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第六篇Car Thieves Could Be Stopped Remotely
Speeding off1 in a stolen car, the thief thinks he has got a great catch2. But he is in a nasty surprise3. The car is fitted with a remote immobilizer, and a radio signal from a control center miles away will ensure that once the thief switches the engine of , he will not be able to start it again.
For now, such devices are only available for fleets of trucks4 and specialist vehicles used on construction sites. But remote immobilization technology could soon start to trickle down to ordinary cars5, and should be available to ordinary cars in the UK in two months.
The idea goes like this. A control box fitted to the car incorporates6 a miniature cellphone, a microprocessor and memory, and a GPS7 satellite positioning receiver. If the car is stolen, a coded cellphone signal will tell the unit to block the vehicle’s engine management system and prevent the engine being restarted.
There are even plans for immobilizers that shut down vehicles on the moves8, though there are fears over the safety implications of such a system.
In the UK, an array of9 technical fixes10 is already making life harder for car thieves. “The pattern of vehicles crime has changed.” says Martyn Randall of Thatcham, a security research organization based in Berkshire11 that is funded in part by the motor insurance industry. He says it would only take him a few minutes to teach a novice how to steal a car, using a bare minimum of tools12. But only if the car is more than 10 years old.
Modern cars are a far tougher proposition13, as their engine management computer will not allow them to start unless they receive a unique ID code beamed out14 by the ignition key. In the UK, technologies like this have helped achieve a 31 per cent drop in vehicle-related crime15 since 1997.
But determined criminals are still managing to find other ways to steal cars. Often by getting hold of the owner’s keys in a burglary. In 2000, 12 per cent of vehicles stolen in the UK were taken by using the owner’s keys, which doubles the previous year’s figure.
Remote-controlled immobilization system would put a major new obstacle in the criminal’s way by making such thefts pointless. A group that includes Thatcham, the police, insurance companies and security technology firms have developed standards for a system that could go on the market sooner than the customer expects.
第九篇Wonder Webs
Spider webs are more than homes, and they are ingenious traps. And the world’s best web spinner may be the Golden Orb Weaver spider. The female Orb Weaver spins a web of fibers thin enough to be invisible to insect prey, yet tough enough to snare a flying bird without breaking.
The secret of the web’s strength? A type of super-resilient silk called dragline. When the female spider is ready to weave the web’s spokes and frame, she uses her legs to draw the airy thread out through a hollow nozzle in her belly. Dragline is not sticky, so the spider can race back and forth along it to spin the web’s trademark spiral.
Unlike some spiders that weave a new web every day, a Golden Orb Weaver reuses her handiwork until it falls apart, sometimes not for two years1. The silky thread is five times stronger than steel by weight and absorbs the force of an impact three times better than Kevlar, a high-strength human-made material used in bullet-proof vests. And thanks to its high tensile strength, or the ability to resist breaking under the pulling force called tension, a single strand can stretch up to 40 percent longer than its original length and snap back as well as new. No human-made fiber even comes close.
It is no wonder manufacturers are clamoring for spider silk. In the consumer pipeline: high-performance fabrics for athletes and stockings that never run2. Think parachute cords and suspension bridge cables. A steady supply of spider silk would be worth billions of dollars — but how to produce it？
Harvesting silk on spider farms does not work because the territorial arthropods have a tendency to devour their neighhors. Now, scientists at the biotechnology company Nexia are spinning artificial silk modeled after Golden Orb dragline.
