China's water crisis needs more than words
From Naturenews
Data on precipitation,river run off, ground water, land use, pollution and water use are not sharedbetween governmental agencies, or made accessible to thepublic. It will be difficult to implement the holistic policy laid out in theNo 1 Document without breaking down these bureaucratic barriers.
As a starting point, China needs to build anintegrated network to monitor surface and groundwater, and use it to assess and set water policies through an integratedwater-resource management system. And for this to happen, China needs a law that sets out clear policies on data sharing,and penalties for those who do not comply.
Other legislation is neededtoo. A water law introducedin 1988, and amended in 2002, is too vague to apply inpractice, and there remains confusion over water rights ofindividuals, such as whether to grant thembased on land ownership or use.
Other legislation is needed too.承上启下
As political attention to water increases, anew, fair water law, based on transparent decisions, is essential to protectcitizens' rights and prevent corruption.Low-income farmers will suffer greatly if water prices rise. To protect them, and so food supplies, China must keep irrigationcosts low. Clear measures will also be needed to bettermatch food production with water availability. Without regulation to increase food production in the south, it will bedifficult to maintain food security, even if water-useefficiency is improved in the north.
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Some of the areasidentified in the document need more attention. Despite increasing concern about the effects of climate change on theavailability and suitability of water resources, the document does notspecifically define adaption to climate impacts. It is also vague on how the departments of water resources and environmentprotection should cooperate on planned new limits on water pollutants.Ecological water use is mentioned, but the document does notoutline the specific measures that will be needed to protect the water supplyof ecosystems against conflicting demands ofeconomic activity. The role of ecosystems in water availability must beexplicitly accounted for.
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How will the money beraised to deliver the government's promises on water? The document demands thatlocal governments reserve 10% of the annual income (currently 70 billionrenminbi) from land sales for real-estate development to be used for waterprojects. However, it is not clear whetherthis money would be better held by local governments or allocated by Beijing.
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The current drought shows how urgentthe problem of sustainable water use and supply is for China. Although many of the policies and measures in the No 1 Document are not new and still need more work, the high priority thegovernment has placed on sustainable water use is extremely welcome.
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other ...作者: wangxue6677 时间: 2011-2-21 23:35:43
本帖最后由 wangxue6677 于 2011-2-21 23:40 编辑
22号作业
Last impact
from NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
Football draws as much attention lately for the knocks that players take as it does for their drives down the field. The emergence of research linking head collisions with behavioral and cognitive changes similar to those seen in Alzheimer's patients puts the pummeling in a new context. Whether ramming opponents head-on or butting helmets, athletes may face the risk of long-term brain injury from hits accumulated over time.
Brain degeneration from repeated blows to the head has been known in boxers since the 1920s as dementia pugilistica, or punch-drunk syndrome. "Football is the current poster child for that," says H. Hunt Batjer, a Northwestern University neurosurgeon who co-chairs the National Football League Head, Neck, and Spine Committee. "What's come to the fore is the risk of repetitive minor hit injuries." Recent research indicates that small impacts can cause damage as much as big ones, widening the field of concern to young athletes, hockey players—and soldiers subject to head-rattling blasts.
At the University of North Carolina, where football players receive an average of 950 hits to the head each season, neuroscientist Kevin Guskiewicz and colleagues have spent six years analyzing impact data from video recordings and helmets equipped with accelerometers. He and Batjer note that there are plans to test similar technologies on various NFL teams starting this year. "Are you better with five higher-end impacts or 50 lower-end ones? We don't know," says Guskiewicz. "We're trying to see what the real issues are in the concussion puzzle."
Guskiewicz believes that on-field monitoring and education are paths to progress. Already the spotlight on football-related brain trauma has resulted in new NFL practices, state laws, and congressional hearings on ways to protect young athletes. Batjer adds that military experts working on better helmets for soldiers are collaborating with the NFL. New helmet materials, and technology for on- and off-field testing, were the focus of a recent NFL conference in New York City.
