【每日阅读训练第四期——速度越障14系列】【14-07】科技

starlitcream

[time 1]
The same brain regions that perform cognitive tasks may also provide social intelligence, according to a new study.
Emotional smarts and general intelligence may be more closely linked than previously thought, new research suggests.
In a group of Vietnam veterans, IQ test results and emotional intelligence, or the ability to perceive, understand and deal with emotion in oneself or in others, were linked. And in brain scans, the same regions of the brain seemed to perform both emotional and cognitive tasks, the study found. The findings were published in the journal Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience.
"Intelligence, to a large extent, does depend on basic cognitive abilities, like attention and perception and memory and language," said study coauthor Aron Barbey, a neuroscientist at the University of Illinois, in a statement. "But it also depends on interacting with other people. We're fundamentally social beings and our understanding not only involves basic cognitive abilities but also involves productively applying those abilities to social situations so that we can navigate the social world and understand others."
In the past, scientists believed that emotional intelligence and general intelligence were distinct, and books and movies are rife with depictions of intellectually brilliant but socially clueless nerds.
But Barbey and his colleagues wondered whether emotional intelligence and IQ were more tightly coupled than previously thought. To find out, the team used emotional intelligence, and intelligence tests drawn from 152 Vietnam veterans.
Barbey's team found that as IQ test scores went up so did measures of social abilities.
Next, they studied brain scans from the veterans. Participants had suffered injuries in different parts of the brain, so the researchers created a map of the brain, then broke it into tiny sections. They then compared emotional and general intelligence test results between those with and without injuries for each individual section.
Those with brain injuries in the frontal cortex and the parietal cortex had impairments in both general and emotional intelligence. The frontal cortex plays a key role in regulating behavior, planning and memory, while the parietal cortex plays a role in understanding language.
The findings suggest that social savvy and general smarts are more tightly connected than previously thought.（351）

[time 2]
Apple's Supply Chain Still Has Issues With Underaged Workers
The company has been increasingly trying to clean up the labor and environmental issues associated with making its products. But the latest revelations show a giant company with such a sweeping international supply chain can't control everything.
After years of trying to eradicate child labor from its supply chain, Apple is still struggling. A new internal audit reveals that there were 106 incidents of child labor at its facilities in 2012 alone.
We first wrote about on Apple's issues with underage workers in its supply chain in 2010, when the company reported multiple violations in its audit of 102 facilities, including component suppliers, mines, and ore processors. Clearly, the problem isn't easy to get rid of--it almost seems like an endless game of Whac-a-Mole. In its 2011 Supplier Responsibility Report, Apple describes some of the issues it faces: "During our investigation, we also discovered that the vocational school involved in hiring the underage workers had falsi?ed student IDs and threatened retaliation against students who revealed their ages during our audits. We reported the school to appropriate authorities in the Chinese government."
The change of Apple is very, very important because they are considered to be not the just the largest but the most successful.
In its latest report, Apple found children working at 11 factories in its supply chain. And, unsurprisingly, many of the kids were using false identity documents. Apple replied by forcing the suppliers to send their underage employees back to school, where their education is paid for by the company's Child Labor Remediation program.(266)

[time 3]
Apple also implemented a new underage labor prevention standard, requiring more detailed documentation, age verification, and better communication of labor policies with recruiters and suppliers. This past year, Apple broke off a relationship with one of its suppliers for hiring a high number of underage workers--something that other suppliers will perhaps take to heart.
Every step Apple takes in China is analyzed closely--as it should be for the world's most valuable company. The company has had its share of supply chain problems (including egregious environmental violations documented by Chinese environmentalist Ma Jun), but it's not as if Apple's problems exist in a vacuum. They're endemic in the electronics industry as a whole. The only difference is Apple's size and stature.
As Ma Jun explained to us in an interview on the company's environmental supply chain issues: "...the change of Apple is very, very important because they are considered to be not the just the largest but the most successful. And if they simply say, 'I made a policy not to talk, not to disclose,' then they would be freed from all this public scrutiny. We already feel that some other companies sometimes check with us that if [Apple's position] could be tolerated, then why should they spend all these resources to try to do better?"
Apple has the opportunity to lead the charge on any number of issues, including underage labor. If the company can do an even better job of cleaning up its supply chain, other electronics giants will at least pay attention.
(254)


[time 4]
Biofuel production is often touted as a boon to rural development, but a University of Iowa engineering professor is worried about the effect of corn ethanol plants on his and other states' water supplies. At a biofuels energy symposium hosted by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies last week in Washington, D.C., professor Jerald Schnoor said corn ethanol production facilities require large quantities of high-purity water during the fermentation process.

