大家一起来听写Science News

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http://podcast.sciam.com/earth/sa_e_podcast_110706.mp3

                                        July 6, 2011


Soda and beer. Other than exhaling, bubbly drinks are our closest experience with releasing the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. So as you confront steamy summer, which cold beverage is best—from an environmental perspective?

Massive, oil-lubricated supply chains feed even local craft breweries. And the unintended consequences of the high fructose corn syrup in your soda range from obesity to a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

And then there are the containers. Aluminum is energy intensive to mine, process and transform into cans—but the lightweight metal is also easily recycled. As are plastic soda bottles. So filling a washable, reusable cup with soda from a plastic container—and then recycling the big bottle—is the environmentally friendly thing to do.

Beer and soda also rely on water. And there's a lot more water in a drink than the drink, whether it's the water used to grow the grain that's fermented into beer or the cooling water required to produce the electricity that runs the soda bottling machines. Or you can cut out the middleman and just drink water. From the bottle-free tap.
—David Biello

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http://podcast.sciam.com/daily/sa_d_podcast_110708.mp3
July 8, 2011



Cameras were once big and bulky. Today, really good cameras fit in your pocket. And now, researchers at Cornell have developed a camera that’s just a half-millimeter on each side and a hundredth of a millimeter thick.
The lens-less device is called a Planar Fourier Capture Array. It’s a flat piece of doped silicon. Each of its pixels is sensitive to specific incident angles and supplies a component of the mathematical operation called the Fourier Transform to produce an image about 20 pixels across. The details of the new camera are outlined in the journal Optics Letters. [Patrick Gill et al., "A Micro-Scale Camera Using Direct Fourier-Domain Scene Capture"]
Animals like the nautilus manage with lens-less eyes. The images aren’t necessarily sharp, but they’re still useful. Same with this tiny camera.
Patrick Gill, who headed the project, had been trying to create a lens-less implantable device to detect brain neurons that, due to modifications, glow when they’re active.
The camera his team came up with could cost just pennies to produce, and could find use in surgery, research and robotics. An insect-sized robot with tiny silicon cameras could tell light from dark and perceive general shapes. After all, the flatworm planaria does just fine with eyes that are arguably not as good.
—Cynthia Graber

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July 10, 2011

http://podcast.sciam.com/earth/sa_e_podcast_110710.mp3


[Sound clip] That's the future sound filling city streets. If President Obama has his way there will be one million electric vehicles on the road by 2015. This week the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration started a process to determine what should be done to make it easier for pedestrians and others who share the road to detect these quiet cars.

[clip 1] That electronic [sound clip] is one of several alternatives if the NHTSA decides to require these cars to add sounds. Here's another [sound clip].

The goal is to give an audio cue, not unlike the beeping associated with the backing up of large trucks. Why? Well, a study led by psychologist Lawrence Rosenblum of the University of California, Riverside found that blindfolded test subjects could hear an internal combustion engine 36 feet away but didn't hear a hybrid until it was a mere 11 feet away.

That left scant few seconds to react before the hybrid reached them. And that's not safe. Which is why the electric or hybrid cars of the future may sound so, well, futuristic.—David Biello [The above text is an exact transcript of this podcast]

苏梳眠UID: 2717864

支持LZ。。。

lumao66UID: 2383330

http://podcast.sciam.com/daily/sa_d_podcast_110712.mp3

                                        July 12, 2011

Obesity is associated with a host of health problems. But a new study finds that obese people may actually have an advantage in a specific medical situation: they’re less likely to die after surgery from certain respiratory complications than are their non-obese counterparts. The finding was published online by the Journal of Intensive Care Medicine. [Stavros Memtsoudis et al, Mortality of Patients with Respiratory Insufficiency and Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome after Surgery: The Obesity Paradox, link to come]

Obese surgical patients get slightly fewer cases of the conditions known as respiratory insufficiency and adult respiratory distress syndrome. And their risk of dying in the hospital from these breathing difficulties was less than a third that of the non-obese patients who developed the same respiratory challenges.

The researchers have various ideas about why. People carrying more weight could have more energy and nutritional stores to draw upon. Also, fatty tissue could be soaking up some of the inflammation compounds that exacerbate the breathing issues. Or it may be more simple: doctors and nurses may expect their fatter patients to have a tougher time, so they give them more attention.

