【每日阅读训练第三期——速度越障2系列】【2-1】科技

xinnono

sherrie最近不常来, 来了总是看到大家热情高涨的做速度越障~ 开心啊~ 给大家加油打气~

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Safety Science: The Stories Behind Seat Belts and Bulletproof Clothing
摘自http://www.voanews.com/learningenglish/home/science-technology/Safety-Science-The-Stories-Behind-Seat-Belts-and-Bulletproof-Clothing-143379226.html
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: This is SCIENCE IN THE NEWS, in VOA Special English. I’m Shirley Griffith.
BOB DOUGHTY: And I’m Bob Doughty. Today we tell about two recent inventions that have helped to save lives.  We will also tell about the people who developed them.
(MUSIC)
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: Most cars have seat belts as part of their equipment. Seat belts protect drivers and passengers in case of accident. They also reduce the effect of a crash on the body. Safety experts estimate that the restraining devices save thousands of lives a year in the United States alone. Worldwide, some experts, say the devices have protected up to a million people.
The first seat belt was said to have been created in the eighteen hundreds by George Cayley of England. He is remembered for many inventions, especially for early “flying machines.”
The United States first recognized the invention of an automobile seat belt in eighteen forty-nine. The government gave a patent to Edward J. Claghorn of New York City so that others would not copy his invention. Claghorn called the device a Safety-Belt. It was said to include hooks and other attachments for securing the person to a fixed object.
BOB DOUGHTY: Other inventors followed with different versions of the seat belt. But more than one hundred years passed before the current, widely used seat belt was developed. It resulted from the work of a Swedish engineer, Nils Bohlin. His three-point, lap and shoulder seat belt first appeared on cars in Europe fifty years ago.
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Bohlin was born in Sweden in nineteen twenty. After completing college, he designed seats for the Swedish aircraft industry. The seats were built for the pilot to escape from an airplane in case of disaster. Bohlin’s work with planes showed him what could happen in a crash at high speed. In nineteen fifty-eight, Bohlin brought that knowledge to the Swedish car manufacturer Volvo. He was the company’s first chief safety engineer.
At the time, most safety belts in cars crossed the body over the abdomen. A buckle held the restraints in place. But the position of the buckle often caused severe injuries in bad crashes.
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: Nils Bohlin recognized that both the upper and lower body needed to be held securely in place. His invention contained a cloth strap that was placed across the chest and another strap across the hips. The design joined the straps next to the hip.
Volvo was the first automobile manufacturer to offer the modern seat belt as a permanent addition to its cars.  It also provided use of Nils Bohlin’s design to other car-makers.
The Swedish engineer won many honors for his seat belt.  He received a gold medal from the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences in nineteen ninety-five. He died in Sweden in two thousand two.
(MUSIC)
BOB DOUGHTY: Kevlar is another invention that has saved many people from serious injury and death. Kevlar is a fibrous material with qualities that make it able to reject bullets. Added to clothing, the material protects security officers and soldiers across the world.
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The fibers form a protective barrier against gunfire. Bullets lose their shape when they strike Kevlar. Those bullets look like mushrooms, and do not enter the body. Most threats to police and security officers come from handguns. They wear Kevlar vests to protect the upper body. Soldiers wear more extensive clothing protected with Kevlar against heavier ammunition.
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: Kevlar might not have been invented had Stephanie Kwolek been able to seek a career in medicine. From childhood, she wanted to be a doctor. But she lacked the money for a medical education.
Today, thousands of people are glad that Stephanie Kwolek became a research chemist. In that job, she developed the first liquid crystal polymer. The polymer was a chemical product that formed the basis for Kevlar.
BOB DOUGHTY: Stephanie Kwolek was born in nineteen twenty-three in New Kensington, Pennsylvania. As a child, Stephanie loved science. Later, she studied chemistry and other sciences at a Pennsylvania college now known as Carnegie Mellon University.
She got a job with the DuPont chemical company in nineteen forty-six. It was the beginning of a career with the company that lasted about forty years.
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: By the nineteen sixties, Dupont already had produced materials like nylon and Dacron. The company wanted to develop a new fiber. Stephanie Kwolek was part of a DuPont research group that asked to work on its development.
At the time, she was searching for a way to make a material strong enough to use on automobile tires. If tires could be improved, automobiles would need less fuel. Ms. Kwolek needed a new way to make stiff, resistant fibers for the job.
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BOB DOUGHTY: Her experiments for the project were supposed to produce a clear substance similar to a thick syrup. Instead, what Stephanie Kwolek produced was unexpected. It was a liquid that looked cloudy or milky. She said she might have thrown it out. But she decided to let it sit for awhile.
She told VOA that she was warned the liquid could never complete a required process. The process calls for the chemical to be pushed through the small holes of a spinneret. She remembers that the man operating the device at first refused to accept her material. He probably suspected it had solid particles that would block the holes. However, after awhile he said he would try it. She says she thinks he was tired of being asked, or might have felt sorry for her.
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: That person must have been surprised when the substance passed the test. It returned from the laboratory with more firmness than anything Stephanie Kwolek had made before.
Ms. Kwolek did not tell anyone that she had produced something new and strong. She said she was afraid there might have been a mistake. Repeated testing, however, did not find anything wrong. She and her group worked to improve the discovery. DuPont first manufactured large amounts of Kevlar in nineteen seventy-one. The material is found today in hundreds of products from sports equipment to window coverings.
Over the years, Stephanie Kwolek has received many awards. Her honors include membership in the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
(MUSIC)
BOB DOUGHTY: Getting Kevlar placed in protective clothing resulted mainly from the work of Lester Shubin and Nicholas Montanarelli. Mister Shubin was educated in chemistry. He worked for the United States Army in the nineteen seventies. At the time, Mister Montanarelli was an Army project director. He was trained in engineering and psychology.
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The two Americans were working at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. They were searching for a way to protect people in public life from gunfire. Mister Montanarelli knew about DuPont’s recently developed fiber, and the two men decided to test it.
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: The men fired handguns at several materials protected by Kevlar. The material changed the shape of the bullets. It seemed a good candidate to help defend police officers and soldiers.
Mister Shubin was able to gain financial help for a field experiment. Thousands of police officers in many cities began to wear the vests. But Mister Montanarelli said it was difficult to get companies to make them. The companies feared legal action if the vests should fail.
BOB DOUGHTY: Then came December, nineteen seventy-five. A gunman shot at a policeman in Seattle, Washington. One bullet hit the officer’s hand. But a bullet fired very close to the policeman struck his chest.