On the medical side, there is hope for advanced brain-imaging techniques, experimental blood or spinal fluid tests, and even a genetic marker that would enable doctors to identify chronic traumatic encephalopathy (the same as punch-drunk syndrome, but not limited to boxers) early on. At the moment, the definitive mark of the disease—clumps of abnormal tau protein in the brain—can be seen only when the brain is sliced, stained, and studied under a microscope. CTE typically appears years after head traumas, and "we don't want to diagnose a disease after death," says Ann McKee, co-director of Boston University's Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy.
Guskiewicz envisions databases that track all the hits athletes take throughout their playing years to help explain neurologic changes later in life. But, he says, "it'll probably be my grandchildren who are analyzing that data.作者: wangxue6677 时间: 2011-2-22 23:57:12
本帖最后由 wangxue6677 于 2011-2-22 23:59 编辑
【甚解小组】【TASK 4】原文抄抄抄之TRANSITIONS
Marine biology network launches into choppy waters
from Nature
The sea squirt could become a top model organism at Europe’s new marine biology centre.W. Jorgensen/Visuals Unlimited/Corbis
Sometimes good ideas take a while to be picked up. In 1872, Anton Dohrn, a pioneering German biologist, wrote a commentary in Nature proposing the foundation of "a net of scientific stations" along European coasts, focusing on marine biology (A. Dohrn Nature 5, 277–280; 1872 ). Almost 140 years later, an institute that bears Dohrn's name is leading a twenty-first-century realization of his idea.
sometimes good ideas take a while to be picked up.上下句链接的多好
The European Marine Biological Resource Centre (EMBRC) will launch this week at a meeting in Naples, Italy, with the Anton Dohrn Zoological Station in Naples (SZN) taking the lead. Linking 15 existing research centres in 8 countries (see 'Marine network'), the project will create an overarching organization for European research on marine biology, and provide model organisms for studying fundamental molecular biology and for screening drug candidates, for example. But the project has yet to secure the ambitious budget needed to realize its full potential.
Its goal is to make experiments on marine organisms as easy and common as those on mice or fruitflies. "Most of the molecular biology we know today comes from terrestrial species," says SZN president Roberto di Lauro. "Genetics has mostly focused on Drosophila or the mouse because they are very easy to grow in a lab." Yet, he points out, most of the world's genetic diversity is found at sea, and some marine species are becoming useful model organisms. The sea squirt Ciona intestinalis, for example, is one of the closest invertebrate relatives of humans and has had its genome sequenced, making it useful for a range of studies. Interest in marine organisms such as Ciona is growing rapidly outside the community of marine ecologists.
Click for larger image.
The EMBRC aims to select a few species as the best candidates to become model organisms and develop technologies to grow them in artificial seawater, and to study and modify their genes. These organisms will be made available to other institutes or companies, along with the technology and support needed to study them. The centre could also produce strains of genetically modified organisms on request for institutes that want to grow them on their own premises, as now happens with rodents.
In the preparatory phase, lasting 3 years, 作者: wangxue6677 时间: 2011-2-24 02:43:01
Cracking down
from Nature
During the past decade, both the United States and the United Kingdom have enacted tough laws in response to violent tactics from activists. In 2005, the United Kingdom created the Serious and Organised Crime and Police Act, allowing stiff sentences to be imposed on those who intimidate companies and individuals that contract with animal-testing labs. Activists have since been found guilty of blackmail for terrorizing individuals and companies with financial ties to Huntingdon Life Sciences, a contract animal-testing company in Cambridgeshire, UK . In the United States, the 2008 Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act was brought in to combat property damage and threats that produce a 'reasonable fear' of death or injury for researchers or their relatives, although its enforcement has been challenged in the courts.
Click for larger version.
These laws do not seem to have driven down the rate of violence. The Foundation for Biomedical Research in Washington DC, which is in favour of animal research, and the anti-animal-research magazine Bite Back, based in West Palm Beach, Florida, collect accounts of activism incidents from media reports and activist websites, respectively. Although not comprehensive, their data suggest that the worldwide incident rate has been stable for five years or more, with some regional variation. Activity in Britain seems to have dropped since the anti-Huntingdon campaign cooled. Protests have also been scaled back at the Biomedical Sciences Building at the University of Oxford, which opened in 2008 and houses research animals including primates.