Further study could reveal why the bigger patients have the smaller risk—which might lead to strategies to lower the risk for those lower in weight.
—Steve Mirsky

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http://podcast.sciam.com/space/sa_60ssp_podcast_110711.mp3

July 11, 2011


At a recent meeting of the American Astronomical Society, Bill Borucki, principal investigator for NASA's planet-finding Kepler spacecraft, provided an update on Kepler's hunt for distant worlds, especially those Earth-like planets that might be habitable:

“We are finding Earth-size planets. Not in the habitable zone. We are looking for planets and finding a few big planets in the habitable zone. Okay, and we are trying to take what we have found and ask, if you see a few how do you extrapolate to the many? When you see a planet by a transit, the orbit has to be in your line of sight. But most orbits won't be. Well, we can correct for that. It's like rolling dice—what are the odds of getting snake eyes? One in 36. So if you get snake eyes there's probably 35 times that you'd roll and you wouldn't get them, for example.

“So we can do the same thing. We can tell in our galaxy there must be billions of planets. Probably on the order of a billion planets in the habitable zone of their stars. That's pretty crude right now—we're refining it—but we're getting the first statistics that are allowing us to make those estimates.”

In next week's episode, Borucki will tell us when Kepler will answer the big question—are habitable, Earth-like planets rare or common?
—John Matson

lumao66UID: 2383330

http://podcast.sciam.com/daily/sa_d_podcast_110711.mp3

July 11, 2011

You’ve heard of tennis elbow. Well, a friend of mine has gamekeeper’s thumb. When he told me his diagnosis, it rang a bell. So I went through the Scientific American archives. And found this:

“Injury to the ulnar collateral ligament of the metacarpophalangeal joint trips off the tongue more agreeably as gamekeeper’s thumb. The name comes from the chronic ligament damage incurred by Scottish gamekeepers in the course of killing wounded rabbits.”

The article that comes from quotes a physician named Kevin Math, that’s right, Dr. Math, who explained, “The gamekeepers would grasp the hare’s neck between the base of the thumb and index finger, and repetitively twist and hyperextend the neck. The activity would have to be repeated thousands of times before the ligament would get stressed to that degree.” Talk about curling your hare.

The same thumb damage can result during a fall while skiing, from the torque of the pole strap. Doctors still refer to gamekeeper’s thumb more than skier’s thumb, even though schussers presumably outnumber bunny snuffers these days. My buddy’s was injured playing softball. So I’m happy to report that no animals were harmed in the making of his condition. For which we give him two thumbs up.
—Steve Mirsky

lumao66UID: 2383330

http://podcast.sciam.com/daily/sa_d_podcast_110713.mp3

                                        July 13, 2011

You could think of it as the real dancing with the stars. Two white dwarf stars have been found twirling around each other to make a complete orbit in less than every 13 minutes. And they provide a chance to test ideas about general relativity and gravitational waves. The system is described in a paper accepted by the Astrophysical Journal Letters. [Warren Brown et al, A 12 minute Orbital Period Detached White Dwarf Eclipsing Binary]

One of the stars is about the size of Earth, but has more than half the mass of the Sun. A penny as dense as the star would weigh half a ton here. The other star is about 60 times our size and has about half the mass of its companion.

Astronomers estimate that the partners will collide in about 900,000 years. At that time, they could form a stable binary star, or merge into a single, rapidly spinning white dwarf, or go supernova. In the meantime, they provide a place to look for gravitational waves. Because they’re not exchanging mass now, gravitational waves should account for the loss of energy that brings them closer every year. Which for each of them around the other is just a few podcasts long.
—Steve Mirsky

lumao66UID: 2383330

http://podcast.sciam.com/daily/sa_d_podcast_110714.mp3

                                        July 14, 2011

Former major league pitcher [url=]
Antonio Alfonseca
[/url]
had six fingers on each hand. One of his coaches was once asked about the consequences of Alfonseca having six fingers and replied, “He can’t flip you off.” Think about it.
Well, neither can many moles. Because most individuals of the type called talpid moles also apparently have six fingers on each foot. Or at least it looks that way. Now a study shows that they really only have the regular old five true fingers. The real thumb looks like the other four fingers, and what appears to be the thumb is actually a much larger-than-normal version of the radial sesamoid bone of the wrist. The finding is in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters. [Christian Mitgutsch et al, Circumenting the polydactyly ‘constraint’: The mole’s ‘thumb’]
The fake thumb has no joints, a dead giveaway that it’s not a real finger. And molecular markers show that the five true fingers develop together in a mole embryo, with the outsized sesamoid cropping up later. The arrangement is probably an advantage for an animal that spends a lot of time digging. And doesn’t convey displeasure with hand signals.
—Steve Mirsky

