Just How Buggy is Your Phone?
What item in your home crawls with the most germs? If you say toilet seat, you're wrong. Kitchen sponges top the list. But cell phones are pretty dirty too. They contain around 10 times as many germs as toilet seats. People touch their phones, laptops, and other digital devices all day long, yet rarely clean them.
In one incident, a thief paid a terrible price for stealing a germy cell phone. He stole it from a hospital in Uganda during a widespread of the deadly disease Ebola. The phone's owner reported the theft before (die)from the disease. Soon, the thief began showing symptoms and finally (confess)to the crime.
in that unusual case a cell phone carried dangerous bacteria, not all germs are bad. Most cause no harm. In fact, they could provide helpful information. Look at the surface of your phone carefully. Do you see some dirty mars? “That's all you,” says microbial ecologist Jarrad Hampton-Marcell. “That's biological information.”
It turns out that the types of germs that you apply all over your phone or tablet are different from of your friends and family. They're like a fingerprint that could identify you. Some day in the future, investigators may use these microbial fingerprints to solve crimes. Phones and digital devices may be one of the best places to look for buggy clues.
In a 2017 study, researchers sampled a range of surfaces in 22 participants' homes, countertops and floors to computer keyboards and mice. Then they tried to match the microbial fingerprints on each object to its owner. The office equipment was easiest to match to its owner. In an (early)study, a different group of researchers found that they could use microbial fingerprints to identify the person who (use)a computer keyboard even after the keyboard sat untouched for two weeks at room temperature.
One day, microbial signatures might show people have gone and what they have touched. They could prove an unmarked device is yours. So, sure, your phone is pretty germy. Does that inspire you, or does it just bother you?
The Nile
The ancient Greek writer Herodotus once described Egypt-with some envy-as'the gift of the Nile'. The Egyptians depend on the river for food, for water and for life. The Ancient Egyptians were able to control and use the Nile, creating the earliest irrigation systems and developing a prosperous .
Snaking through the deserts, the Nile would flood almost each year in June. Once the water subsided, a rich deposit of sand was left behind, making an excellent topaoil. Seeds were sown, yielding wheat, barley, beans, lentils and leeks. Drought could spell disaster for the Egyptians, so during the dry seasons, they dug basins and channels to deliver water to their land. They also devised simple channels to transfer water at the peak of the flood.
An early system of a Nilometer, was used to de determine the size of the floods. Later, during the New Kingdom, a lifting system called a shaduf was used to raise water from the river-- to the way in which a well is used today.
The Egyptians took up some of the earliest trading missions. Without a(n) system they exchanged goods, bringing back timber, precious stones, pottery, spices and animals. Their efforts in medicine were also advanced: surgeons performed operations to remove cysts(囊肿). Mummification gave them great understanding of the human body-yet they also relied heavily on various medicines to prevent disease, and discoveries were often confused with superstition(迷信). And while a great deal of time was dedicated to the Egyptians thought the stars were gods.
By the 16th century Egypt was under the Ottoman Empire until Britain seized control in 1882. What is now mostly Arabic Egypt only won from Britain after World War Ⅱ. The Suez Canal, opened in 1869, the country as a center for world transportation. But it, and the completion of the Aswan High Dam in 1971 the ecology of the Nile, which now struggles to satisfy the country's rapidly growing population, currently more than 76 million-the largest in the Arab world.
A. measurement B. similar C. remarkably D. monetary E. astronomy F. altered G. civilization H. defined I. independence J. invariably K. dominated |
Keeping The Taps Running in Thirsty Cities
Water covers 71% of Earth's surface yet only 2% of it is accessible as a source of fresh water. 1 on this limited resources is rising, a trend likely to continue.
It is important to recognize that it is not just city residents who 2 water. Agriculture, industry and tourism often require more water than the municipal water supply. Globally, 70% of fresh water is 3 for agriculture, but locally in heavily irrigated(灌溉)areas this can increate to 90%. A healthy environment also requires fresh water, and the quality of available water is as important as its 4.
Water stress is not always caused by physical shortages in dry areas. 5 for water resources between different users within river catchments or basins can also be a cause.
Every thirsty city operates within its own context, 6 to the challenge of providing adequate water supplies. Cape Town, 7, has faced three years of drought during which winter rains failed to materialize. At the end of the 2017 rainy season the city faced the 8 of its dams running dry during 2018. The dams were only 37% full—in the same week four years before they were full to the top. In January 2018, it was 9 that Cape Town would reach Day Zero, when it would be forced to turn off the taps, in April. This was despite the city reducing its water use by more than half, from 1.2 billion litres a day in 2015 to fewer than 600 million litres, and working 10 with industry and agriculture to reduce demand.