Although Nature 's survey was not designed to measure the incidence of activism, it suggests a similar picture: 45% of respondents said they had not perceived an increase in activist activity in the past five years, with some regional differences. US scientists were more likely to say that activism had increased, whereas many UK scientists reported a perceived decrease. Sally Rockey, deputy director for extramural research at the US National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, says that the responses probably reflect the publicity drawn by high-profile incidents, not real increases. "There have been some life-threatening situations, arson and bomb threats for example. One of the things we've seen is some investigators have been targeted at their homes," says Rockey.
Animal researchers who said that they or someone they knew had been affected by activism wrote about incidents ranging from anonymous threats and protests outside laboratories to vandalism, 'liberation' of animals, physical attacks by masked activists and bombs both real and simulated. "Home damaged, young children terrorized, death threat, etc," reports one genomics researcher matter-of-factly.
A small number, about 15% (26 respondents), who had been negatively affected by activism said that they had changed the direction or practice of their research as a result. After encountering violent protests, one US academic was "much less willing to conduct any studies on non-human primates, despite their absolute critical relevance for neuro-protection research".作者: 周九 时间: 2011-2-24 20:12:35
Clash over Iran's capability
Effects of sanctions and computer worm on uranium production are disputed.
FROM NATURE
Experts at two prominent organizations are clashing over whether Iran is improving its uranium enrichment capability, a key measure of its ability to produce a nuclear weapon.
On one side is David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) in Washington DC, and a widely quoted authority on Iran's nuclear programme. In a report released by ISIS on 15 February, Albright and his co-authors find that the Stuxnet computer worm — a computer program that hit many industrial systems in 2009 and 2010, and is widely thought to have been targeted at Iran's nuclear programme — probably destroyed about 1,000 centrifuges located at a fuel enrichment plant at Natanz, in central Iran. "It set them back," Albright told US television personality Stephen Colbert in an interview, echoing the US government's optimism.
Just a few weeks before, however, an analysis published by Ivanka Barzashka, a physicist then working at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), also in Washington DC, came to a very different conclusion. It is impossible to estimate the effect of Stuxnet on Iran's nuclear programme, and more to the point, Iran's centrifuges are, on average, performing much better than the previous year, the report says. The ISIS assumption about Stuxnet destroying centrifuges "can lead to dangerous conclusions, such as that we are slowing down Iran's programme, and that gives you a sense of complacency", says Barzashka, now a visiting scholar at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia.
The technical debate between the FAS and ISIS centres on the effectiveness of Iran's IR-1 centrifuges, the fast spinning machines that separate uranium-235 from the heavier uranium-238 isotope. A number of outside organizations, including the FAS and ISIS, have focused on how efficiently those centrifuges can enrich uranium, measured as kilograms of enriched uranium produced per standard 'separative work unit' (kg SWU). This number would help indicate how quickly Iran, if it so chose, could enrich enough material for a nuclear weapon.作者: 周九 时间: 2011-2-25 23:37:30
Young mammal hearts heal themselves
From Nature
Staying young at heart has taken on a new meaning. Newborn mice can mend their own hearts, thanks to the replication of healthy cardiac cells. The findings, published today in Science1, reveal striking similarities in the way that fish and neonate mammals rejuvenate their organs.
Zebrafish (Danio rerio) can recover lost cardiac tissue throughout their life, even after a 20% amputation of the ventricle, in large part because of the proliferation of remaining heart muscle cells called cardiomyocytes2,3. Similarly, mouse embryos with a genetic defect that harms the heart can restore cardiac cells through proliferation and regain normal function4. Although adult mammals can replace some damaged cardiomyocytes, the turnover rate in humans is estimated to be lower than 1% a year — not enough to revitalize the organ after a heart attack or other major injury that causes scar formation5.
Follow your heart
Hesham Sadek, a cardiologist of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and lead author of the new study1, suspected that there might be a crucial stage during mammalian development after which cardiomyocytes are no longer capable of repopulating and repairing the heart.