396857815UID: 2758634

顶！从今天开始也要开始听写了！不过刚开始遇到好多问题，用stiman需要realplayer，没装，就用了另一个media study player，导入了老托PartC的材料，可是分句不会分……悲催……，没分句就不能句尾暂停然后写句子，导入了材料原文还不会导入，菜鸟弱问，求教LZ用什么软件？具体怎么用啊？导入原文是要导入TXT格式的吗？最好的听写材料是哪些啊？
PS：我8月27考
掩面……

lumao66UID: 2383330

我没有用stiman，就是每天听一篇最新update的sciencenews，边听边默写出大概意思。下周六就考试了。

lumao66UID: 2383330

July 14, 2011 http://podcast.sciam.com/tech/sa_60st_podcast_110714.mp3


What's the future of technology? Who better to ask than today's kids?

That's exactly what a company called Latitude Research did last year when they asked 201 children 12 and under around the world to draw a picture of something they'd like to see their computers or the Internet do differently.

The results were published in June. The researchers found that kids don't distinguish much between their lives online and offline. Or as the researchers put it, technology isn't something that mediates young people’s experience—it "pervades" it. Most kids want to interact with computers, robots and other technology in a more personal way, using voice, gesture and touch rather than a mouse or keyboard.

Some interesting regional differences emerged. Kids in the U.S., Europe and Australia want better interactivity so they can more easily play games or communicate with their computers. Kids in Africa and South Asia focused on interactivity with more concrete results in mind, like help with homework or even cleaning their rooms. They’ll never know the joy of the Commodore 64 I grew up with. Lucky kids.
—Larry Greenemeier

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http://podcast.sciam.com/earth/sa_e_podcast_110717.mp3

July 17, 2011




Humans have played a role in large animal extinctions since time immemorial. The
giant ground sloth of Texas. Siberian mammoths. Abear-size wombat in Australia. We harry our competitors for meat—and our predators—out of existence. Or at least to the margins of the planet.

Now a study in the journal Science shows the impact of this wholesale elimination of large predators and other animals at the top of local food chains. [James Estes et al, Trophic Downgrading Of Planet Earth]

Such absence can be seen throughout ecosystems: biomes haunted by the ghosts of missing species. Lakes grow cloudy with algae once bass are gone. Rainforests thin with the absence of jaguars. Coral reefs lose their abundance when unpatrolled by sharks.

None of these changes were obvious to ecologists, until the top animals were removed. And the fix may require aggressive conservation efforts, such as reintroducing predators like the wolves added back to Yellowstone and throughout the West. In fact, that's the kind of massive range—andscale of effort—such animals require to thrive. And it may just be the price of co-existence.
—David Biello

lumao66UID: 2383330

http://podcast.sciam.com/daily/sa_d_podcast_110717.mp3

July 17, 2011


What do you do while driving to make the streets more dangerous? Fiddle with the radio? Light a cigarette? Butter your bagel while texting as you adjust the seat? Or possibly the most dangerous, do you simply drive while teenaged?
The Transportation Research Board of the National Academies is embarking on a major study to find out what drivers are doing that endangers them and others on the road. In the hopes of making streets safer.
The plan is to enroll a total of more than 3,000 drivers in six different states in what’s called the Strategic Highway Research Program’s Naturalistic Driving Study. Investigators will install a data collection system in participants’ cars that measures an array of driver activity. Sensors include four video cameras, accelerometers, GPS and radar to identify what’s in front of the car. Traffic, lighting and weather will also get tracked.
The study seeks drivers in Seattle, Tampa Bay, Durham, North Carolina, Bloomington, Indiana, Buffalo, New York and central Pennsylvania. For more info go to www.shrp2nds.us. After coming to a full stop.
—Steve Mirsky