60 SECOND SCIENCE听写+讨论帖（提供音频及官方文稿）已更新至7月24日

tuziduiduiUID: 2599524

June 24
                                                 Fish Capable of Judgment Calls
There’s plenty of evidence that animals learn from one another. But until now, it was thought that only humans make judgment calls, such as“that woman seems to be finding more food than that other guy, and she’s eating more than I am, so I’ll follow her.” This ability to selectively follow such cues shows sophisticated social learning.
Now, scientists say they’ve found the first animal example of this behavior in a common fish, the nine-spined stickleback.Two-hundred-seventy fish were study subjects. The researchers gave some of the fish access to one feeder stocked with lots of worms and one that didn’t. So the fish learned which feeder was best.
Then the fish watched other fish eat, but the feeders were switched.From their own experience the sticklebacks had learned that feeder Agave more worms, but by watching, they could see that feeder B was now more plentiful.
And when going back for seconds, they relied on social cues, not their own experiences, and headed over to B. The study is in the journal Behavioral Ecology. Another study demonstrating that the idea of the absolute uniqueness of human intelligence may be a bit…fishy.
—Cynthia Graber

tuziduiduiUID: 2599524

June 25
                                               Ancient Granary Predates Agriculture
A team of archeologists working in Jordan has made a discovery that represents a new chapter in the story of our ancestors' move from foraging to farming. The researchers unearthed an ancient granary. The round, mud hut dates back more than 11,000 years. A raised floor was key for keeping grain dry and out of reach of hungry rats. But what makes the find so special is that the granary was built a thous and years before people ate domesticated crops. The report appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers found caches of wild barley and oats inside the structure. Such evidence of a dedicated food-storage edifice has never been recorded from the pre-pottery Neolithic age. The investigators say this selective cultivation and management of wild plants shows behaviors that led to agriculture. What’s more, the granaries were built in-between houses and buildings used for food processing, which led to the establishment of more permanent settlements. By stockpiling a food surplus, our predecessors produced a new societal structure and curbed their wandering ways. Which then led to today’s foraging for junk food in supermarket aisles.
—Adam Hinterthuer

tuziduiduiUID: 2599524

June 26
                                             Wind's Power Potential Quantified
Last month, President Obama pledged nearly half a billion dollars toward the development of solar and geothermal energies. But what about wind? A team of scientists estimates that wind turbines in the continental U.S. could produce 16 times more electricity than we currently use. They present their data in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

We all know that wind can be harnessed to do work. But this power source can be a bit fickle: today it might gust, while tomorrow could bring barely a breeze. So how much can we count on the movement of air to meet all our energy needs? The scientists used data from satellites,balloons, and air crafts, to estimate wind speeds around the planet.They excluded cities, forests, and ice-covered areas, which would all be hard to harvest.

Crunching the numbers, they concluded that a global network of land-based turbines could make 40 times more electricity than the world currently consumes—even if they only operated at 20 percent of their capacity.

People may balk at the sight of a sea of wind turbines. And flying wildlife may be bollixed by the blades. But wind power’s benefits may blow away its problems.
—Karen Hopkin

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June 29
                                    Genetic Protection against Sleep Deprivation
Numerous studies have shown that lack of sleep hurts—it can lead to weight gain, diseases, and of course weakened cognitive functioning.But a bad night’s sleep doesn’t hurt everyone equally. Unlike me, some people can think clearly no matter what. A study published June 24th in The Journal of Neuroscience helps explain why.

Scientists looked for a genetic marker called Period 3known to predict the effects of sleep deprivation. People with short versions of the gene do okay when they lose sleep. But the longer gene leads to suffering with lack of sleep.

Researchers tested attention and cognition before and after both good and bad nights’ sleeps. Those with the long Period 3had poor function in the part of the brain that would usually spring to life. Even after a decent night, the long-gene people had reduced brain activity towards the end of the day. But folks with the short gene did better, and their brains even pulled in extra assistance from surrounding brain areas. I can guess which variation of the gene I have—which means not only should I get a good’s night sleep, I should probably write my scripts in the morning.
—Cynthia Graber

lauramathersUID: 2146017

非常感谢整理，已收藏~

tuziduiduiUID: 2599524

June 30
                                                      Women Better Than Men with a Hammer
We might think women are not as adept as men at wielding heavy tools, like say, hammers, according to popular stereotypes.
Turns out that women may have a leg up when it comes to hammering incertain situations. This was announced at the recent Experimental Biology annual meeting in Glasgow, Scotland.

