【Native Speaker每日综合训练—37系列】【37-05】科技

zxppx

内容：ZXPPX 编辑：ZXPPX

Stay tuned to our latest post! Follow us here ---> http://weibo.com/u/3476904471

Part I: Speaker

Pope Francis Pleas for the Environment
In a May 21 speech Pope Francis warned that despoiling the environment would come back to haunt humanity. David Biello reports

Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the Earth, and subdue it. That's what God told Adam and Eve in the King James Bible. Do Christians therefore have an obligation to tame the Earth and exercise “dominion” over all its plants and animals?

Not according to Pope Francis. In a speech on May 21, he noted that our planet is a great gift to humanity. Nature and the cosmos beyond are objects for wonder and awe—an awe that the Christian deity also shared after creating it.

That experience of awe suggests that the obligation we humans bear is to care for God's creation. At least, that's how Pope Francis apparently thinks about the natural world. According to the leader of the Earth’s more than one billion Catholics, we should be stewards of creation—not its masters or owners.

His remarks included a caveat. Translated into English, Pope Francis said, "If we destroy Creation, Creation will destroy us. Never forget this!"

Sounds like he was issuing a warning about climate change, mass extinction and other negative human impacts on our only planetary home. A warning we should heed, regardless of religious affiliation or lack thereof.

—David Biello

Source: Scientificamerican
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/pope-francis-pleas-for-the-environment/

[Rephrase 1, 1:22]

zxppx

Part II: Speed

Princes and Princesses Among 50 Egyptian Mummies Unearthed
Royal mummies from Egypt's golden age surprise scholars.
BY Dan Vergano| 1 May 2014

[Time 2]

Offering hopes for tracing the family secrets of the ancient pharaohs, more than 50 royal mummies have emerged in Egypt's Valley of the Kings from a tomb long sealed by rubble and little suspected of harboring royalty. (Related: "Valley of the Kings—Gateway to Afterlife Provides Window on the Past.")

Egyptian antiquities officials, working with archaeologists from Switzerland's University of Basel, reported this week that the royal mummies date from the reigns of the pharaohs Thutmose IV and Amenhotep III in the 14th century B.C. Both pharaohs were members of the 18th dynasty, which included the famous King Tutankhamen, or King Tut, who was buried nearby. (Related: "Replica of King Tut's Tomb to Open in Egypt.")

"They were the royal sons and daughters buried over several decades in this tomb," said Egyptologist Susanne Bickel of the University of Basel's Kings' Valley Project.

The find points to the history, and surprises, still buried in the ancient tombs of Egypt's long-gone rulers, who reigned during one of the high points of the realm's influence and power. (Related: "Tomb of Ancient Egyptian Physician Discovered.")

"It really was a golden age for ancient Egypt," says Egyptologist Salima Ikram of the American University in Cairo. "They had a huge empire that stretched from Syria to Nubia. They were not just a military power but an arbiter of culture."

[223 words]

[Time 3]

Rubble Clearing
The tomb, dubbed KV 40, was first discovered and opened in 1899 by a team led by French archaeologist Victor Loret. But Loret seems to have not ventured into the tomb, Ikram suggests.

The Egyptian and Swiss team reopened the boulder-choked tomb in 2011. Over the past three years they've dug a 20-foot-long (6 meter) shaft and revealed five rooms.

The rooms were littered with smashed and broken mummies, grave goods, coffins, and funeral materials. The main room and three of the side rooms held the scattered remains of the mummies, including some infants.

Inscribed pottery identified more than 30 of the dead by name. Although the site was long considered unlikely to hold royal remains, it harbored at least eight royal princesses and four princes, as well as foreigners to the court of the long-vanished pharaohs.

The remains of pharaohs of the era have also been discovered in other tombs, and analysis of their ancient DNA may reveal family relations among the royal children.

"They are not just names and fragments now, but real people who we can see lived and we can feel a connection to," Ikram said. The discovery should shed light on social distinctions and mummification practices for the royal of that era.