This water is obtained from underground aquifers, and as ethanol production reaches a fever pitch in Iowa, the state's water supply is threatened. Even in 2009, Iowa state geologists warned that the Jordan aquifer was being pumped at an unsustainable rate in several counties, exceeding the state's 1975 base line within the next two decades."We're near record devotion of acres to corn right now," said Schnoor, who also headed the Iowa Climate Change Advisory Council in 2007. Up to 40 percent of corn production in the United States now goes to ethanol fuel. Schnoor estimated that up to three-quarters of corn crops in his home state are devoted to ethanol production, stressing Iowa's groundwater sources.
He cited the Lincolnway Energy Plant in Nevada, Iowa, as an example. This plant, which Schnoor acknowledged was older and less efficient than newer plants, produces 50 million gallons of ethanol every year by processing 100,000 acres of corn. He said this process requires 200 million gallons of water per year.(238)

[time 5]
Big consumption in small areas
The Lincolnway Energy Plant's 2012 annual report gives a number closer to 100 million gallons a year, but it does describe its water use as "significant."
According to a 2007 report Schnoor authored for the National Academy of Sciences, "because water use in biorefineries is concentrated into a smaller area, such facilities' effects can be substantial locally." The report added that "a biorefinery that produces 100 million gallons of ethanol per year, for example, would use the equivalent of the water supply for a town of about 5,000 people."
In the western United States, where corn must be irrigated because precipitation is less reliable, Schnoor said the strain on the underground water supply is even greater.
"eople don't realize that we're unsustainably pumping down these aquifers," he said, calling for an end to the expansion of biofuel use for this reason.

Theresa Selfa, a professor at the State University of New York's College of Environmental Science and Forestry, examined the socio-economic impacts of corn ethanol on small communities in Kansas and Iowa in a 2011 study. After extensive interviews, she found communities were often proud of the biofuel plants, despite the perceived impacts on the water supply.
"We did get more positive than negative comments on the survey," she said.
Drought underscores the problem
These communities had relatively high poverty rates -- one more than 20 percent -- so residents appreciated the boost to the local economy, however small. "These plants don't really have a lot of direct jobs," Selfa said.
"Any job in this town is better than none at all," said a resident in Selfa's study from Russell, Kan.Also, she said that relative to the environmental impacts of other industries in the Midwest, like feed lots, oil refineries and meat packing plants, "the ethanol industry seemed pretty benign."
But in Russell, home to a plant owned by U.S. Energy Partners, 67 percent of community members expressed concern about the water resources used by the plant. In May 2012, Russell was placed under water restrictions due to drought.(344)
[left]
Selfa thought that had these communities been aware of ethanol production's impact on the local water supply, support for the plants may not have been as strong.
"I think people in general were not that well-informed," Selfa said, concluding that "biofuels are not an overwhelming win-win for rural communities."


