the disease has been a medical examination of the brain after a person dies. Doctors say methods to test the living have presented problems, like high costs. One such method is an MRI or magnetic resonance imaging. Another imaging test is Positron Emission Tomography, also known as PET. It makes scans or pictures that doctors can study.
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JUNE SIMMS: Researchers know that people’s brains start changing ten to fifteen years before they show signs of Alzheimer’s disease. That is why they are exploring ways to test people early so they can delay, or someday even stop, the progress of the disease.
Madhav Thambisetty is with the National Institutes of Aging, part of America’s National Institutes of Health. Dr. Thambisetty led a study that used a blood test to measure levels of beta-amyloid in the brain. The test could be given to seemingly healthy people before any signs – or symptoms - of Alzheimer’s appear.
DR. MADHAV THAMBISETTY: “We’re looking for blood proteins that might be indicative of the extent of brain damage that we know occurs very early on in patients with Alzheimer’s disease.”
In the study, researchers studied blood samples from fifty-seven older volunteers who had no symptoms of Alzheimer’s. They also used PET scans to measure the amyloid protein. They found that volunteers with high blood levels of amyloid had much higher levels of it in the part of the brain that controls memory. Dr. Thambisetty found the results interesting.
DR. MADHAV THAMBISETTY: “Recent studies suggest that the deposition of amyloid might happen several years before symptoms of memory impairment begin in somebody with Alzheimer’s disease.”
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: Another test for the disease uses a new kind of brain scan to identify protein in the brain. In January, the United States Food and Drug Administration held hearings about a special radioactive dye that connects to the protein. The special dye can be seen on PET scans.
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People who were near the end of their lives agreed to have both the brain scan and an autopsy performed after they died. An autopsy is a medical examination of the body after someone dies. The researchers reported that in almost all of the people, the scan results were nearly the same as the autopsy results.
JUNE SIMMS: Neil Buckholtz is chief of the Dementias of Aging Branch at the National Institute on Aging. He says early intervention is important in the fight against the disease.
NEIL BUCKHOLTZ: “How these changes progress over time, so that we’ll be able to target those for drug intervention, and again, eventually we’ll be able to slow the progression and, hopefully, stop the disease in its tracks.”
The United States recently announced new steps for fighting Alzheimer’s disease. Last month, the government made fifty-million dollars immediately available for research on the disease. It also announced plans to increase research spending by eighty million dollars in the next fiscal year, which begins in October.
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: In nineteen six, a German doctor – Alois Alzheimer – described a dementia patient whose brain was examined in an autopsy. Her brain had sticky structures and nerve cells that appeared to be mixed together. Today, researchers are still working to uncover the causes of, and treatments for, this stubborn medical mystery.
(MUSIC)
JUNE SIMMS: This SCIENCE IN THE NEWS was written by Christopher Cruise, with reporting by Carol Pearson.
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: I’m Shirley Griffith with June Simms, who was also our producer. Join us again next week for more news about science in Special English on The Voice of America.
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越障
Searching for aliens
The wow factor
A new citizen-science project will improve the chances of finding ET
摘自http://www.economist.com/node/21549905
Mar 10th 2012 | from the print edition