The officer survived. The bullet did not enter his body. He felt good enough to protest being kept in a hospital that night to make sure all was well. The incident helped get manufacturers to stop worrying about legal action. They began making the vests.
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: Today, about three thousand people are members of the Kevlar Survivors’ Club. DuPont and the International Association of Chiefs of Police organized the group. All the members have escaped injury or death because long ago, a chemist named Stephanie Kwolek produced something unexpected.
(MUSIC)
BOB DOUGHTY: This SCIENCE IN THE NEWS was written by Jerilyn Watson. Our producer was Brianna Blake. I’m Bob Doughty.
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH:  And, I’m Shirley Griffith. Join us again next week for more news about Science in Special English on the Voice of America.
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越障
Combating climate change
Net benefits
The idea of pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere is a beguiling one. Could it ever become real?
摘自http://www.economist.com/node/21550241
THOSE who worry about global warming have a simple answer to the problem. Simple in theory, that is: stop pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In practice that is rather hard to do. But there is another approach. Having put the stuff into the air, take it out.
One proven way of doing this is photosynthesis. Measures to nurture and expand the world’s forests come high on the agenda of environmental proposals. But new forests take up a lot of land. How about a high-tech alternative: capturing the CO2 from air by artificial means and tucking it away in the Earth’s crust?
Klaus Lackner, a physicist at Columbia University, started talking about this a decade ago. Peter Eisenberger, also of Columbia, and David Keith, until recently of the University of Calgary, in Canada, and now at Harvard, have taken up the idea as well. All three have formed companies aimed at doing it, with the help of some intrigued billionaires. Dr Lackner was patronised by the late Gary Comer, founder of Lands’ End, a large clothing company. Dr Eisenberger’s backer is Edgar Bronfman, whose fortune came from Seagram, a now defunct distiller. And Dr Keith has Bill Gates.
But there is a limit to what even an enthusiastic green billionaire can afford—and many observers think that air capture lies well beyond it. A report published last year by the American Physical Society (APS) put the cost of extracting and storing carbon dioxide using an air-capture system based on known technology at between $600 and $800 a tonne. That is about 80 times the current price of European carbon credits. At such prices it would take tens of trillions of dollars to deal with a year’s worth of carbon-dioxide emissions. And some think the APS’s estimates of costs are on the low side.
It was in large part to argue about that estimate that air-capture enthusiasts and their critics met in Calgary on March 7th-8th. The discussions were detailed, mostly civil, sometimes heated. They did not arrive at a meeting of minds, but they did demonstrate that the way people think about air capture is shifting. What was once seen as a way of tucking CO2 away for good is now increasingly thought of as a way of packaging it up for people willing to pay for it—including oil companies eager to sell more oil.
The billionaire boys’ club
Air-capture schemes revolve round a process of reversible absorption. First, a stream of air is run over the absorbing material in question, which pulls CO2 out of it. Then the absorber is processed to release the CO2, allowing the device to go back to work and the CO2 to be disposed of.
Dr Lackner’s version uses layers of Teflon or paper covered with a resin that absorbs carbon dioxide when dry and gives it up when moist. Dr Eisenberger’s proposal employs ceramic blocks similar to those found in a car’s catalytic converter. These, like Dr Lackner’s sheets, are coated with chemicals that take in and release carbon dioxide according to the circumstances. In Dr Eisenberger’s case, though, the crucial circumstance is temperature. The blocks absorb CO2 when they are cool and re-emit it when they are hot.
Dr Keith’s version of the technology, which he hopes to commercialise through a company called Carbon Engineering, based in Calgary, uses a liquid to suck up the CO2. This is similar to the way a power station’s cooling tower works. A film of liquid trickles over corrugated packing material inside the tower, but instead of giving up heat to the surrounding air the liquid absorbs carbon dioxide from it.
The figure in the APS report applies to a system similar in spirit to Carbon Engineering’s. Dr Keith thinks he can do things for much less. His system has a design that makes it easier to get the air through it, uses cheaper materials and does not draw electricity from the grid, which adds to costs and reduces the net amount of carbon stored (since grid electricity comes with carbon emissions attached, from the fuel used to make it). An assessment produced for Carbon Engineering by consultants sees a price of $330 a tonne as possible. The company is aiming for $150.
That is still higher than any carbon market is likely to pay. But the idea of simply getting carbon credits for storing CO2 in the ground, which air-capture enthusiasts used to see as the natural use for the technology, is no longer plausible. For air capture to work it needs to find people with a real economic need for the carbon dioxide it produces.
Dr Keith thinks he has done so. Enhanced oil recovery (EOR) technologies get extra petroleum out of depleted fields by squeezing CO2 into them. Normally, where that CO2 comes from would not matter—and there are much cheaper sources than air capture. But California now has a low-carbon fuel standard that takes account of the amount of carbon dioxide released in the delivery of a barrel of oil to market. Because an EOR system using atmospheric carbon dioxide removes, rather than emits, carbon dioxide, the fuel it produces would count as very low carbon indeed under California’s rules. That means it might command a premium worth the costs of air capture.
A giant sucking sound
The other companies also have plans for using CO2 to make fuels, by feeding it to algae. And Ned David, chief executive of Kilimanjaro, the firm that uses Dr Lackner’s technology, waxes lyrical about the long-term possibilities of EOR in a world in which oil stays expensive and depleted fields are ever more common. If air capture were cheap enough to play a role there, wide-scale deployment might push its costs down further still, making it directly applicable to the climate problem. But a lot of oil would get pumped up first.
And there is another problem. If getting CO2 out of the air can be done cost-effectively, getting it out of the chimneys of power plants and oil refineries, where it is much more concentrated, will be a lot easier. The APS report estimates that this technology, known as carbon capture and storage (CCS), should be a tenth as costly as air capture. And serious plans for CCS in America, such as Summit Power’s proposal for a coal plant in San Antonio, Texas, depend on the revenues expected from selling the CO2 to oil companies for EOR.
Carbon capture and storage is not a sure thing. Its development has been a lot slower than advocates would have wished. But if air capture can be made economical, then CCS will surely be made even more so, and will be able to sell more carbon dioxide cheaper. If air capture has anything to offer it will be in niches where CO2 is needed only for a short while, or in a remote location. (Boeing is looking at using the technology to help the armed forces make synthetic fuels in war zones.) First, though, the questions of cost have to be settled—not through argument, but by actually building things which either fail or pull off tricks that few outside the companies involved deem possible. And that, it appears, is what billionaires are for.
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kaitlynyl