Tomb Robbers
The archaeologists weren't the first visitors to the tomb. Members of a priestly family from the 9th century B.C. were also buried in the tomb.

But the smashed remains attest to looters sacking the tomb in antiquity and later in the 19th century, Bickel says. The tomb walls and much of its contents have a heavy coating of soot, which was probably left by the torches of grave robbers.

In 2011, Bickel's team also discovered KV 64, the first new tomb discovered in the Valley of the Kings since Howard Carter's discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922.

"For us, the excavations are done. Our work is ahead in the lab," Bickel says. "It actually wasn't the mummies themselves that interested us, as much as the materials and inscriptions that we found with them."

[344 words]
Source: news.nationalgeographic
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/05/140501-mummy-royal-tut-discovery-egypt-science/


Microbes defy rules of DNA code
Researchers find widespread 'recoding'.
BY Erika Check Hayen | 22 MAY, 2014

[Time 4]

The instructions encoded into DNA are thought to follow a universal set of rules across all domains of life. But researchers report today in Science1 that organisms routinely break these rules.

The finding has implications for the design of synthetic life: by designing organisms that break the rules, researchers may be able to make novel life forms resistant to viral infection. Making these organisms also been proposed as a way to stop synthetic life forms from infecting unintended hosts. Widespread exceptions to these rules, however, could make it difficult to engineer organisms that will not pass on their DNA to those in the wild.

“This study highlights the malleability of the genetic code,” says bioengineer Farren Isaacs at Yale University in West Haven, Connecticut.

Researchers led by Edward Rubin at the US Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, California, went looking for such rule-breakers in the DNA and RNA of microbes from 1,776 places, including 17 locations in the human body. They were hunting for 'recoding' events — instances in which the microbe interprets the genetic code differently from the way most organisms do.

The team looked specifically for events in which stop codons — genetic sequences that normally tell an organism to finish making a protein — instead send a 'go' signal, telling the organism to add another amino acid to the growing protein.

[226 words]

[Time 5]

From stop to go
The team first asked what proteins would be encoded by stretches of genetic code at least 1,000 bases long if the organism were using the traditional stop command. If those proteins were abnormally short, the researchers then looked at whether the microbe might actually be interpreting a stop codon as an amino acid. This seemed to be the case in 31,415 samples, and in as many as 10% of the sequences taken from some environments.

Microbes found in humans were particularly prone to recoding. Although only 10% of the samples came from the human body, more than half of the recoded codons came from these locations.

Rubin says that recoding has been seen in nature, but not at this level because most studies have focused on microbes that can be grown in a lab. “When we took this approach and looked outside the lab and asked, ‘Is this the rule?’, the rules broke down,” he says.

Synthetic biologists have been using recoding to allow organisms to make new kinds of amino acids with new properties2. They also hope to use it as a way to stop designer organisms from sharing their modified DNA with other life forms. For instance, viruses hijack their host's cellular machinery to make more copies of themselves. But this might be more difficult if the virus and host interpret the code differently.

By allowing scientists to engineer recoded microbes that can't exchange genetic information with natural ones, recoding has the potential to make a big impact in biosecurity, says Isaacs, who spent six years recoding one of the stop codons in an Escherichia coli bacterium to incorporate a synthetic amino acid into its proteins2. Rubin’s study, however, found that in some environments — in the human mouth, for example — bacteria are infected with viruses that seem to have incompatible coding. “It suggests that we should be more careful if we really want to make a firewall,”
 Rubin says.

But George Church, who is leading an E. coli recoding project3 at Harvard University in Cambridge, says that because synthetically recoded organisms leapfrog evolution and are not exposed to continual evolutionary pressures, they will not be vulnerable to the same type of genomic hijacking that seems to allow natural viruses to infect differently recoded forms of life.

“If you change a genome radically while the virus is 'not looking'”, says Church, “then the number of changes needed to be correct simultaneously can be larger than any viral population that could fit on Earth.”

