每天60秒英语原音磨耳朵（坚持每日更新）

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每天60秒英语原音磨耳朵（坚持每日更新） What Makes An Honest Smile Honest?
文本部分：
Most of us can spot a genuine smile. There’s just something different about it.
Well it was a French doctor in the 1860s who went to the trouble of stimulating facial muscles with electrical currents to discover just what reveals a genuine smile. It’s two muscles working together. The zygomatic major muscle that turns the corners of the lips up, and the orbicularis oculi muscle that squeezes the eyes into the famous fanned wrinkles also known as crows feet. Now it’s this latter muscle that’s involuntary, so the crows feet smile is considered the real spontaneous emotion and is known as the Duchenne smile.
It turns out the real thing has a lot of power. In this month’s Observer Magazine, Eric Jaffe outlines some fascinating effects of an honest smile. For instance a 30-year long study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that women who displayed the Duchenne smile in their college yearbook photos had greater levels of well-being and marital satisfaction three decades later. Another study published this year in Psychological Science went further to make a connection between smiles and longevity. They found that professional baseball players who sported Duchenne smiles in their yearbook photo were only half as likely to die, in any given year, as those who had not.
So during this holiday season, when the cameras and cell phones come out, give it your best, most candid smile…it appears a good thing.

—Christie Nicholson

音频部分：http://www.yeeaoo.com/listening_training/pure/secondmind/4801.html

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谢谢楼主

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Saturn's Rings May Be Remnants of a Moon
文本部分：
Galileo first spotted Saturn’s rings 400 years ago. But since then, scientists have been stumped about how they got there. Because the rings are almost pure water ice—and material in the outer solar system is generally an ice-rock mix. But a new analysis in the journal Nature may have solved the mystery. [Robin Canup, "Origin of Saturn's Rings and Inner Moons by Mass Removal from a Lost Titan-Sized Satellite"]

Today, Saturn's only massive moon is Titan. But Saturn’s fellow gas giant planet Jupiter has four big moons. So Saturn might once have had more—one of which could have had a rocky core surrounded by a shell of water ice. That moon would have interacted with a disk of gas surrounding Saturn at the time, dragging its orbit closer and closer.

As the moon spiraled in, tidal forces would have flexed its icy shell, stripping off chunks to build rings a thousand times more massive than Saturn has today. Eventually, ice boulders in the rings would have smashed into each other, spreading out the rings, and causing the outer edge to spawn icy moons—the small ones we find orbiting Saturn today.

As for that ancient moon’s rocky core? Saturn probably swallowed it up. Leaving Titan unique. And leaving scientists with a puzzle they finally may have solved.

—Christopher Intagliata

[The above text is an exact transcript of this podcast.]

[Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.]

音频部分：http://www.yeeaoo.com/listening_ ... ndScience/5325.html

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Energy Choices Predict Future Climate
文本部分：
U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu offered two predictions during his visit to Cancun last week for the recently concluded climate negotiations.

"The price of oil will be higher in the coming decades...the second prediction is that we will live in a carbon-constrained world."

Why? Because it is now more clear than ever what's behind climate change. "We've got our fingerprints all over. It's humans. Digging up fossil fuels, burning it and releasing it in the atmosphere."

Paired with higher oil prices, that means "the first thing we need to do is use energy more wisely." At the same time, to secure both the nation and its future economic prosperity, the U.S. government must continue to invest in energy innovation via programs like ARPA-e or the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis in California. They try to mimic plants in turning CO2, water and light into chemical energy, only better.

If we don't, we'll be storing up trouble for the future. "The damage we've already done now won't be known for another 100 years. If we wait another hundred years we'll have done even more damage which won't be known for a hundred years."

—David Biello

音频部分：http://www.yeeaoo.com/listening_ ... condearth/5330.html

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Reptile Sex Determination Is Hot Topic
文本部分：
Every expectant mother gets asked the same question: boy or girl? For mammals like us, it’s an easy call. Two X chromosomes you get pink booties. X and a Y you get blue. But for some reptiles, the answer depends on the weather. Well, on the temperature to be precise. For many lizards and turtles and gators, the sex of the hatchlings depends on the temperature in the nest where the eggs incubate.

But why would animals bother with such a seemingly slapdash system for assigning sex? The only logical answer is: there must be some benefit. Each sex must fare better at the temperature that tends to produce that sex. A fine theory, but no one has been able to test it. Until now.

In the January 20 online issue of Nature, scientists at Iowa State University describe how they used hormones to produce lizards with the “wrong sex”—animals that came out male even though they were incubated at the female temperature. And vice versa. They found that females born and raised at the female temperature made more babies than females hatched at the wrong, male temperature. Ditto for the males. Call it the Goldilocks principle.  You’re born at a temperature that’s just right—at least if you’re a lizard.

—Karen Hopkin
音频部分：http://www.yeeaoo.com/listening_ ... ndScience/5573.html

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Trained Rats Sniff Out TB
文本部分：
Rats have long been guilty of spreading disease. But now they’ve gone into the diagnosis side. Because rats can be trained to spot tuberculosis—and to do it better than conventional techniques. The finding is in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. [Alan Poling et al., "Using Giant African Pouched Rats to Detect Tuberculosis in Human Sputum Samples: 2009 Findings"]

TB is the number-one infectious disease killer in the world. Early detection saves lives. But the most common way to diagnose TB, visually checking sputum samples for the microbe that causes the disease, requires sophisticated equipment and trained personnel. And it’s not all that accurate.

