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

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July 14
                                                         Cat Call Coerces Can Opening
Anyone who’s ever had a cat knows how demanding they can be. Let me out, let me in, give me food, give me different food. The list goes on.But how do these clever kitties convince us to do their bidding? A study in the July 14 issue of Current Biology suggests it’s all in how they ask.

Karen McComb of the University of Sussex started studying persuasive cat calls after realizing that her own pet used a hybrid between a purr and a cry to get her out of bed in the morning. McComb got recordings of other cat calls. And back in the lab, she found that humans thought purrs made by cats who were trying to solicit a snack were more urgent,and less pleasant, than those made when kitty was, say, relaxing on the sofa.

Turns out that the "feed me" purr includes a high-frequency component,absent from the contented purr, that makes people want to reach for a can opener just to make Fluffy stop. It’s obviously part of “Fluffy’s Master Plan (song) for World Domination.”
—Karen Hopkin

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July 15
                                                           The Myth of Multitasking
Modern humans are masters of multitasking. We eat while driving,watch TV while studying, and of course talk on our cell phones while doing, well, everything. How do we do it? A study in the July 16thissue of Neuron suggests that though we can train our brains to work faster as we juggle, we never actually manage to do more than one thing at a time.

Our brains aren’t really built to handle the sort of parallel processing we think we’re capable of. The good news is: studies have shown that extensive training can make us better at doing two things at once. But how?

One theory is that with lots of practice some routines become“automatic.” And if we don’t need to run every little thing past the part of the brain that’s spends time thinking about stuff, we can multitask just fine.

But this new study finds that that’s not the way it works. Turns out that multitaskers still consult the prefrontal cortex, but training gets the “Thinking Brain” to think a little faster. So we’re switching tasks quickly enough to appear to be doing them simultaneously. Which is still nothing to shake a stick and sneeze at.
—Karen Hopkin

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July 16
                                       Wastewater Analysis for Drug Abuse Evidence
If authorities wanted to determine how pervasive the problem of illicit drug use was in their communities, how could they do it? One cheap and easy way has just been tried experimentally in Oregon. Based on the principle that what goes in must come out, researchers measured the amounts and kinds of drugs that made their way through users to become included in untreated wastewater. This first-of-its-kind research is reported in the journal Addiction.

Ninety-six municipal water treatment facilities across Oregon volunteered for the study, which concentrated on finding evidence of the drugs meth, cocaine and ecstasy. All samples were collected on the same day, in areas that include about two-thirds of that state’s population.

Some findings: evidence for cocaine use was primarily in urban are as, almost nonexistent in rural regions; ecstasy use tended toward urban areas as well, and only turned up in about half of all communities; meth was everywhere. More important than those one-day snapshot findings, however, is that this methodology was proven viable,and could be used to track patterns of drug use in multiple regions over time.
—Steve Mirsky

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July 17
                                                    Jockey Positions Speed Up Horses
[Horse race bugle]

Horse racing is a sport that’s 200 years old.

[Horse race announcer sounds]

And a day at the track is much more exciting now than it was back then.

[Horse race announcer sounds]

That’s because horses are faster than they used to be. Or are they? A study in the July 17th issue of Science shows that it’s the way that jockeys ride that’s made racing more heart-pounding than before.

Images from the late 1800s show that the boys in silks looked pretty relaxed as they went along for the ride. But modern jockeys—crouching,tightly coiled atop their galloping steeds—actively work to make sure their weight doesn’t slow things down. Using GPS to track the riders’ motions, scientists found that jockeys move out of phase with their mounts. That means that the horse doesn’t have to physically move the jockey through each cyclical stride. As a result, races are five to seven percent faster than they were 100 years ago.

[Horse race announcer sounds]

—Karen Hopkin

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July 20
                                                     Aldrin Dusts Off Moon Memories
It’s the 40th anniversary of the first humans setting foot on the moon. Last August, I interviewed one of them, Buzz Aldrin, in the lobby of a hotel he was staying at in Manhattan. Near the end of our conversation I asked him to get a little existential: “What was the actual experience of being up there? Did you have any time to just say,‘This is unbelievable?’”

