【每日阅读训练第四期——速度越障7系列】【7-17】科技

h14zpsn

速度1：
Gamblers go all-in on Ritalin
A dose of Ritalin makes healthy women more reckless in a gambling game. After taking the stimulant, participants in an experiment shifted their betting strategy and kept playing even when faced with stakes too high for most folks.
Though solid numbers are scarce, evidence suggests that many healthy people turn to Ritalin (also known as methylphenidate) and other stimulants to boost mental capacity. Some college students, for instance, rely on these “smart pills” to focus attention in cram sessions before tests.
The new results, published in the Sept. 19 Journal of Neuroscience, suggest that the drugs might have unanticipated consequences for these people, says study coauthor Daniel Campbell-Meiklejohn of New York University.
Scientists have known that the very same drug has an opposite effect in people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and a kind of dementia, normalizing these people’s risky behavior. Scientists can’t yet explain Ritalin’s divergent effects, but they suspect that variations in how the brain handles the chemical messenger dopamine may be involved.  
Researchers enlisted 40 healthy women to take either Ritalin or a placebo, and later play a gambling game. The game was rigged so that the players would quickly rack up a loss and then have to choose whether to double-down in the hopes of recovering their money. “That’s the sad part of the game,” says Campbell-Meiklejohn, who conducted the study while at Aarhus University in Denmark. “You really can’t win.”
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速度2：
Usually, when the stakes get too high, most people bow out and accept their loss. Women who took the placebo behaved this way in a gambling game that used fake money and awarded a real cash prize to the overall winner. But women who got Ritalin kept betting, even when the stakes reached 1,600 Kroner, or about $280. These women seemed inured to the fear of losing a big pot of money.
More studies are needed to know exactly how Ritalin, which boosts levels of dopamine and another chemical messenger called noradrenaline in the brain, influences risky behavior. Ritalin and other drugs like it might shift people so that they are more focused on the potential reward at the expense of thinking about the consequences. Or the drugs might impair a person’s ability to recognize a risky situation or learn from a loss.
Other drugs like amphetamines and cocaine, which behave similarly to Ritalin in the brain, might also increase aspects of risky behavior, says cognitive neuroscientist Trevor Robbins of the University of Cambridge. And these changed behaviors, which could include drug-seeking and using, could lead to addiction.
The influence of these drugs isn’t restricted to illicit drug use or gambling, says Campbell-Meiklejohn. A shift in decision-making strategy would reverberate in everyday life, whether you’re deciding if you should stick it out through a rough patch at a job or to run for the bus rather than walk.
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速度3：
DNA tags may dictate bee behavior
Reversible changes that dictate how genes function may determine what jobs honeybees do in the hive.
Worker honeybees are literally born to be nurses that take care of larvae. After two to three weeks, the workers become foragers. That career change is accompanied by the addition of chemical tags called methyl groups to some of their genes, says a team of researchers led by epigeneticist Andrew Feinberg of Johns Hopkins University and biologist Gro Amdam of Arizona State University in Tempe and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences in Aas.
The addition of chemical tags, tweaks known as epigenetic modifications, changes genes’ activity but doesn’t alter the genes themselves. In honeybees, these modifications are also reversible: Forager bees that go back to being nurses also revert to the epigenetic pattern seen in nurses, the researchers report online September 16 in Nature Neuroscience.
Although other researchers have previously detected different patterns of chemical tags between nurses and foragers, this is the first time behavior changes have been linked to reversal of those patterns.  
“This is an exciting paper because it implicates epigenetics in the establishment and stability of distinct behavioral predispositions,” says Gene Robinson who studies bees, genes and behavior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The new study does not show that methylation changes cause bees to behave differently, but it does show that behavior and epigenetic modifications are both reversible and associated with each other.
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速度4：
For the new study, Amdam and her colleagues set up bee colonies in which all the workers were the same age. The researchers continually removed larvae just before hatching so no relief workers could be added to the workforce. Dots of paint distinguished foragers from nurses. An analysis of the chemical tags in bee brains showed that the nurse-to-forager career transition was associated with dropped or added epigenetic tags on 155 different genes.
When all the foragers were out of the colony, Amdam and her colleagues snatched the remaining nurses. After a few days of confusion, some foragers returned to their old nursing jobs. That reversion was accompanied by DNA methylation changes in 107 genes, including 57 involved in the original nurse-to-forager change, the team found.
Epigeneticists would have predicted a result similar to these findings, says Wolf Reik, an epigeneticist who studies wasps at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, England. “This is not surprising, but it is actually quite exciting to see it,” Reik says.
Researchers in Australia had previously described epigenetic differences between queens and workers, a difference Feinberg and Amdam’s analysis failed to uncover. Reik and Solenn Patalano, also of the Babraham Institute, attribute the different findings to the age of the bees in the studies. The Australian group studied established workers and queens, while the new study examined newly emerged bees. Epigenetic patterns are shaped over time by experience, age and interactions with the environment. So the differences noted in the earlier study might reflect the different experiences queens and workers encounter in their lifetimes.
Similarly, Ryszard Maleszka, an epigeneticist at the Australian National University in Canberra who led the earlier studies, isn’t convinced that reversing epigenetic tags causes bees to revert to old behaviors. Rather, flexible tags may reflect the reverted nurses’ switch from flying alone in a visually exciting world to returning to a dark, crowded nest alive with smells.
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速度5：
Flash leads to flex in lab-grown muscle
Artificial muscle tissue that recoils when hit with a burst of light could one day be used to build soft-bodied robots that can be guided by light.
The light-sensitive tissue could also be used to test new drugs that target muscle-wasting diseases, says Mahmut Selman Sakar of ETH Zurich. The findings are slated to appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Lab on a Chip. Sakar and colleagues first reported their work August 21 on the publication's website.
The work is “a neat step forward,” says bioengineer Hang Lu of the Georgia Institute of Technology, although Lu notes that making a light-controllable robot might still be a long way off.