Scientists measured the accuracy and force of men and women’s blows to a metal plate. They also tested their hammer style in rooms that were either brightly lit or pitch dark. (Glow-in-the-dark stickers marked the targets.)

Indeed they found that men struck twice as hard as the women. But women were 25 percent more accurate than men in well-lit conditions.Surprisingly both sexes were better than expected at hammering in the dark, although men had an advantage, with about 10 percent higher accuracy.

The researchers theorize that maybe men and women inherently use different strategies, putting more emphasis on either force or accuracy, respectively. But these are preliminary results. They intend to do further studies with larger sample sizes in different conditions.
But for now that old stereotype might need to be retooled.
—Christie Nicholson

tuziduiduiUID: 2599524

July 1
                                                                      Why Didn't Earth Freeze Completely?
During the last ice age our problem was too little carbon. Unlike today where too much carbon is causing global warming.

Past glacial ages occurred partly because the weathering of rocks,over millions of years, pulls CO2 from the atmosphere, locking it in ocean floor sediment. The rise of global mountain ranges during the last 25 million years should have sucked all the CO2, sending the Earth to an icy death.
But that never happened. CO2 levels stabilized at about 250 parts per million.

This week in the journal Nature, researchers announce one reason why this happened: plants.

Leafy greens need CO2 to live, and when CO2 levels drop significantly they starve. Researchers say that the plant numbers decreased to a level where volcanoes and other carbon-creating sources produced CO2 faster than the remaining plants could remove it. So the Earth remained somewhat warm.

It may seem that our leafy friends could help us now, this time from overheating. But ultimately we’re producing too much CO2 too fast for natural weathering processes to remove it. Ultimately, we need a way to stop producing CO2 in the first place.
—Christie Nicholson

tuziduiduiUID: 2599524

July 2
                                                                          Rain Zone Moving North
If you’ve spoken to anyone in New York City—where Scientific American’s offices are—then you’ve heard about the rain, every day since mid-June.

Still, we’re not in the inter tropical convergence zone, an area just north of the equator stretching across the Pacific that builds rainclouds 30,000 feet thick releasing as much as 13 feet of rain annually.

But the rainiest place on Earth might reach us, eventually. Researchers report in the journal Nature Geoscience the zone is moving north at a rate of nearly a mile per year.

It’s important because it supplies freshwater to a billion people in the tropics.

Researchers studied Washington Island in the Pacific that gets 10 feet of rain annually. Core samples revealed that it was desert-like only400 years ago. A similar situation was found in Palau, now in the heart of the convergence zone. Also, the now arid Galapagos Islands had a very wet climate about 400 years ago.

Researchers predict that this zone will be more than 75 miles north of its current position as early as midcentury, having profound economic and cultural implications for those who currently depend upon it.
—Christie Nicholson

tuziduiduiUID: 2599524

July 3
                                                        Genetic Link for Perfect Pitch?
We might think perfect pitch is an innate talent. Well, a study in the American Journal of Human Genetics is providing some evidence for that.

Perfect pitch, aka absolute pitch, is the rare ability to name or recreate musical notes like A or middle C without using any comparable reference.

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, studied the results from an online test taken by over ten thousand people. Not surprisingly, individuals tended to either have perfect pitch or not.

But in a closer study of 73 families researchers found a region of genes on chromosome eight in those with perfect pitch and from European ancestry. More study is needed to zero in on just which gene or multiple genes might be responsible. And for comparison they intend to study individuals without perfect pitch but with equivalent musical training.

There is some evidence that babies have the ability for absolute pitch, so researchers for this study theorize that maybe most lose this ability with age, but that what a so-called pitch gene does is extend this talent through a crucial period in childhood.
—Christie Nicholson

tuziduiduiUID: 2599524

July 6
                                                                         Future of Science Coverage
At the World Conference of Science Journalists last week in London, outgoing Scientific American Editor in Chief John Rennie talked to writers about the future of what they do, remarks that also pertain to this podcast:

The question then is, how could science writing for the public possibly be better? I think there are a couple of different ideas. One of them is, maybe there should just be less of it. And because I would like to leave this room unlynched, let me amend that to say that at least there should be less of some of it. If our job is, ultimately as we see it,to try to inform the public better about science and technology, I for one think that we could all do with a lot fewer of the “what causes/cures cancer this week” story.