哈哈，沙发先速度：今天比较短，都按时读完了。先讲了安全带，后来开始说防弹衣。越障：讲了全球变暖还有其他一个方式，把CO2抓起来然后抛出地球去。
         有个K，还有两个人提出这个计划，提出计划的过程。有个人之前在哪个学校然后又去了哈佛。
         这个项目的成本，貌似只有billionaire可以hold住。
         人们对于这种方式的讨论和争议在shift。
         开始讲billionaire的工作：
             讲了3个计划版本。
             1 一个叫F的版本，什么温度很重要，什么的。细节忘了。
             2 K的版本。然后细说K的。工程需要神马，K又做到了神马。说了很多过程的事情。
             3 其他公司的版本。
        项目仍然存在的问题。然后又开始分析成本，说这个只有billionaire可以做。

phoebe0624

板凳一次！

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越障 7'20''
A new way to solve the problem of gloal warming--capturing CO2 from air by artifical means.
Three people have companies for the program, although some billioners help them, the fund for this plan is still insufficient.
The way to caputure CO2 from air --material sock up CO2--injection liquid to push out CO2--sell CO2 for some companies
The money costed in this program make CO2 more expensive than traditional ways, but this is green industy. The locational law may encourage the program.

qiuhua01234567

zhan
1:38
1:36
1:34
1:58
1:38
越障：迷茫了、、、、8：02、、、阅读不行啊。。

dengly

1.32
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1.24
1.12
1.16

越障6.40

搞G战士DB

速度：'58   1'01   1'04    1'07    '56
越障：4‘43

liulu007

速度。。。1‘37/1’12/1‘21/1’27’/1‘48
越障。。。华丽丽的8'40。。。。
先讲了不能再排放CO2了。。后面说了几种控制CO2的方法。。。
说了一个公司研究一直研究。。。
有一种可以用液体溶解。。
还可以把CO2当做燃料。。
后面的没太读懂。。记得的就这么多了。。也不知道对不对。。。
RC真是弱爆了。。。

kevin405hu

1‘37
1’30
1‘46
1’52
1‘50

8’48

abjure

1:18
1:34
1:37
1:38
1:57

fox0923

速度彻底不在状态~50"
53"
1'06"
1'39"
1'20"


今天越障读的走神~就不写了~