EVER since 1993, when funding from America’s space agency, NASA, was cut, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), which scans the sky looking for radio signals from intelligent aliens, has been inventive in its methods. In particular, it was one of the pioneers of the field of “citizen science”, in which interested amateurs are recruited to help professionals crunch data. In 1999 it started SETI@home, an application that uses spare processing power on volunteers’ computers to sift the information generated by its radio telescopes. These days, SETI@home boasts more than 1m users.
On February 29th the SETI Institute launched another citizen-science project. This time, though, its researchers are less interested in the digital computers on volunteers’ desks than in the biological ones between their ears. SETILive, as the project is called, hopes to use the pattern-recognition capabilities of brains to distinguish interesting signals from the cacophony of interference generated by the denizens of planet Earth—and to do so in real time.
The basic idea behind SETI is to look for distinctive radio-frequency emissions that might come from advanced aliens rather than natural sources like stars. To do this, the SETI Institute uses an instrument called the Allen Telescope Array—a group of 42 small radio-telescope dishes in California, partly paid for by the eponymous co-founder of Microsoft.
Unfortunately, some parts of the radio spectrum are full of signals created by Earthlings, rather than aliens. Everything from passing satellites and tumbling space junk to ground-based radar and even the ignition systems of nearby cars can generate spurious radio waves that confuse the software. Until now, the project has dealt with that by ignoring the more crowded bits of the spectrum. But SETILive will bring them into play.
It will do so by feeding pictorial representations (known as waterfall plots) of data from these noisy chunks of the spectrum to its users in the hope that they will be able to filter out the noise and spot potentially interesting signals buried behind the radio clutter from Earth. Those interesting signals will not necessarily have come from alien civilisations, says Chris Lintott, an astrophysicist at Oxford University who helps to run Zooniverse, a citizen-science website that manages several projects, including SETILive. But even if they do not, some new astronomical phenomena may be discovered by the project. And as the various sources of interference become better characterised, the results will be fed back into the automated-search algorithms, improving their ability to deal with Earth-generated noise.
Other citizen-science projects already use the superior pattern-recognition capabilities of human “wetware”, but SETILive is different from these in one important way. Rather than having its users pore at leisure over stored data, aliens are hunted on the fly. Users logging on to the project’s website view information that is hot from the Allen Array. They have to work quickly, though. Every 90 seconds, the array switches to looking at a different star, or a different frequency range, and a new image is generated.
If, however, the humans do spot something interesting, the array can be told within three minutes to switch back to observing the star or range in question, to see if the signal is still there. That is a big advantage, says Dr Lintott. Volunteers working on SETI@home have found plenty of interesting signals, but because the data they analyse are often months old, those signals have usually vanished by the time anyone gets around to checking up on them.
The most famous example of such delayed discovery, though it long predates the start of SETI@home, is the so-called “Wow!” signal. This signal, which looked exactly like the sort of thing astronomers had theorised aliens might use to get in touch was spotted in telescope printouts in 1977. It was a powerful, finely tuned broadcast at the most important natural frequency for radio astronomers—the one generated by the flipping spin of the electron in a hydrogen atom (a flip also pertinent to the study of antimatter, see article). But by the time astronomers had noticed it and set their instruments up to double-check, the signal had vanished.
If a second Wow! signal were discovered by SETILive, astronomers could focus on it almost immediately. First contact with aliens, then, might take place not in a lab full of computers but late one night in a suburban bedroom. There could be a film in that.
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Daisy汪

沙发占座~
1’26 讲的是Azhime病，这种病会残害人们的大脑，影响人们的memory和personality，患者会忘记事情，并且忘记得越来越多，比方说忘记带车钥匙，最后演变成忘记钥匙是干什么的。患者常常忘记自己丈夫孩子的名字，最后甚至不知道自己是谁。这种病的潜伏期很长，隐藏得比较深吧~
1‘40 media中讲的人们找不到回家的路的人大多数是Azhime病患者，他们经常忘记自己来时的路，来时的目的，常常不知道自己要来干什么
患者有三个方面的特征：1、学习东西难，他们很难记住要学习的东西；2、解决问题的能力变低，看到food burning不知道要干什么，患者会变得安静；3、表达能力变差，struggle to think out an word，安静的人可能因此变得暴躁
疾病一般出现在65岁以上的老人身上，但是研究表明现在这个年龄倾向于50岁，2%的65岁的人患病，20%的80岁的人患病，85到90好像就有一半患病了
1’59 美国人中有5million患者，比之前翻倍。。。有一半接受治疗，证明药效可以维持6-12个月。。这种病的影响就是记性变差，最终使人们丧失normal生活的能力，造成这种病的原因是brain里的一种protein，过多的protein会影响人的think。。。但是这种说法并不确切，但可以肯定的是protein的增长是result from Alzhime
这种病的治疗需要进行详细的检查，大概因人而异吧~doctor说最好的方法是检查person after it die。。Alzhime的治疗很贵
1‘15 人的大脑在Alzhime出现之前10-15年就开始changing，doctor检查过脑内血压，发现在Alzhime症状出现前，脑内血压完全正常，然后继续说protein的问题。。doctor换了一种PET方式对大脑进行扫描
1’15 患者在死之前都会进行扫描，研究人员发现患者的扫描结果和autopsy相同，然后政府决定对这种疾病的患者进行资金补助，然后说到了药物的研究。。。某个病人的脑内细胞会mix。。。