The first step: extract silk-making genes from the spiders. Next, implant the genes into goat egg cells. The nanny goats that grow from the eggs secrete dragline silk proteins in their milk.“The young goats pass on the silk-making gene without any help from us,” says Nexia president Jeffry Turner. Nexia is still perfecting the spinning process, but they hope artificial spider silk will soon be snagging customers as fast as the real thing snags bugs
第十一篇（B转A） Climate Change Poses Major Risks for Unprepared Cities （气候变化给不备城市带来 重大风险） A new examination of urban policies has been carried out recently by Patricia Romero Lankao．She is a sociologist specializing in climate change and urban development．She warns that many of the world’s fast-growing urban areas，especially in developing countries．will likely suffer from the impacts of changing climate．Her work also concludes that most cities are failing to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases．These gases are known to affect the atmosphere．”Climate change is a deeply local issue and poses profound threats to the growing cities of the
world,” says Romero Lankao. ”But too few cities are developing effective strategies to protect their residents.\ Cities are major sources of greenhouse gases．And urban populations are likely to be among those most severely affected by future climate change. Lankao’s findings highlight ways in which city-residents are particularly vulnerable, and suggest policy interventions that could offer immediate and longer-term benefits．
The locations and dense construction patterns of cities often place their populations at greater risk for natural disasters. Potential threats associated with climate include storm surges and prolonged hot weather. Storm surges can flood coastal areas and prolonged hot weather can heat heavily paved cities more than surrounding areas．The impacts of such natural events can be more serious in an urban environment．For example，a prolonged heat wave can increase existing levels of air pollution，causing widespread health problems．Poorer neighborhoods that may lack basic facilities such as drinking water or a dependable network of roads，are especially vulnerable to natural disasters．Many residents in poorer countries live in substandard housing without access to reliable drinking water，roads and basic services.
Local governments, therefore ,should take measures to protect their residents.”Unfortunately，they tend to move towards rhetoric rather than meaningful responses, Romero Lankao writes, ” They don’t impose construction standards that could reduce heating and air conditioning needs. They don't emphasize mass transit and reduce automobile use. In fact, many local governments are taking a hands—off approach.” Thus, she urges them to change their idle policies and to take strong steps to prevent the harmful effects of climate change on cities.
第十二篇（B转A） Free Statins With Fast Food Could Neutralize Heart Risk (快餐加免费降胆固醇药物 可以降低罹患心脏病的风险)
Fast food outlets could provide statin drugs free of charge so that customers can reduce the heart disease dangers of fatty food, researchers at Imperial College London suggest in a new study．
Statins reduce the amount of unhealthy ”LDL” cholesterol in the blood. A wealth of trial data has proven them to be highly effective at lowering a person’s heart attack risk . In a paper published in the American Journal of Cardiology，Dr Darrel Francis and colleagues calculate that the reduction in heart attack risk offered by a statin is enough to offset the increase in heart attack risk from eating a cheeseburger and drinking a milkshake． Dr Francis，from the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London，who is the senior author of the study, said:”Statins don’t cut out a11 of the unhealthy effects of cheeseburgers and French fries．It’s better to avoid fatty food altogether．But we’ve worked out that in terms of your possibility of having a heart attack. Taking a statin can reduce your risk to more or less the same degree as a fast food meal increases it.” “It’s ironic that people are free to take as many unhealthv condiments in fast food outlets as they like, but statins, which are beneficial to heart health, have to be prescribed. It makes sense to make risk-reducing statins available just as easily as the unhealthy condiments that are provided free of charge．It would cost less than 5 pence per customer 一not much different to a sachet of sugar.” Dr Francis said．
When people engage in risky behaviours like driving or smoking, they’re encouraged to take measures that lower their risk, 1ike wearing a seatbelt or choosing cigarettes with filters. Taking a statin is a rational way of lowering some of the risks of eating a fatty meal．
第十三篇 Better Solar Energy Systems: More Heat, More Light （更有效的太阳能系统：更 多热量，更强灯光） Solar photovoltaic thermal energy systems, or PVTs, generate both heat and electricity, but until now they haven’t been very good at the heat-generating part compared to a stand-alone solar thermal collector. That’s because they operate at low temperatures to cool crystalline silicon solar cells, which lets the silicon generate more electricity but isn’t a very
efficient way to gather heat.
That’s a problem of economics. Good solar hot-water systems can harvest much more energy than a solar-electric system at a substantially lower cost. And it’s also a space problem: photovoltaic cells can take up all the space on the roof, leaving little room for thermal applications.
In a pair of studies, Joshua Pearce, an associate professor of materials science and engineering, has devised a solution in the form of a better PVT made with a different kind of silicon. His research collaborators are Kunal Girotra from Thin Silicon in California and Michael Pathak and Stephen Harrison from Queen’s University, Canada.
Most solar panels are made with crystalline silicon, but you can also make solar cells out of amorphous silicon, commonly known as thin-film silicon. They don’t create as much electricity, but they are lighter, flexible, and cheaper. And, because they require much less silicon, they have a greener footprint. Unfortunately, thin-film silicon solar cells are vulnerable to some bad-news physics in the form of the Staebler-Wronski effect. “That means that their efficiency drops when you expose them to light—pretty much the worst possible effect for a solar cell,” Pearce explains, which is one of the reasons thin-film solar panels make up only a small fraction of the market.