[420 words]
Source: Nature
http://www.nature.com/news/microbes-defy-rules-of-dna-code-1.15283


Mysterious Hexagon May Reveal Length of Saturn's Day
BY Eric Hand | 7 MAY, 2014

[Time 6]

Fixed above Saturn’s north pole is something as beguiling as Jupiter’s Great Red Spot: a hexagonal storm kept in place by a peculiar jet stream. Now, planetary scientists say that the rotation of the hexagon could most accurately reflect the length of Saturn’s short-lived day: 10 hours, 39 minutes, and 23 seconds. Like the other gas giants, Saturn lacks a solid surface that can be used to measure its rotation period; surficial atmospheric features at the equator move faster than at the poles. Many planetary scientists use magnetic-field radio emissions as a way to calculate the rotation period, because those emissions are assumed to originate from deep within the planet’s interior, where the rotation period is more constant. At Saturn, however, this technique has proved to be problematic: Those emissions differ by about 15 minutes between the northern and southern hemisphere. The hexagon could be the key to a more constant rotation rate. Publishing in Geophysical Research Letters, researchers combined images from the Cassini spacecraft spanning 5.5 years and found that the hexagon’s rotation period barely changed. They suggest that the storm, which could extend hundreds of kilometers below the surface, is intimately coupled with the interior, and therefore a good marker for the planet’s true rotation period.

[208 words]
Source: news.sciencemag
http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2014/05/scienceshot-mysterious-hexagon-may-reveal-length-saturns-day

zxppx

Part III: Obstacle

Exotic atomic threesomes explained
How an experiment confirmed giant quantum states of three atoms that would not bind in twos.
BY Katia Moskvitch | 23 MAY, 2014

[Paraphrase 7]

In 1970 Vitaly Efimov, a physicist now at the University of Washington in Seattle, found a surprising effect hidden in the equations of quantum physics.

He calculated that when two identical particles interact too weakly to form bonds, a third one can reinforce their interaction and keep the three particles together in a stable, if loosely bound, state. This should apply to neutral atoms, whose mutual attraction (known as Van der Waals force) can be extremely feeble.

This hypothetical configuration became known as an ‘Efimov state’, and is often compared to Borromean rings, an arrangement of three rings linked in a way that removing one ring would leave two unlinked ones. (Borromean rings get their name from the Italian aristocratic dynasty of Borromeo, which has the rings on its coat-of-arms.)

Efimov states remained a theoretical curiosity until 2006, when researchers observed them in caesium atoms. Now the same team that made that discovery has confirmed another one of Efimov's predictions — a second, 'excited' energy state for these fragile triatomic molecules. In this Explainer, Nature takes a closer look at these quantum states.

Why did it take so long to observe Efimov states?
Efimov states are extremely fragile — they can be observed only at extremely cold temperatures, around ten-billionths of a kelvin. At such temperatures, atoms in a gas behave more like a single wave. In 2006, physicist Rudolf Grimm of the Institute for Experimental Physics in Innsbruck, Austria, and his collaborators observed an Efimov state in a gas of caesium atoms by cooling them down to 10 nanokelvin with lasers, and then adjusting a magnetic field to nudge them into forming an Efimov state.

What is the new finding?
Efimov predicted not just one configuration but many. Just as an atom's electrons can absorb energy and jump into outer shells, an Efimov state could transition into another, excited one.  And whereas atoms can take on different shapes depending on their excited states, “for an Efimov state, the whole object gets larger while keeping its shape”, says Grimm. “It is just like with the Russian dolls, matryoshka: All the states look exactly the same, but they increase in size,” he adds. Efimov calculated that each of the successive excited three-particle states would be larger than the previous one by a factor of 22.7.

Grimm and his colleagues observed an excited Efimov state of caesium atoms. The results are compatible with Efimov's prediction of 22.7 (if experimental error is taken into account). Their results appeared in last week's Physical Review Letters.

Such threesomes are truly gigantic. Whereas a typical three-atom molecule is less than one nanometre wide, the states observed in 2006 were roughly 50 nanometres across; the excited ones are around one micrometre — the size of a typical bacterium.