On February 1, the authorities put in place a strict limit of 50 litres of water per person per day. 11, in Britain this is considered enough for a five-minute shower of half a washing machine cycle on full load.
In addition, a ban was placed on using 12 water for gardens, water management devices were installed at household with a high water use and the water pressure was reduced to cut demand and leaks. At the same, the city launched a media 13 to change habits and introduced higher duties. This is not without its costs; agriculture and tourism, both significant areas of employment, have 14. It is a classic example of the problem of water economics-the cost of water is low but the cost of a lack of water is very high.
Crises such as the Cape Town drought are in danger of becoming the new norm. The 15 of Day Zero must serve as a wake-up call for cities across the world to develop cost-effective water management strategies to cope with an uncertain future.
Despite an advertisement campaign suggesting wall-to-wall special effects, “Bridge of Terabithia” is grounded in reality far more than in fantasy. Adapting Katherine Paterson's award-winning novel, the screenwriters David Paterson and Jeff Stockwell have produced a thoughtful and extremely affecting story of a transformative friendship between two unusually gifted children. The result is a movie whose emotional depth could appeal more to adults than to their children.
Jess Aarons (Josh Hutcherson) is a sixth grader with four sisters, financially tensed parents and a talent for drawing. An introverted(内向的) kid who is regularly picked on by the school buses, Jess forms a bond with a new student named Leslie (Anna Sophia Robb), a free spirit whose parents, both writers, are fondly neglectful. An attraction between outsiders, their friendship feeds on her words and his pictures; together they create an imaginary kingdom in the woods behind their homes, a world they can control and where their minds can wander free.
Beautifully capturing a time when a bully in school can occur as large as a monster in a nightmare and the encouragement of a teacher can alter the course of a life, “Bridge to Terabithia” keeps the fantasy in the background to find magic in the everyday. Gabor Csupo directs this, his first feature, like someone close to the pain of being different, fascinated in tiny, perfect details.
With strong performances from all the leads, “Bridge to Terabithia” is able to handle adult topics with sensitivity. As the emotional landscape darkens, those who haven't read the book may be surprised at the sorrow the filmmakers cause without ever resorting to horror or terror. In other words, your children may cry, but they won't be traumatized so badly.
Consistently smart and delicate as a spider web, “Bridge to Terabithia” is the kind of children's movie rarely seen nowadays. At a time when many public schools are being forced to cut music and art from the curriculum, the story's insistence on the healing power of a cultivated imagination is both welcome and essential.
Hot Air Balloons
|
| A hot air balloon is made up of 3 main parts:
The Envelope The actual fabric balloon which holds the air.
The Burner The unit which pushes the heat up into the envelope
The Basket Where the passengers and pilot stand |
The basis of how the balloon works is that warmer air rises in cooler air. This is because hot air is lighter than cool air as it has less mass per unit of volume. Mass can be defined by the measure of how much matter something contains. The actual balloon has to be large as it takes a large amount of heated air to lift it off the ground.
The burner uses propane gas to heat up the air in the envelope to move the balloon off the ground and into the air. The pilot must keep firing the burner at regular intervals throughout the flight to ensure that the balloon continues to the stable. Naturally, the hot air will not escape from the hot at the very bottom of the envelop as firstly, hot air rises and secondly, the floating power keeps it moving up.
To move the balloon upwards, the pilot opens up the propane value which lets the propane flow to the burner which in turn frees the flame up into the envelope. It works in much the same way as a gas grill: the more you open the valve, the bigger the flame to beat the air and the faster the balloon rises.
The “Parachute Valve” at the very top of the balloon is what is used to bring the balloon down towards the ground. It is a circle of fabric cut out of the top of the envelop which is controlled by a rope which runs down through the middle of the envelope to the basket. If the pilot wants to bring the balloon down, he or she simply pulls on the rope which will open the valve, letting hot air escape, decreasing the inner air temperature. This cooling of air causes the balloon to slow its rise.
The pilot can operate horizontally by changing the vertical position of the balloon because the wind blows in different directions at different altitudes. If the pilot wants to move in a particular direction, he or she simply arises and falls to the appropriate level and rides with the wind.
The surface of Venus has never seemed very hospitable. Temperatures change around 470℃(900°F), the result of a runway greenhouse effect, and the pressure of its atmosphere, thick with carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid(硫酸), is some 90 times that of Earth's. Lead(铅) would flow like water on Venus, and water cannot have existed in liquid form for perhaps a billion years.
Now NASA'S Magellan spacecraft seems to have found one more horror in the nasty landscape: active volcanoes. Last week the space agency released the first detailed map of Venus and the most dramatic images ever made of its surface. The picture offer the best evidence to date that a planet once assumed dead is actually a lively pot of geological change.