Aldrin: “Well, there is no way to recreate or really anticipate the visual that we were given. You just couldn't project ahead that you are going to see unusual things like putting your foot down and the dust goes out and kind of lands in a different way. Things behave differently up there.”
To hear the entire interview with Buzz Aldrin, just go to snipurl.com/buzzaldrin

It includes a discussion of how his doctoral thesis work at M.I.T.on guidance techniques for manned orbital rendezvous wound up coming into play during actual missions that he took part in as an astronaut.
—Steve Mirsky

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July 21
                                                       Raindrop Sizes Surprises
When you get caught in a downpour, you probably don’t think about the size of the raindrops that assault you as you run for cover. But physicists do. And they’ve come to the conclusion that the drops that hit the ground, or your head, are the shattered remains of bigger drops that fell from the clouds.

Raindrops come in a variety of sizes, even within the same storm. And scientists used to think that, to get that kind of distribution,raindrops must crash into each other on the way down, breaking up into smaller droplets or coalescing into larger ones. Now a team of French scientists has produced high-speed footage of falling water droplets.And they find that drops of different dimensions don’t require collision—they come from the fragmentation of individual, isolated droplets. Their results appear online in the journal Nature Physics.*

The video evidence reveals that water droplets first flatten out as they fall. And as these plummeting pancakes get wider and thinner they eventually capture air, forming what look like little plastic grocery bags floating in a breeze. And when the bags get big enough, they pop.And you’re left wondering why you can never remember your umbrella.
—Karen Hopkin

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July 22
                                                        What's on TV Is Biomedical Bonus
When TV sets die, they usually end up incinerated or in landfills.But now researchers from England’s University of York believe they’ve found a valuable use for told TVs—in medicine.

Liquid crystal displays—or LCDs—are becoming increasingly popular.One key component of the display is a compound called polyvinyl-alcohol, or PVA. The researchers recovered the PVA from television screens. They then heated the material in water with microwaves, cooled it back down and washed it with ethanol. That process creates a new material called expanded PVA. And our bodies fail to mount an immune response against expanded PVA, so it’s a good substance for biomedical applications.

It’s porous with a large surface area, so the expanded PVA is a good material for cellular scaffolding that can be implanted and on which tissues can regenerate. It can also be used for pills and dressings that deliver drugs. The research was published in the journal Green Chemistry.
The study authors say billions of televisions with LCD technology are nearing the end of their lives. Which means that medical dramas that once played out on the TVs may soon come from the TVs.
—Cynthia Graber

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July 23
                                                Artificial Gravity Slows Muscle Loss
[Captain Kirk:] “Would you mind telling me what this is all about, Mister?” No problem, Captain. A study in the Journal of Applied Physiology shows that artificial gravity should prevent a big problem faced by astronauts who stay weightless for extended periods. [Kirk:] “Are you a doctor?” Well, no, but I know the weightlessness problem: muscle decay.

Fifteen healthy men spent three weeks lying in bed. Such inactivity produces similar muscle losses as weightlessness. But eight of the volunteers were spun around in a NASA centrifuge 30 times a minute for an hour each day. The forces produced are equivalent to standing up in about two and a half times normal gravity. The spun guys kept making leg muscle proteins normally. But muscle production in the unspun group was cut almost in half.

The study has implications for elderly people here on Earth. [Kirk:]“I’m 34 years old.” Actually, if today’s 78-year-old Shatner were hospitalized, he’d quickly lose muscle. But getting Bill to stand up and move just a little each day could help him ward off muscle decay.[Kirk:] “What are we doing here?” [McCoy:] “Maybe they’re throwing us a retirement party.” [Scotty:] “That suits me, I just bought a boat.”
—Steve Mirsky

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July 24
                                                 Fish Shrink to Beat Heat
Forget the meek. If the Earth keeps getting warmer, a recent study shows that it’s the small that are gonna come out on top—at least in the world’s oceans. With global temperatures on the rise, scientists are trying to figure out what a warmer earth will mean for worldwide ecosystems. In aquatic environments it seems two responses have already come into play. First, species are seeking higher altitudes and latitudes so they can stay in their comfort zones. Second, organisms are shifting key events in their life cycles, like when algae bloom or fish spawn.

Now researchers writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences have discovered a third rule, if you will, that governs how fish and other ocean-dwelling critters are working to beat the heat: they’re shrinking. Makes sense because a smaller body means a bigger surface area to body volume and more efficient heat dumping. The researchers reviewed long-term surveys and other published results and found that the number of smaller-sized species is on the rise. And that within each species, fishes of every age are just a little bit littler than they used to be. Holy miniature mackerel.
—Karen Hopkin