In 2009 researchers at the European Laboratory for Non-Linear Spectroscopy (LENS) in Florence observed a similar giant state in a closely related type of three-atom system — one in which two of the atoms could bind even in the absence of a third, explains Matteo Zaccanti, a LENS physicist who led that study. Although that was evidence for the existence of excited Efimov states, “it was a bit more indirect” than what Grimm and his team have observed, Zaccanti says.

How did they do it?
The team used laser cooling and other techniques, such as evaporative cooling, to bring the gas of 30,000 caesium atoms to even lower temperatures than before, of 7 nanokelvin, and held the atoms in an 'optical trap' which locked them in place with infrared laser beams. By varying the applied magnetic field, the team tweaked the interaction energy between the atoms, and monitored how many of them escaped from the trap. The number peaked for a particular value of the magnetic field. This was the fingerprint of an excited Efimov state, says Grimm, because it was the value where Efimov triplets are expected to break down into individual atoms that escape the trap at high speed.

What makes Efimov states interesting?
Efimov states are seen as a test case for a general class of systems made of three objects, which occur not only in atomic physics but in nuclear physics as well, says Jeremy Hutson, a theoretical physicist at Durham University, UK, and a co-author of the new paper. The neutron-rich nucleus of the lithium-11 isotope, for example, has two loosely bound neutrons in addition to a tighter body of neutrons and protons — and removing one of these two neutrons causes the other to be lost too.

Grimm says Efimov states could also lead to the discovery of a new, unconventional class of superconductors. In ordinary superconductors, electrons form pairs that are able to move through the material in tandem without electrical resistance. But perhaps the electron pairs in some materials could be replaced by Efimov-like triplets.

The next stage for Efimov physics could take place in space, where microgravity could help to reach temperatures not attainable in ground-based labs, and to let Efimov states last longer, Grimm explains. NASA's recently approved Cold Atom Laboratory, scheduled to launch to the International Space Station in 2016, should achieve temperatures of 100 picokelvin, and will conduct research on Efimov states among other experiments.

“What we usually understand quite well are systems of either two or many interacting particles. The few-body world in between has its own rules and holds many surprises,” says Grimm. “We need to bridge the gap in understanding between two and many.”

[906 words]
Source: Nature
http://www.nature.com/news/exotic-atomic-threesomes-explained-1.15271

南薰阁主

Yes, 第一个写完~~

Speaker
Pope Francis in his speech advocates that human should not be the master of our planet but be the steward. Human beings should wonder and awe the earth and nature.

Time 2   3.09
More than 50 royal mummies have been emerged including Pharaohs Thutmose IV and Amenhotep III and royal sons and daughters.

Time 3   4.29
It talks about the inside situation of the tomb after people clearing the rubble.
There are broken mummies, grave goods, coffins, and funeral materials.
But those archaeologists were not the first visitors who entered into the tomb, evidences show that in the later 19th century, tomb robbers had already sacked this tomb.

Time 4   3.45
Researchers found that organisms break the rule of that DNA follows a universal set of rules across all domains of life.

Time 5   2.50
How did the recoding thing work？Synthetic biologists have been using it in their areas.

Time 6   3.29
It is hard to calculate the rotation period of Saturn because it doesn't have a solid surface, however, using the hexagonal storm as a key, astronomer might be able to figure out this question.

Obstacle   3.01
Efimov found an effect in the quantum physics which is called "Efimov state". It is basically saying that a third particle can reinforce two former particles interaction and make them stable.