I think that in fact is directly related, that kind of story is really related to a different problem, which is that we have a model of following what defines science news as that 95 percent of the time it is “interesting paper that appears in prestigious journal this week.”That constitutes science news. Except that we’re all smart enough to know that that has absolutely nothing to do with how science works.That has to do with how publishing works. That’s what did they put into press this week.

Science actually doesn’t change when one, new important paper comes out. We all know that. The reality of science is it takes time for science to play itself out. When interesting new results come in,they’re tested and they’re confirmed and people rework them. One paper can be the landmark that starts to affect some of that, but the reality is the actual change in the science follows that often by a considerable amount of time. Sometimes long after we’ve actually written the big headlines about the exciting, dramatic, revolutionary change of whatever has come about because of something.

And I think that’s something that I don’t have a particular prescription on all of this. But I really think this comes down to why it is that we have a responsibility as editors to try to rethink what counts as science news.
—Reported by Steve Mirsky

tuziduiduiUID: 2599524

July 7
                                                               Really Mass Media
Ever increasing numbers of people are consuming news via the internet and cell phones. In London last week at the World Conference of Science Journalists, Philip Hilts, the director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at M.I.T., reviewed the worldwide state of Internet and cell phone use:

“Internet use, it’s about 1.5 to two billion internet users,subscribers. And so there’s this discussion about, well, we have it in North America but Africa’s not got it, so we’re on two different planets and so on. That’s true, 5.6 percent in Africa now, 17 percent in Asia, but this is moving very rapidly. In Africa it’s growing 12times right now. In Asia it’s growing almost six times right now. So the greatest growth is where we’re short in penetration.

“Cell phone use where news will be also as the smart phones get around the world and as Africa gets wired up, the cables are now going in that will be useful in Africa, they haven’t been there. 1980, we had11,200,000 cell phone subscribers which was zero penetration. And we’re looking at 60 percent penetration now, 4.1 billion subscribers. China and India is the core of cell phone usage on Earth, and then it goes on down from there, U.S., Brazil, Japan, U.K.”
—Reported by Steve Mirsky

tuziduiduiUID: 2599524

July 8
                                                           Are Parasites to Thank for Sex?
Sex might seem like one of those little gifts from evolution.But it’s pretty inefficient from an evolutionary perspective. It’d be much easier to reproduce if you could do away with finding the right member of the opposite sex to help you create the next generation. So why did evolution come up with sex?

Biologists have hypothesized that one driving force might have been parasites. Now scientists have had a chance to test that theory.Asexual reproduction leads to clones. Being genetically identical,clones are also weak in the same ways, and thus more likely to all succumb to a parasite. But sex keeps shuffling the genetic deck.

Well, there’s a snail common in New Zealand lakes that does both—some populations have sex and some reproduce asexually. So researchers spent 10 years monitoring the two populations, and the number of parasites living off both groups. As expected, cloned snails that were plentiful at the beginning of the study suffered big losses as they became infected with parasites. But the sexual snail populations remained stable, results published in the journal American Naturalist. So, next time you’re feeling sexy, thank a parasite.
—Cynthia Graber

tuziduiduiUID: 2599524

July 9
                                       Poll: Science, Though Beneficial, Losing Importance
The results are in, and, Americans pretty much like science.Eighty-four percent of those polled think that “science’s effect on society” is mostly positive. That’s the result of two phone surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, released on July 9th.

Seventy-three percent believe that federal funding of basic research pays off in the long run. But the public’s rating of the over all significance of science seems to have dropped in the last 10 years. In1999, 47 percent of those polled said that scientific advances were among the most important U.S. achievements. Today, only 27 percent think so.

And Americans are aware of scientific info much more when it’s related to their daily lives and health. For example, 91 percent know that aspirin’s an over-the-counter drug sometimes used to prevent heart attacks; only 46 percent can tell you which are bigger, electrons or atoms.

To gauge your general basic science knowledge, including on the atom/electron question, take the test at pew research.org/science quiz
—Steve Mirsky

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July 10
                                            Shell Shock: Turtle Development Secret Revealed
It sounds like the title to a Rudyard Kipling tale: how the turtle got its shell. But it’s actually a question that has puzzled scientists. After all, no other animal, living or extinct, has a similarly constructed bony shield surrounding its body. Scientists had thought that, over evolutionary time, small bony plates fused with the animal’s skin. But a new study published July 10th in the journal Science offers a different pathway.