Sakar and colleagues at MIT teamed up with scientists at the University of Pennsylvania to genetically engineer mouse muscle cells that twinge in response to light. The researchers loaded the cells with a light-activated protein, let the cells fuse into fibers, and mixed them with a special gel to form 3-D strips smaller than the width of a grain of rice. Then, they hit the strips with narrow beams of blue light.


Only the light-zapped fibers jumped; those in the dark stayed still. “I was hoping it would work, but the first time I saw it, it was amazing,” Sakar says. “I was very, very excited.”
Sakar and colleagues even got the muscle fibers to show off a bit of brawn. Tissue strips stretched between two tiny elastic posts pulled the structures together when scientists switched on the light.


Burly tissues with controllable fibers could help researchers make muscle-bound robots that crawl along the ground like worms, Sakar says. These wormbots could wiggle over dirt, scouting out toxic chemicals in the environment with built-in sensors.
The itty-bitty biological machines would have to carry a light source to turn on their muscles. But other research groups are working to merge LED lights onto elastic sheets that could ride atop a wormbot’s muscles like skin, Sakar says.


The real challenge would be making the bots bigger: If the muscles strips got much thicker than the ones Sakar and his colleagues have created, oxygen and nutrients wouldn’t be able to pass into the tissue to power its contractions. That means a beefed-up robot would need something like a blood vessel system to carry fuel through its body. Another problem, Sakar says, would be getting light to penetrate opaque chunks of tissue.


Though building a big, strapping muscle bot may not be possible for decades, mini robotic glow worms may be able to wriggle outside much sooner. “Maybe 10 years,” Sakar says. “I’m actually very optimistic.”
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越障：
Must a Paper Trail Be Paper?