【越障】

The search for better ways of storing electricity is hotting upKRIS PUPEK, an industrial chemist at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, near Chicago, waves a tube of white powder in the air emphatically. A mere pinch of the contents is sufficient for his analytical colleagues to work out if it has the potential to be the next whizzy material in battery research. But Dr Pupek does not deal in pinches. His job is to find out whether potential can be turned into practice - in other words, whether something that has the right properties can be made cheaply, and in bulk. If it can, it is passed on to industry for testing. The hope is that at least one of the tubes will start a revolution.Batteries are a hugely important technology. Modern life would be impossible without them. But many engineers find them disappointing and feel that they could be better still. Produce the right battery at the right price, these engineers think, and you could make the internal-combustion engine redundant and usher in a world in which free fuel, in the form of wind and solar energy, was the norm. That really would be a revolution.It is, however, a revolution that people have been awaiting a long time. And the longer they wait, the more the doubters wonder if it will ever happen. The Joint Centre for Energy Storage Research (JCESR), at which Dr Pupek and his colleagues work, hopes to prove the doubters wrong. It has drawn together the best brains in energy research from America’s national laboratories and universities, along with a group of interested companies. It has money, too. It has just received a grant of $120m from the country’s Department of Energy. The aim, snappily expressed, is to make batteries five times more powerful and five times cheaper in five years.Think positive]Most batteries, from the ancient, lumbering lead-acid monsters used to start cars, to the sleek, tiny lithium cells that power everything from e-book readers to watches, have three essential components: two electrodes (an anode and a cathode) and a medium called an electrolyte that allows positively charged ions to move between the electrodes, balancing the flow of negatively charged electrons that form the battery’s useful current. The skill of creating new types of battery is to tinker with the materials of these three components in ways that make things better and cheaper. Dr Pupek’s white powders are among those materials.To discover more of them, Argonne will make use of a rapidly growing encyclopedia of substances created by Gerbrand Ceder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr Ceder runs the Materials Project, which aims to be the “Google of material properties”. It allows researchers to speed up the way they search for things with specific properties. Argonne will use the Materials Project as a reference library in its search for better electrodes, and also hopes to add to it.The first test of any combination of substances that comes out of the Materials Project, or anywhere else, will be to beat the most successful electricity-storage device to emerge over the past 20 years: the lithium-ion battery. Such batteries are now ubiquitous. Most famously, they power many of the electric and hybrid-electric cars that are starting to appear on the roads. More infamously, they have a tendency to overheat and burn. Two recent fires on board Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliners may have been caused by such batteries or their control systems. Improving on lithium-ion would be a feather in the cap of any laboratory.George Crabtree, JCESR’s newly appointed director, thinks such improvements will be needed soon. He reckons that most of the gains in performance to be had from lithium-ion batteries have already been achieved, making the batteries ripe for replacement. Jeff Chamberlain, his deputy, is more bullish about the existing technology. He says it may still be possible to double the amount of energy a lithium-ion battery of given weight can store, and also reduce its cost by 30-40%.This illustrates the uncertainty about whether lithium-ion technology, if pushed to its limits, can make electric vehicles truly competitive with those run by internal-combustion engines, let alone better. McKinsey, a business consultancy, reckons that lithium-ion batteries might be competitive by 2020 but, as the chart below shows, there is still a lot of work to do. Moreover, pretenders to lithium-ion’s throne are already emerging.The leader is probably the lithium-air battery, in which metallic lithium is oxidised at the anode and reduced at the cathode. In essence, it uses atmospheric oxygen as the electrolyte. This reduces its weight and means its energy density is theoretically enormous. That is important. One objection to electric cars is that petrol packs six times more joules of energy into a kilogram than a battery can manage. Bringing that ratio down would make electric vehicles more attractive.The lithium-air approach has consequently generated a lot of hype. It has problems, though, which will take years of research to resolve. Lithium-air batteries are hard to recharge and extremely temperamental. The chemical reaction which powers them is not far removed from spontaneous combustion. Lithium-air batteries are thus highly inflammable and require heavy safety systems to stop them catching fire.Luckily, the researchers at JCESR have other irons in the fire. One is the multivalent-ion battery. A lithium atom has but a single electron available for chemical reactions. A magnesium atom, by contrast, has two such valence electrons, and an aluminium atom three.Theoretically, says Dr Chamberlain, this means it might be possible get two or three times as much energy out of a magnesium or aluminium battery. Though these metals are not as light as lithium (nor as electropositive, to use a piece of chemical jargon that is pertinent to the argument), their extra valence electrons increase the amount of energy they can store, thus pushing them forward in the competition with petrol. They are also cheaper than lithium. And safer. Their ions, however, are harder to move around inside a battery, which is why they have not been used much in the past, and this is where new materials will need to be sought out.The second transformation, besides electric cars, that better batteries might bring about is what is known as grid-scale storage. If this could be done cheaply enough it would revolutionise the economics of wind and solar energy by making the main problem with such sources - that the sun does not always shine and the wind does not always blow - irrelevant. To this end, Argonne’s researchers are working on what are known as flow batteries.Go with the flowIn a conventional battery the electrolyte is contained within the cell and serves to transport ions between the electrodes. The battery’s charge is held as chemical potential energy in those electrodes. In a flow battery the charge is held in the electrolyte itself, which is stored in a tank and then pumped through the cell to the place where the electrochemical reactions occur.Unlike batteries based on cells, flow batteries can be made very large indeed, so they can store vast amounts of energy. Hence the idea of using them to collect surplus power from wind turbines and solar panels and squirrel it away for use later. But their water-based electrolytes limit their potential, because of water’s tendency to decompose by electrolysis. That restricts the voltage at which they can operate. Replacing their aqueous electrolytes with organic ones would overcome this limitation, and Argonne’s researchers are endeavouring to do so.A battery-driven world, then, would electrify parts of the economy, such as transport, that have been recalcitrant, and would encourage the shift from costly (and polluting) fossil fuels to “fuels” such as sunlight that cost nothing. As a manifesto for a revolution, that takes some beating. The question is, will the revolutionaries win, or will the ancien régime prevail?（1345）