In most animals the shoulder blades lie outside the ribs. Not so with turtles. And there’s no intermediate evolutionary form in which the shoulder blades lie beneath ribs. So researchers in Japan compared chicken, mouse and Chinese soft-shelled turtle embryos at different stages of development. They show that initially the embryos develop along the same pathways. But the turtle takes a turn.

As it develops, part of its body folds in on itself. Shoulder blades get folded within the ribs. The ribs stay connected, but new connections also develop between bone and muscles. Then the shell starts to develop as the ribs fuse together and encase the shoulder blades. Not as droll perhaps as a “Just So” story. But more fascinating for being true.
—Cynthia Graber

tuziduiduiUID: 2599524

July 13
                                                         Profanity Bleeps Physical Pain
Holy @$#%! According to neuroscientists from Britain’s Keele University, dropping the f-bomb can actually relieve physical pain. In the upcoming August 5th issue of the journal NeuroReport,the researchers say swearing is a different phenomenon than most language. It activates emotional centers in the right side of the brain, rather than those &#*@ing cerebral areas reserved for regular #$#y communication in the left hemisphere.

The researchers had groups of undergraduate students submerge their hands in a tub of witch$@&#* cold water and repeat the swear word of their choice. And students could tolerate the icy abyss much longer than when they were only allowed to say more socially acceptable words.The researchers say the foul-mouthed students also had increased heart rates, which indicates that swearing activates a &#*@ing classic“fight or flight” response. You know, when you act all bad$(# to downplay the fact that you’re scared @$#%^ss.

The study suggests that swearing is an ancient social phenomenon with both emotional and physical effects. And also that socially acceptable words don’t mean @$#% when your pain really hurts like a son-of-a-%@&$#.

—Adam Hinterthuer

Related Article:
                                          Why the #$%! Do We Swear? For Pain Relief
Bad language could be good for you, a new study shows. For the first time, psychologists have found that swearing may serve an important function in relieving pain.

The study, published today in the journal NeuroReport,measured how long college students could keep their hands immersed in cold water. During the chilly exercise, they could repeat an expletive of their choice or chant a neutral word. When swearing, the 67 student volunteers reported less pain and on average endured about 40 seconds longer.

Although cursing is notoriously decried in the public debate,researchers are now beginning to question the idea that the phenomenon is all bad. "Swearing is such a common response to pain that there has to be an underlying reason why we do it," says psychologist Richard Stephens of Keele University in England, who led the study. And indeed, the findings point to one possible benefit: "I would advise people, if they hurt themselves, to swear," he adds.

How swearing achieves its physical effects is unclear, but there searchers speculate that brain circuitry linked to emotion is involved. Earlier studies have shown that unlike normal language, which relies on the outer few millimeters in the left hemisphere of the brain, expletives hinge on evolutionarily ancient structures buried deep inside the right half.

One such structure is the amygdala, an almond-shaped group of neurons that can trigger a fight-or-flight response in which our heart rate climbs and we become less sensitive to pain. Indeed, the students' heart rates rose when they swore, a fact the researchers say suggests that the amygdala was activated.

That explanation is backed by other experts in the field. Psychologist Steven Pinkerof Harvard University, whose book The Stuff of Thought (Viking Adult,2007) includes a detailed analysis of swearing, compared the situation with what happens in the brain of a cat that somebody accidentally sits on. "I suspect that swearing taps into a defensive reflex in which an animal that is suddenly injured or confined erupts in a furious struggle, accompanied by an angry vocalization, to startle and intimidate an attacker," he says.

But cursing is more than just aggression, explains Timothy Jay,a psychologist at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts who has studied our use of profanities for the past 35 years. "It allows us to vent or express anger, joy, surprise, happiness," he remarks. "It's like the horn on your car, you can do a lot of things with that, it's built into you."

In extreme cases, the hot line to the brain's emotional system can makes wearing harmful, as when road rage escalates into physical violence.But when the hammer slips, some well-chosen swearwords might help dull the pain.

There is a catch, though: The more we swear, the less emotionally potent the words become, Stephens cautions. And without emotion, all that is left of a swearword is the word itself, unlikely to soothe anyone's pain.