TaoRs92

首页！！！！！！！


time:1:05.35
Several mummies have been unearthed recently.
These mummies were members of dynasty.They represented the golden age of the ancient Eygpt.
_____________
time:1:41.35
The progress of unearthing these tombs(from several years ago until today)
These tombs seem not contain mummies,but mummies actually unearthed in these tombs surprise people.
These tombs were touched by grave robbers.The study works are continuing in the lab.
_____________
time:1:25.57
Scientists find organisms that don't follow the normal rule of DNA and gene making.
The significance of this finding--sythetic life(3 points).
Opinions from other scientists--positive.
What did the team do--send different signals to the organism.
______________
time:2:09.04
The details of the experiment.
Microbes in human body are prone to recoding.But recoding is still not very normal in nature.
Sythetic biology use recoding to do many things.This will be an impact in biology.People can use recoding to build a firewall--but this also contains risks and problems.
The study remains many problems to solve.
_______________
time:1:14.53
H can be a great sign to match Saturn's day.
Saturn's natural features(lack solid surface)--difficult to use normal ways to match its day.
Old ways scientists usually use to match Saturn's day.
Why H is good to be used to match Saturn's day.
_______________
time:5:33.70
E state--when two atoms are too weak to make bond,a thrid one can help the three make a stable state together.
Therotical curiosity.First finding in 2006.Now there is a more direct finding.
Why take so long to observe E state?
--Because it needs extreme condition to observe this phenomonen.
What is this new finding?
--E state is easy to transit to another state.The more excited state atoms may be into is 22.7 larger than the formal state.And the team observed the 22.7 results.
--the finding in 2006 is more indirect,compared the finding today.
How did the team do?
--laser cooling.gags into evaporative cooling.atoms connection break(the footprint of E state).use traps to catch and observe these atoms.
Why E state interesting(the significance)?
--happen in not only one circumstance.
--lead to discovery new superconductors.
--space E state.

小蘑菇开始打怪

含泪占座。。
------------------
终于把作业补完了，谢谢ppx~

speaker:

how we harm the earth, it will turn out the harm to us

regardless of the religious believe, we do need to be friendly to the environment

time2:

the new finding of the 50 royal mummies will offer hopes for tracing the family secrets

the finding shows that it was a golden age for ancient Egypt

time3:

by analyzing the DNA scientists know the relationship among the royal children

the team also found KV 64, the first new discovered tomb

it was not the mummies themselves that interested the researchers, as much as materials and inscriptions that the researchers found with them

time4:

if scientists can know the secrets of genetic code, they can use it to design organisms make novel life

the team is looking forward to finding the code telling the organism to add another amino acid to the growing protein

time5:

if the recoded microbes can exchange genetic information with natural ones, then it will have big impact in biosecurity

time6:

saturn土星

like many other gas giants, Saturn lacks a solid surface that can be used to measure its rotation period, but scientists say that the rotation of the hexagon could most accurately reflect the length of Saturn’s short-lived day

time7:

when three particles combine together, they can create a stable status

the state can only be observed in some extreme condition, so it takes a long time to observe

E predicted many configuration through the experiment

such threesomes are gigantic巨大的

the team use special tech to reach the extreme condition in order to find the state

scientist can make experiment in the space because NASA has approved the proposal of launching a space station

bridge the gap

sudadelv

46’’
The author introduces an evacuation about ancient Egypt. The author introduces the age that the evacuation could date back to , which was a golden age for ancient Egypt not only for military but also for culture, and the owners that the evacuation was belong to, which was a great empire with his family in Egypt.
1’30’’
The evacuation was first taken by a Frenchman, and then be reopened in2011. The scientist finds new inscriptions and five rooms. The author presents some information about the rooms and the inscriptions. But the tomb was firstly discovered by robbers, damaging the wall of the tomb.
1’11’’
Scientist finds organisms routinely break rules of genes and hopes to design organisms that can prevent infesting. But other Scientist thinks this highlights the malleability of the genetic code, and it is difficult to engineer these organisms. And some Scientists design an experiment which includes the samples that rule-breakers in the DNA, especially events in some specific places.
2’17’’
Introduce a way to stop
The scientist make an experiment to find what protein could balabla, and finds that abnormally short protein can balabla, a microbe and an acid balabla, as a result, scientist uses recoding to make acid to prevent designer organisms converting genes to others. The scientists intend to engineer recoded microbes to prevent the situation but some say in some environment B will be infested. But other scientist argue that they will not do harm to because balabala (protein, acid, microbe, recoding ,codon具体几个事物之间的逻辑关系没太读懂)
1’18’’
There is a hexagonal storm above the Saturn’s north pole. Scientist says that the rotation of  “storm ”will reflect the length of Saturn and presents why this happens. And some Scientists use emissions to calculate the rotation period, because emissions come from interior which is stable. And the method has been used to calculate the rotation period of Saturn, and is more problematic but could be used to constant rotation because it rarely changed according to research of some scientist.  
4’00’’
The author introduces a phemons called Efimov state, which the third particle can help the two particles bond together when the two particles interact too weakly. And the discovery can be applied to many fields such as atoms.
1) Firstly, the author Introduces why it take so long to get the solution. Because the environment that the Efimov state happens is very sever and scientist has to make special temperature to get the Efimov state.
2) Secondly, the author introduces why it is a new finding. Efimov state could transition into another, and increases size, an experiment supports it. Some scientists make a discovery that related to the Efimov state, which twos can bond together without third but some scientists say that it is note tied closely with the Efimov state
3) Thirdly, the author introduces how they get the Efimov state. They use cooling and other technology, the author introduce how to get this state though these technologies.
4) Fourthly, the author Introduces why Efimov states is interesting. Firstly, it can be used not only in balabla but also be used in nuclear field. Secondly, it leads to the discovery of superconductors. And it could take place in space , NASA will support the lab in space  