However, Pearce and his team found a way to engineer around the Staebler-Wronski effect by incorporating thin-film silicon in a new type of PVT. You don’t have to cool down thin-film silicon to make it work. In fact, Pearce’s group discovered that by heating it to solar-thermal operating temperatures, near the boiling point of water, they could make thicker cells that largely overcame the Staebler-Wronski effect. When they applied the thin-film silicon directly to a solar thermal energy collector, they also found that by baking the cell once a day, they boosted the solar cell’s electrical efficiency by over 10 percent.
第十四篇（2009考过） Sharks Perform a Service for Earth's Waters（鲨鱼有益于地球水系）
It is hard to get people to think of sharks as anything but a deadly enemy1. They are thought to attack people frequently. But these fish2 perform a valuable service for earth's waters and for human beings. Yet business and sport fishing3 are threatening their existence Some sharks are at risk of disappearing from Earth
Warm weather may influence both fish and shark activity. Many fish swim near coastal areas because of their warm waters. Experts say sharks may follow the fish into the same areas, where people also swim. In fact, most sharks do not purposely charge at or bite humans. They are thought to mistake a person for a sea animal, such as a seal or sea lion. That is why people should not swim in the ocean when the sun goes down or comes up. Those are the times when sharks are looking for food. Experts also say that bright colors and shiny jewelry may cause sharks to attack.
A shark has an extremely good sense of smell4' It can find small amounts of substances in water, such as blood, body liquids and chemicals produced by animals. These powerful senses help sharks fred their food. Sharks eat fish, any other sharks, and plants that live in the ocean.
Medical researchers want to learn more about the shark's body defense, and immune systems against disease. Researchers know that sharks recover quickly from injuries. They study the shark in hopes of finding a way to fight human disease. Sharks are important for the world's oceans They eat injured and diseased fish. Their hunting activities mean that the numbers of other fish in ocean waters do not become too great This protects the plants and other forms of life that exist in the oceans.
第十五篇 “Liquefaction” Key to Much of Japanese Earthquake Damage （“液化”是日本地震破坏的关键） The massive subduction zone1 earthquake in Japan caused a significant level of soil \surprised researchers with its widespread severity, a new analysis shows. \extent of damage in Japan were unusually severe,\\gas pipelines6, crippling the utilities and infrastructure these communities need to function. We saw some places that sank as much as four feet.\
Some degree of soil liquefaction7 is common in almost any major earthquake. It's a phenomenon in which soils soaked with water, particularly recent sediments or sand, can lose much of their strength and flow during an earthquake. This can allow structures to shift or sink or collapse .
But most earthquakes are much shorter than the recent event in Japan, Ashford said. The length of the Japanese earthquake, as much as five minutes, may force researchers to reconsider the extent of liquefaction damage possibly occurring in situations such as this.
\such a long-lasting earthquake, we saw how structures that might have been okay after 30 seconds just continued to sink and tilt as the shaking continued for several more minutes,\he said. \it was clear that younger sediments, and especially areas built on recently filled ground, are much more vulnerable.\ The data provided by analyzing the Japanese earthquake, researchers said, should make it possible to improve the understanding of this soil phenomenon and better prepare for it in the future. Ashford said it was critical for the team to collect the information quickly, before damage was removed in the recovery efforts.
\similar events ,\liquefaction, such as better compaction to make soils dense, or use of reinforcing stone columns.\
Ashford pointed out that northern California have younger soils vulnerable to liquefaction ---on the coast, near river deposits or in areas with filled ground. The \deposited within the past 10,000 years or more. In Oregon, for instance, that describes much of downtown Portland, the Portland International Airport and other cities.
Anything near a river and old flood plains is a suspect12, and the Oregon Department of Transportation has already concluded that 1,100 bridges in the state are at risk from an earthquake. Fewer than 15 percent of them have been reinforced to prevent collapse. Japan has suffered tremendous losses in the March 11 earthquake, but Japanese construction standards helped prevent many buildings from collapse ---even as they tilted and sank into the ground.