The most amazing image is of Venus's second tallest mountain, Maat Mons, which rises 8km(5 miles) . Most of the planet's many peaks, including 9.5-km-(6-mile-) high Maxwell Montes, look bright in the radar pictures Magellan takes from its orbit above the permanent could cover. That means they are strong reflectors of radar waves. But Maat Mons is dark; like the Stealth bomber, it absorbs much of the radar falling on it.
This interesting fact, say project scientists, is a strong hint that the mountains has recently been covered with lava(熔岩). Rock that sits on the surface of mountaintops appears to weather quickly in the hot , chemically reactive atmosphere, creating a soil that is rich in iron sulfide(硫化铁). It is this mineral, the scientists believe, that can easily be seen on radar. If Maat Mons doesn't have any, it has probably been resurfaced, perhaps within the past few years.
Such resurfacing has undoubtedly taken place in Venus lowlands: earlier images of the planet showed vast areas that are remarkably free of craters(火山坑). That would be easy to explain on a Planet like Earth, where cratering from meteor strikes is erased by steady erosion. But while there is some evidence of wind erosion on Venus, the best explanation for the lack of cratering is periodic lava flow. Magellan has found direct evidence of such flows, including domelike upwellings and hardened streamed of rock trailing down the sides of Venusian peaks. There are also signs of other geologic activities, including dramatic faulting and several distinct incidents of mountain building. But the evidence can't indicate whether they really occurred millions of years ago. The case for active Venusian volcanoes is not yet proved, but Magellan, which is now well into its second complete survey of the planet's surface, may eventually settle the issue.
Nowhere To Hide: What Machines Can Tell From Your Face
The human face is a remarkable piece of work. So is the face's ability to send emotional signals, whether through the unconscious shame or the trick of a false smile. People spend much of their waking lives, in the office and the courtroom as well as the bar and the bedroom, reading faces, for signs of attraction, hostility, trust and deceit. They also spend plenty of time trying to hide their feelings, intentions or nature.
In America facial recognition is used by churches to track worshippers' attendance; in Britain, by retailers to spot past shoplifters. This year Welsh police used it to arrest a suspect outside a football game. In China it confirms the identities of ride-hailing drivers, permits tourists to enter attractions and lets people pay for things with a smile. Apple's new iPhone is expected to use it to unlock the homescreen
Set against human skills, such applications might seem enhancive. Some breakthroughs, such as flight or the internet, obviously transform human abilities. Although faces are peculiar to individuals, they are also public, so technology does not, at first sight, intrude on something that is private. And yet the ability to record, store and analyse images of faces cheaply, quickly and on a vast scale promises one day to bring about fundamental changes to notions of privacy, fairness and trust.
Masking true feelings helps fix the wheels of daily life. If your partner can spot every prohibited yawn, and your boss every hint of annoyance, marriages and working relationships will be more truthful, but less harmonious. The basis of social interactions might change, too, from a set of commitments founded on trust to calculations of risk and reward derived from the information a computer attaches to someone's face. Relationships might become more reasonable, but also transactional.
A. However, facial recognition seems merely to encode them.
B. Research show that artificial intelligence can reconstruct the facial structures of people.
C. Anyone with a phone can take a picture for facial-recognition programs to use.
D. Technology is rapidly catching up with the human ability to read faces.
E. Continuous facial recording that paints computerized data onto the real world might change the texture of social interactions.
F. The astonishing variety of facial features helps people recognize each other and is crucial to the formation of complex societies.
Sport Tourism
Tourism is the world's largest industry and is predicted to grow well into the years to come. Increasingly, the economic importance of tourism has been recognized by governments around the world. At the same time, the tourism industry has become more complicated in its development and marketing new forms of tourism. One of the fastest growing parts of the tourism industry is travel related to sport and physical activity. A recent survey found that while the traditional beach and sight-seeing vacations continue to predominate, 22% of those surveyed reported that opportunities to participate in sports were important when selecting a vacation.
The term sport tourism has been adopted in recent years to describe sport-related leisure travel. It is generally recognized that three are three broad categories of sport tourism. The first category. Watching sporting events or Sports Event Tourism includes hallmark events such as FIFA World Cup Football Championships, and the Olympic games. Tournament sponsored by the Professional Golf Association or the World Tennis Association are also part of the spectator-centered sector of sport tourism.
The second type of sport tourism, celebrity and nostalgia sport tourism involves visiting famous sports-related attractions. Visits of the sports halls of fame fall into this category. Another form of celebrity and nostalgia sport tourism that has emerged in recent years is meeting famous sports personalities. The cruise industry has been experienced in this area. Sports theme cruise such as “the NBA basketball cruise” arrange for passengers to meet personalities from sports while on board.
Active participation is the third category of sports tourism. This is composed of individuals who travel to participate in golf, skiing, and tennis in particular, although other sports such as fishing, and scuba diving are popular in the US.