越障：4‘14
讲在space中find alien
SETI组织，现在有volunteer，通过volunteer电脑来检测radio signal
科学家对radio sigal between their ears 比对volunteer的电脑更有兴趣，有一个什么ignition的装置，科学家将转变方法，通过检测recognition capabilities of brain来确定是否有interesting signal，但地球经常会有一些noise干扰检测结果，所以不是检测到signal就代表有外星人，科学家要排除这样的干扰
然后SETI有个什么装置可以一检测到interesting，就可以返回跟踪是否真的有，这一点有big advantage。
讲到了wow的signal，一检测到这样的signal，科学家就会马上与alien取得联系，通过外部的电脑，就像电影里出现的那样

qiuhua01234567

占
1:15
1:34
1:39
1:26
1:32
4:30

kevin405hu

速度练习，很慢，而且只记得80%
02'17''
01'55''
02'06''
01'56''
01'59''
越障练习
06’49’’
读完只记得讲的是有关外星球外太空有关的探索，具体都忘记了

阅读太差了

kaitlynyl

速度：第一篇第二篇差1行，后三篇读完，讲了A疾病，介绍，然后讲这种病人会有什么行为，后来讲了通过研究死后的这种病人的大脑来研究它，至今还在研究。看了越障之后忘记了。
越障：NASA的一个工程SET。由来，发展，开始有什么志愿者，后来没了，主要做什么工作，是区分宇宙里面的信号。后来讲他们怎么测试的，怎么跟噪音区分的，遇到的困难，发现信号延迟，以及一种新信号，跟这个信号不一样，叫wow信号，第一次发现它是什么时候，然后又发现不了了。后来第二次又发现了这个信号。

CHRISTINE2010

（1）速度：
计时1：1’12
计时2：1’24
计时3：1’39
计时4：1’12
计时5：1’10
（2）越障：
时间：5’50
回忆：Technologies for searching for aliens have improved dramatically. Nowadays scientists created a technology called: SET1 to do this work. This is a social-science technology. People who are interested in searching for aliens can download a software to their computers at home, and the software collect the signals. There are about 1m people joined this program in 2011.


Now scientists have developed another social-science technology, this allows people to collect signals between their ears.


The old technology always collect lots of false signals that do not come from the space, but the earth.


Users of the new tech can observe the signals from one planet for 90 seconds and then the detector will change to another chanel. If the user find anything abnormal, he can report it and the detector will redetect the chanel in 3 minutes. This is a great improvement.


Several years ago, there is an incident called “WOW”. An astronaut observed an special signal, however, when the scientists set up the equipments, the signal had already gone.


So, the new tech has improved a lot.

dengly

2.06
2.35
2.12
1.50
1.19

越障5.43

hannah烂番茄

速度：1:09  1:28  1:35  1:18  1:12
越障： 5:13
讲NASA的一个project,最开始是SETI,然后利用志愿者的电脑搜集可能外星的信号
后来好像不用志愿者的电脑还是神马的。  设立了SETILive project.
这个project主要还是搜集alien 的信号
然后巴拉巴拉忘了
后来又说SETILive的系统不同于其他一般系统。他有个优点就是可以再几分钟内回查感兴趣的信号
给出一个例子：WOW信号，但是回查的时候那个信号消失了
最后说现在可以更快的回查

chloegrant

1'08
1'12
1'36
1'15
0'54

越障4‘44
没理清头绪，被生词和专有名词征服

七个栗子

1'40
2'00
2'30
1'45
1'35
(555,我太感动了，我终于有那么几段能在两分钟内读完了，谢谢nonoMM的文~~~)

越障8‘30

说到SET这个拿政府钱研究外星人的组织，以前做了SETI@的市民活动，是从那些感兴趣的业余人士处获知有关外星人的知识。

后来，SETI近期开发了SETILife活动，是接受电波来获得外星人传来的信息。

用了ATA，不是很成功，因为这个能接收各种电波，甚至车子的。

但是，科学家觉得，如果能筛选，是可以从中获得有用信息的，尽管有些不是外星人的。

提到另一个项目，wetware,让人们在想了解一个消息的时候，点击查询，可获得结果。

但是时效性低，举例了WOW,一个外星人当年传的，但是还没被破译的信号。

说下一次再收到WOW时候，一定要很快做出反应