There was a time when the only choice scientists needed to make about their lab notebooks was whether to use a blue pen or a black one. But these days, laboratory record-keeping is more complicated. As digitally generated data have proliferated, many electronic alternatives to traditional paper lab notebooks have emerged, varying widely both in price—from free to astronomical—and in how rigorously they adhere to accepted documentation standards. "It's going in one direction, of course,” says David Wright, director of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Research Integrity (ORI) in Rockville, Maryland. “With more and more generation of electronic data, the traditional laboratory notebook is going to become obsolete. There are some very sophisticated technologies available. Now it's a matter of institutions and individual research groups taking them up."
For now, many researchers—perhaps most—believe that paper notebooks work just fine. Cell biologist Andrea Ladd of the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio keeps her lab notebook exactly the same way she was taught as an undergraduate in the early 1990s. She has the members of her lab do the same. “We're pretty rigorous about lab notebooks, and very old school," she says. She and her students use permanently bound, hard copy notebooks with numbered pages; write only in ink; leave no blank spaces; and enter records chronologically. They tape images and figures into their notebook pages. When they have to correct mistakes, they write a note in the margin, dated and initialed so it's clear the entry was made later than the original entry. For data that would be impractical to put in a notebook—a series of 200 images taken with a confocal microscope, for example—they keep electronic image files on the server and reference the files in a notebook entry.
Ladd is aware that various electronic lab notebook (ELN) software packages exist, but she hasn't felt much need to explore their possibilities. "art of the reason I use paper notebooks is that's the way I was trained, and it works," she says. She also worries that keeping an electronic lab notebook would complicate her workflow. "If you have [your notebook] on the computer, then when you have things like printouts or gel pictures that you would normally just tape into your notebook, then I guess you'd have to scan them and enter them electronically. Having to scan everything seems time-consuming and unnecessary.” Ladd also values being able to draw diagrams and cartoons in her notebook as a way of keeping track of experimental setups and thinks that would be hard to do on a computer screen.
Biochemist Christine Payne of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta says she has never been tempted to switch to an electronic notebook and isn’t aware of any colleagues who have switched. Payne likes the traditional format, she says, and would hesitate to use any electronic solutions that involve putting data on the Internet because questions of who then owns the intellectual property can become “fuzzy.”
Payne sees paper notebooks as the most durable and convenient way of maintaining information. “It's easy to pass notebooks back and forth between students if somebody's taking over a project or is repeating an experiment,” she says. “And if they bring their lab notebooks to meetings, we can easily flip through the notebook together."
As holdouts from an earlier, paper-driven era, Ladd and Payne are by no means unusual. Reliable figures on lab notebook practices are not available, but it is widely agreed that a large majority of university researchers still use paper. Nonetheless, some scientists have found that the volume of digital data their labs generate necessitates a new approach to record-keeping. “Traditionally, the way that people have managed their information was that they had a lab notebook and they had their minds, and they would remember things,” says University of California, San Diego, neuroscientist Maryann Martone, who is the principal investigator of the Neuroscience Information Framework, a National Institutes of Health-funded collection of laboratory informatics resources for neuroscientists. “They would remember that 'P756' or ‘Tomo #7’ referred to an experiment in a particular project.” If they needed to pull up data under a particular project, they could go through their notebooks and recognize those cryptic references.
Increasingly, Martone says, scientists are finding that that sort of dependence on memory has become untenable. “With physical data, we used to have boxes of slides and so on. Now, things are in different computers and are not always available for search.” Some scientists have told her they feel as if they've lost control over their own laboratories. “They spend an inordinate amount of time looking for things, so much so that they sometimes decide it’s easier to just redo experiments rather than waste time trying to track down previous results.”
Some of the pressure to streamline laboratory record-keeping has come from scientific journals, which have begun requiring more rigorous documentation. The Royal Society recently began requiring that data associated with papers published in its journals be deposited in an appropriate digital repository. The Journal of Comparative Neurology requires researchers to enter details about their reagents into a publicly accessible database. “All that's going to start with your lab notebook,” Martone says. “If you've got to go look through 60 volumes of your postdoc’s lab notebooks, as opposed to having a beautiful online record, your view of electronic records starts to change.”
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spencerX