疏离无罪

首页末班车

Speaker: Pope Francis appeals people to protect the enviornment in a religious way.

01:14
More than 50 royal mummies were found in a tomb in the Egypt'sValley of the Kings.They all came from the golden age of Egypt's history.

01:50
Scientists found several royal prince and princesses.The discovery can help scientists to understand social distinctions and mummification practices for the royal of that era.Tomb robber have entered the tomb before.

01:17
Scientists found some organisms rountinely break rules of DNA.This may help scientist to make novel life forms and highlight the malleability of the genetic code.

01:57
The recoding process happened on potein the organism produces.The team tried to find out what potein would be encoded.And actually recoding is common in nature.Using recoding allows organisms to make new kinds of amino acids.

01:20
Researchers used a hexagon strom as a good marker to calculated the day time of Saturn.

05:58
Main Idea: Efimov state
A phenomenon called Efimov state is that two identical particles interact too weakly to form bonds, a third one can reinforce their interaction and keep the three particles together in a stable state.
This phennomenon is extremely fragile.Because it can only be observed in extremely cold temparture.
Scientists have some new findings recently.An Efimov state can get larger while keeping its shape.The team used laser cooling and other techniques to make a much a cooler environment to obseve this phenomenon.
The Efimov state is interesting.It seems to be a test case for a general class of systems made of three objects.It can also lead to the discovery of a new, unconventional class of superconductors.Scientists plans to make Efimov state in space next.

cherry6891

占座~~~~~~

今天文章很精彩回来接着读

Obstacle：8’02’’

Phenomenon：when two identical particlesinteract too weak to form bonds, a third one can reinforce their interactionand keep the three particles together in a stable

--whydid it take so long to observe E states? Estates are extremely fragile and theycan be observe at extreme low temperature

--newfinding: the whole object gets larger while keeping its shape

--theteam used laser cooling and lock the particles in place with infrared laserbeams. Then they found how many of them escape from the trap by appliedmagnetic field

--function:Estate not be seen in atomic physics but in nuclear physics

E statescould lead to discover superconductors

Time22’02’’

Researchersfound royal mummies in the Egypt’s Valley of the kings and it was the goldenage for ancient Egypt

Time3 2’35’’

After cleaningthe rubble, archaeologist found smashed and broken mummies, inscribed potteryand pharaohs

The smashed remains prove that looters sackthe tomb in antiquity

Time 45 4’32’’

Scientistswant to make new set of genetic code to set a firewall

Nudge factor, by a factor of,  mummies 木乃伊，pharaohs 法老，Rubble 碎石，(robber rubber ) smash 粉碎, malleability

straberyzj

timer2: 1’59''
timer3: 2'16''
timer4: 2'12''
timer5: 3'43''
timer6: 1'48''