Section 5. Sight Translation

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

1. Swimmers who want to move faster through the water should spread their fingers like a fork to give them more force, scientists have discovered. A study has found those who swim with their fingers splayed create an “invisible web” of water to help propel them, travelling with 53 per cent greater force.

The optimal spacing, they believe, is between 20 and 40 per cent of the finger’s diameter, which allows them to lift the body higher above the water line. The larger force means larger body mass lifted and greater speed, in accord with the constructal theory of all animal locomotion.

2. Viewers may soon be able to watch films on soap bubbles - after researchers developed a technology to project images on a screen made of soap film. An international team produced a display that uses ultrasonic sound waves to alter film's properties and create either a flat or a 3D image. The bubble mixture is more complex than the one sold in stores for children, but soap is still the main ingredient. The team says the display is the world's thinnest transparent screen. "It is common knowledge that the surface of soap bubble is a micro membrane. It allows light to pass through and displays the colour on its structure," the lead researcher, Yoichi Ochiai from the University of Tokyo, wrote in his blog.

3. While digging in a cave in China, scientists unearthed the most ancient pottery ever found — pieces of clay pots 19,000 to 20,000 years old. The cookware was used during an ice age, when giant sheets of ice covered much of Earth. During this period, fat, a rich source of energy, was relatively rare. So cooking would have been important, since heat releases more energy from meat and starchy plants like potatoes. What the cave dwellers cooked is unknown, although clams and snails would be a good guess. People might have also boiled animal bones to extract grease and marrow, both rich in fat. They might even have used the pots to brew alcohol.

4. Imagine putting a seed in a freezer, waiting 30,000 years, and then taking the seed out and planting it. Do you think a flower would grow? Amazingly, scientists have just managed to do something very similar. They found the fruit of an ancient plant that had been frozen underground in Siberia — a region covering central and eastern Russia — for about 31,800 years. Using pieces of the fruit, the scientists grew plants in a lab. The new blooms have delicate white petals. They are also the oldest flowering plants that researchers have ever revived from a deep freeze.“This is like regenerating a dinosaur from tissues of an ancient egg,” University of California, Los Angeles biologist Jane Shen-Miller told.

5.Just in time for Halloween, a team of scientists has introduced a new breed of kittens that glow in the dark. They’re cute, cuddly and bright, with fur that shines yellow-green when you turn off the light. But like the bag you carry around for trick-or-treating, it’s what’s inside these cats that counts. The researchers are testing a way to fight a disease that infects cats all over the world, and the kittens’ spooky glow shows that the test is working. The disease is called Feline Immunodeficiency Virus, or FIV. Many scientists study FIV because it’s similar to a virus called HIV, short for human immunodeficiency virus, which infects people. Since AIDS was discovered 30 years ago, 30 million people have died from the disease.

6. Yves Rossy is a Swiss pilot, inventor and aviation enthusiast. He is the first person to achieve sustained human flight using a jet-powered fixed wing strapped to his back. Rossy developed and built a system comprising a back pack with semi-rigid aeroplane-type carbon-fiber wings with a span of about 2.4 metres (7.9 ft), powered by four attached Jet-Cat P200 jet engines modified from large-model, kerosene fueled, aircraft engines. His first flight occurred in November 2006 in Bex, lasting nearly six minutes and nine seconds. On 5 November 2010, he flew a new version of his jet-powered flight system and successfully performed two aerial loops before landing via parachute.

7. Apple Inc. said Friday that it is putting its products back on an environmental ratings registry, saying it made a mistake in removing them from the list. The Cupertino, Calif., company said all of its eligible products are back on the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool registry, and says it looks forward to working with EPEAT, the nonprofit organization that runs the registry. The list is considered an industry standard and it helps customers buy electronics that are environmentally friendly. Some municipalities also use it to guide their decisions in buying electronics.

8. Reaching the relevant populations often means traveling to areas where electricity and refrigeration are spotty at best. Nearly half of the vaccine doses around the world are lost to the heat. Also, the cost of refrigeration contributes to about 80 percent of the cost of the vaccines. So silk experts at Tufts University have come up with a potential solution: encase the vaccines in silk protein. Silk proteins contain nanoscale pockets that can hold and protect biological compounds. Inside the silk protein wrap, the compounds stay biologically stable. The technology also worked with antibiotics. Stored at a month at temperatures reaching 140 degrees Fahrenheit, the antibiotics kept their potency.

9. A migrating robin can keep a straight course even when it flies through a cloudy night sky, devoid of obvious landmarks. That s because it can sense the Earth s magnetic field. Something in its body acts as a living compass, giving it a sense of direction and position. This ability known as magnetoreception isn’t unique to robins. It s been found in many other birds, sharks and rays, salmon and trout, turtles, bats, ants and bees, and possibly cows, deer and foxes.

10. Nasa's Cassini spacecraft has found strong evidence for an ocean of water beneath the frozen crust of Saturn's largest moon Titan, scientists said on Thursday. The evidence was put together during six passes over Titan by Cassini, which is orbiting Saturn. During the fly-bys, scientists measured minute changes in the pitch of radio signals passing between the spacecraft and Earth to figure how much Saturn's gravity deformed the moon. They then turned to computer models to match a 10-meter distortion with possible scenarios to explain what was going on. The more solid the moon's interior, the less it would be impacted by Saturn's gravity. "The measurement is pretty conclusive about the existence of an internal ocean," said lead researcher Luciano Iess, with Sapienza University in Rome, Italy.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14