jijiyangyu

1:53    
1:18    
1:15    
1:29    
1:51    
8:03越障没有分段，很混乱的样子。

通过一个实验室引出电池的话题，之后介绍了未来的各种电池及其优劣。有白色粉末电池，lithium-ion电池的改进，Lithium-air电池，multivalent-ion电池和grid-scale storage技术。

cleotina

好不容易找到了，嘿嘿辛苦楼主  不过标题形式还得一致。不然迷失了。

3'48
a study conducted by a group of Illinos University found that the level of IQ has tighten connect with emotional quanlity, since the brain area control these two party are might the same rigion, which are the front cortex, playing a key role in regulating behabior, planning and memory; and parietal area, understanding language.
2'15
The problem that some child labor working in the supply Chine of China department is repoted; and the children were using false identity documents. Apply replied by forcig the suppliers to sent their underage employees back to school, where their education is paid for by the company's Chila Labor Remediation program.
1'50
Apply as the largest and successful company in the world, also implemented a new underage labor prevention standard. But this problem is endemic in the electronics industry as whole, Apply's action will at least draw other electronics giants attention.
2'15
Biofuel product is often touted as a rural development, but University professor is worried about the effect of the corn ethanol plant on his and other state's water supplier.Professor Jerald School said corn ethanol production facilities reqire large quantities of high-purity water during the fermentation process.
3'
Biofuel is not an overwhelming win-win for rural communities, although some people pround of this product and it do creating some job an rural place.
14'30
Scientist focusing on the Kind of New material, whiter powder, which can realize the vision that make the battery five times cheaper and five time more powerful in five year.
the revolution will show in two aspects: the reform of the way powering automobile; the way to well take use salor and wind energy.
Hopefully, the goal will come true.

abc791201064

2.50   The researchers found that the same area of brain could both play role in the interlectual activity and emotionalXXX . They elicited this result from the previous experiment and the result is contrary to what many people previously thought. Also, the reasearchers then asked whether these two XXX(interlectual and emotional) are tightly combined(coupled). The following experiment in which the 越南老兵 joined, indicated that whether the part of brain which has sth to with the interlectual and emotion has been injuried would impact the language...... Therefore the scientists concluded that these two XXXare tightly combined.  

1.59  The company Apple planned to eradicate the problem of hiring underage workers, but failed. After some student workers ,who also faced issues of false identity document, would be returned to school , and their tuition fees would be covered by the company.

1.58 Not only because the Apple is the biggest electronic company in the world, but also because it is the most successful one, Apple company pay attention to many issues, and other international entrupre.... would also , more or less, do the same.

1.42 The new kinds of bioenergy, XXX becomes scientists' concern becuase the fuel require large amount of pure water. In XX, the fuel demands large quantity of water, which is obtained from the underground acquifer, has threten the local and the water level has declined to the lowest since XXXX.  However, this kind of biofuel has take up for 40 percent of the nation's fuel, which indicates that more water is required.

3.05  The prefessor conducted an experiment showing that people seems to accept the biofel more than refuting it , large because some people surveyed come from the poor family, which can not afford to other fuels？？？ ，。， Also, people are not actually realize the problem of biofuel.

sophia412

今天字体变了。


1.59
Intelligence and emotion are more conneted in the brain than previously thought.

1.27
Apple is trying to resolve its underage child labor issue.

1.15
Apple has taken steps to prevent related supply chain issues. The company's industry situation is imporatant and watched by others.

1.21
As corn products transfermed into ethanal energy, the groundwater resouces are threatened.

1.43
Small area is consuming more water resourse for biofuel transferm and not many people concern about the water lack issue.

7.17  好长...
Battery revolution. To improve the battery products by replacing the three componenets into better ones.

铁板神猴

凌晨弄得吧 星星辛苦了~！

修一一

2‘26
1’54
1‘35
1’39
1‘53


迷糊糊滴越障先留一会。。。

starlitcream

猴哥你被面上了吗

acmscorpio

今天字体大，看起来挺舒服的

hopscotch123

1. 2'41
iq and eq interact more tightly in the brain than we think before.
2. 2'11
apple has to do sth to deal with the underaged.
3. 2'03
apple needs to set more rigid standard about employment. and other company may also pay attention to this problem because of the behavior of apple.
4. 1;49
biofule is not as good as people think because it needs a lot of water to produce the main ingredient ethanol. This process will harm the underground water.
5. 2;52
S' people are pround to produce biofule, but they don't realize the problem it has.

13'32