So, he and his team surgically removed about 15% of muscle tissue in the walls of the left ventricle of 1-day-old mice. One week later, they found molecular evidence for cardiomyocyte proliferation throughout the heart. The animals fully recovered muscle tissue within three weeks of the operation, and their left ventricle pumped blood normally within two months. The same procedure performed on 7-day-old mice did not lead to cardiomyocyte proliferation or regeneration.
The mice were genetically engineered to express a blue tint in their cardiomyocytes, so the researchers were able to determine whether cells from this lineage permeated the new tissue. They found that most of the new cardiomyocytes came from pre-existing cardiac cells rather than from stem cells, although they cannot completely rule out the role of stem cells in some types of cardiac repair.作者: wangxue6677 时间: 2011-2-26 23:30:02
本帖最后由 wangxue6677 于 2011-2-26 23:46 编辑
A metaphor too far
From Nature
Metaphors influence the way we think. In a paper in PLoS ONE published today, Paul Thibodeau and Lera Boroditsky, psychologists at Stanford University in California, show that people approve of differing responses to crime when it is presented as either a 'beast' or a 'virus' ravaging society1. In the former case they are most likely to call for strong law enforcement, whereas in the latter they are more open to solutions such as rehabilitation and the understanding of root causes.
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Perhaps the most striking aspect of this study is that the participants were unaware of the how the metaphorical context affected their reasoning. Instead of acknowledging the image's effect, they found ways to rationalize their decisions on the basis of seemingly objective information such as statistics. "Far from being mere rhetorical flourishes," say Thibodeau and Boroditsky, "metaphors have profound influences on how we conceptualize and act with respect to important societal issues."
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To have this demonstrated and quantified is valuable — not least because it underlines something that politicians and their advisers have never doubted. If there is a spin doctor or speechwriter who does not already recognize that metaphors sway opinion, it is a mystery how they ever got the job.
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It isn't hard to see why 'crime as wild beast of prey' encourages people to think about how to cage or kill it, whereas 'crime as virus' fosters more eagerness for 'scientific' understanding of causes. But too rarely are such metaphors interrogated at a deeper level.
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In both these cases, crime is presented as a (malevolent) force of nature, outside human agency. Whether beast or virus, the criminal is not like us — is not human. By the same token, a 'war on drugs' or a 'war on terror' is not just an emotive image, but deploys a militaristic narrative that bears little relation to reality.
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In literature, metaphor serves poetic ends; in politics, it is a (subtly manipulative) argument by analogy. But in science, metaphor is widely considered an essential tool for understanding. So where then does this latest work leave us?
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Whereas the example of crime used here imputes natural agency to human actions, science generally invokes metaphors the other way around: natural processes are described as if they result from intention. This anthropomorphizing tendency was dubbed the 'pathetic fallacy' by the nineteenth-century critic John Ruskin, although it had also been noted by the scientist and philosopher Francis Bacon, two centuries earlier.
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Which one is more like crime?Photos 12 / Alamy, MEDICAL RF.COM/SPL
The pathetic fallacy is an ingrained and profoundly influential habit, especially in biology2–6, where intimations of intelligent agency seem irresistible even to those who deplore them. Most famous in this respect is the 'selfish gene' proposed by biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book of that title. Dawkins' metaphor is apt and understandable almost to the point of inevitability, given the idea that he strove to convey. But its problems go well beyond the fact that genes are of course not selfish in the way that people are (which is to say, they are not selfish at all).
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The 'selfish gene' props up the whole notion of a Darwinian world that is uncaring to the point of being positively nasty: an image that has sometimes provoked resistance to the sciences in general and natural selection in particular. And as Denis Noble, a physiologist at the University of Oxford, UK, has compellingly argued, the idea that genes are selfish is totally unnecessary to an understanding of how they work, and is in some ways misleading7.
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But it is no better to talk instead of the 'cooperative gene', which is equally value-laden and misinformative. Genes are not selfish or cooperative any more than they are happy or short-tempered. It is the concept of scientific metaphor in general that is problematic8,9.
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in general作者: 周九 时间: 2011-2-26 23:48:38