That’s where the rats come in. The critters are easy to train and can smell chemicals present with a TB infection. So scientists sent more than 20,000 sputum samples from 10,000 patients in Tanzania to be analyzed microscopically. They then presented the same samples to the rats. The results: the fancy microscopes found about 13 percent of the patients to be TB-positive. The rats identified an additional 620 cases, boosting the detection rate by 44 percent.

That may not sound like much, but remember a person with TB can infect another dozen or so people over the course of a year. So that’s more than 7000 people that could be saved by a rat.

—Karen Hopkin
音频部分：http://www.yeeaoo.com/listening_ ... ndScience/6336.html

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Reach Kitchen Staff with Safety Stories
文本部分：
‘Tis the season when we’re eating. And we want to be sure that the kitchen staff are following protocols that keep us from getting sick. So how best to help them learn those rules? The answer, it turns out, is to spin a good yarn. Because storytelling techniques can help teach safe kitchen practices, according to a study in the British Food Journal. [Benjamin Chapman, Tanya MacLaurin and Doug Powell, "Food safety infosheets: Design and refinement of a narrative-based training intervention". Also see foodsafetyinfosheets.com]

Researchers led by Ben Chapman at North Carolina State University wanted to evaluate the effectiveness of current food safety instructions. Most of these are prescriptive and are delivered as plain documents.
The researchers interviewed food workers and managers about the instructions. Based on these conversations, they created new versions of the food safety documents.

These updates included real-life stories of outbreaks of food-borne diseases, including what caused the problems and what the consequences were. They had short bites of information and bright, colorful graphics. And they were tailored to the kitchen staff readership and designed to generate discussion.

As a result, food workers were more likely to read the reports, discuss them and retain their lessons. Just shows that even if it’s just about cleaning the cutting board, everyone likes a good tale.

—Cynthia Graber

音频部分：http://www.yeeaoo.com/listening_ ... ndScience/6578.html

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A Holiday for Consumption?
文本部分：
What do you want for Christmas?

A new computer? Maybe a cute stuffed animal?   Well, before you slap down your credit card, you might want to spare a little thought for some of the extra costs they bear.

For example, components of that must-have smart phone may come from eastern Congo, helping to fuel ongoing human atrocities in that region as well as mining that renders the landscape more lunar than terrestrial.

And plastic geegaws masquerading as toys help China to burn some 3 billion metric tons of coal a year—a large part of the reason they have become the world's largest emitter of the heat-trapping gases causing climate change. Of course, that's also helped them supplant Santa's elves as the toy workshop of the world.

This is not exactly what folks had in mind back in the day when the holiday was largely a celebration of the fact that the days were getting longer.

Maybe this year keep time in mind and go for the kind of gift that can continue to be used for generations—so-called heirloom gadgets, like a cellphone that might last 25 years rather than 25 minutes.

Unfortunately, there aren't too many of those on the market so maybe giving to charity on someone's behalf is a good idea. But ultimately, no matter what you receive, it’s likely there's a lump of coal somewhere behind it. And that's not what anyone wants for Christmas.

—David Biello

音频部分：http://www.yeeaoo.com/listening_ ... condearth/6625.html

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More Money Doesn't Mean More Happiness
文本部分：
As we approach another week holiday shopping a lot of us are disheartened by increasing commercialism at Christmas.   And again we ask: Can money buy happiness?

Well back in 1974 something called the Easterlin Paradox answered this question. It was economist Richard Easterlin who discovered that high incomes are correlated with lots of happiness. But over the long term there’s this point at which increased income doesn’t correlate with increased happiness. This is the paradox.

Just last week Easterlin published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science an update on his famous paper.

Researchers had looked at 37 countries, rich and poor, and found consistent results: over the long term—they took measurements over an average of 22 years—happiness ratings within a country do not increase with income. In Chile, China and South Korea per capita income has doubled is less than two decades yet all showed slight declines in happiness.

Easterlin notes, "We may need to focus policy more directly on urgent personal concerns relating to things such as health and family life, rather than on the mere escalation of material goods."

Food for thought as we swipe our credit card buying yet another iPod, Wii or Lite Brite.

—Christie Nicholson

音频部分：http://www.yeeaoo.com/listening_ ... econdmind/6626.html

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Database Tries to Track Culture Quantitatively
文本部分：
They call it culturomics: the obvious play on the word “genomics” looks at trends in human thought and culture. But scientists say culturomics has been hampered by a lack of quantitative data. So researchers at Harvard, along with Google, Encyclopedia Britannica, and the American Heritage Dictionary, have come up with a new tool.

It’s a database of 5.2 million books, published since the year 1500. That’s four percent of all the books ever published, with a total of 500 billion words. The focus is on English language culture, so three quarters of the books are in English.

Among the first findings of the research, published in the journal Science [Jean-Baptiste Michel et al., "Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books"]: about, 8500 new words enter the English language annually. But many of them don’t end up in dictionaries. And about fame—actors become famous around age 30, writers around 40, and politicians around 50. But the fame of politicians can eventually exceed that of actors.

A Google tool called the Books Ngram Viewer is available based on this data—users can track the usage and frequency of a word or phrase over the past few centuries. Thus, we can watch the fall and rise of Melville. And soon the rise and fall of Snooki.

—Cynthia Graber

音频部分：http://www.yeeaoo.com/listening_ ... ndScience/6627.html