谢谢h14zpsn！今天的越障思路很清晰，有GMAT的范儿！

ps：今天应该是7-17了吧？还有今天本来不应该是经管的吗？难道我搞错了？

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miffyhui

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There was a time scientists discussed about whether they should use blue pen or black pen. Now, the problem is whether they use electronic notebook or paper.
L says that he prefers to the paper: 1.he was trained by this way and it worked.2.sometimes we need not to scan everything because it is time-consuming.
C says that she would not switch the way because she thinks that it is fuzzy
P thinks notebook is a convenient and durable way to maintain information and they can put the notebooks together and discuss.
M says that scientists are finding that dependence on memory is untenable.
Reason: 1.they spend a lot of time track the researches;2.the pressure from the journal

puffywhite

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obstacle: 05''36

the passage is concerning the possible transition between the electronic notebook and tranditional notebook in a laboratory as nowadays the electronic datas are becoming more and more prevail.
still, there are many sciencists choose to stay in tranditional method to record their datas and experiments, using notebooks, ink and modifying mistakes next to the originate. L argues that  the tranditional method is more convinenent because it do not need scientists to scan format and diagram. B also claims that electronic method is unnecessary and none next to her has made such a shift. meanwhile, she thinks tranditional way to record can pass more easily when needed and can flip without difficility.
nonetheless, many scientists find that current situation has altered because sometime scientists can not solely rely on their memory to record the experiments. electronic method, which can be accessible to search at any time, provide them enormous convinence. moreover, many journals require scientists to summit their experiments and report to a electronic database, rendering scientists have to make such a shift

angela不怕孤单

谢谢分享~
speed
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obstacle
08:59
1/scientists used paper notebook before and now they have electronic alternatives.
2/paper notebook is fine.
  -->the paper notebook now is the same as in early 1990s.
  -->even the ELN exists,they prefer to use paper notebook.
  -->CP doesn't think the electronic notebook is a good idea,which leak the intellectual property.  
  -->ayne think paper notebook is durable and convenient.
3/digital database is a new approach.
  -->the things that depend on scientists memory are untenable.
  -->database can be available to search.
  -->there are pressures from journals.
提出观点-->观点一（支持）-->让步，观点二（作者更倾向观点二）

fightfor700

标题是否应该是7-17啊？anyway，谢谢h14zpsn，文章选材多样，排版整洁！
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越障：6:32

torresAing

speed：
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1, a drug called A , which can stimulate the people's emotions . nowadays scientists suggest that this diug may have opposite effects , so they carry out a experiment .
2, several women are join the experiment , one of them eat A , the other one eat B . the results turns out people who have A appear extremely exciting during a gamble , as a result , they loose much more money than group B ;
3, DNA tags may affect the bee's behaviour
4, age , environment and some other factors may determine the "nurser-forager-nurser" transition , but someone say they go back to "nurser" because they are accustomed to the dark atmosphere in hive ;
5, artifical muscle tissue may contribute to bulid a kind of robot , muscle can react when the light appears , there are some pros they have to face .so they may succeed in the future , but still a long way off .

Obstacle：8.48
nowadays ,electronic data may replace the traditional lab notebook , which was widely used in the past

vote for tradi-paper
but some researchers and professors are still fonder of trad-notebook , they like writing in bule or black ink and like the words next to each other , so they obsessed with that feeling ;
some teacher think tradi-notework still convinence ;

vote for elec
a neuroscientist finds out people remeber thing through "memory or wirte", momery is not avaliable sometimes .
researcher finds that many people in the lab sometimes will waste a lot of time to find the results rather than do that experiment again , so database will much more convenient ;
some pressure

xjbb

占座～终于考完了，又能腾出时间继续搞阅读了～小分队的童鞋们，俺想死你们了！

cocoobear

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