【推荐1】Nowadays, people all over the world have various ways of dealing with a common cold. Some take over-the-counter(非处方的) medicines such as aspirin while others try popular home remedies(治疗) like herbal tea or chicken soup. However, here is the tough truth about the common cold:nothing really cures it.

Then why do people sometimes still believe that their remedies work? According to James Taylor, a professor at the University of Washington, colds usually go away on their own in about a week, improving a little each day after symptoms peak, so it’s easy to believe it’s medicine rather than time that deserves to be praised, USA Today reported.

To many of us, it still seems hard to believe that we can deal with more serious diseases yet are powerless against something as common as a cold. Recently, scientists came closer to figuring out why. To understand it, you first need to know how antiviral(抗病毒的) drugs work. They attack the virus by attaching to and changing the surface structures of the virus. To do that, the drug must fit and lock into the virus like the right piece of a jigsaw(拼图), which means scientists have to identify the virus and build a 3-D model to study its surface before they can develop an antiviral drug that is effective enough.

The two cold viruses that scientists had long known about were rhinovirus(鼻病毒) A and B. But they didn’t find out about the existence of a third virus, rhinovirus C, until 2006. All three of them lead to the common cold, but drugs that work well against rhinovirus A and B don’t work well when used against C.

“This accounts for most of the previous failures of drug trials against Thinovirus,” study leader Professor Ann Palmenberg at University of Wisconsin-Madison, US, told Science Daily.

Now, more than 10 years after the discovery of rhinovirus C, scientists have finally built a highly-detailed 3-D model of the virus, showing that the surface of the virus is, as expected, different from that of other cold viruses.

With the model in hand, hopefully a real cure for a common cold is on its way. Soon, we may no longer have to waste our money on medicines that don’t really work.

【推荐2】In the animal kingdom, mimics (模仿) are not rare. Stick insects pretend to be twigs. Hawk moth caterpillars resemble poisonous snakes. The examples, though, are visual. Auditory mimicry is rarer. Danilo Russo of the University of Naples Federico II thinks he has found a novel case of it, as he describes in Current Biology. Some bats, he believes, mimic angry bees in order to scare away owls that might otherwise eat them.

Dr. Russo first noticed bat buzzing a few years ago. The noise struck him is similar to the sound of some bees. He wondered whether bat buzzing was a form of mimicry which helped to scare off would-be predators.

To test this idea, he and his colleagues first recorded the buzzing that captured bats made. Then, with protective clothing, they began the more dangerous task of recording the buzzing made by different bees. Computer analysis revealed that bees’ and bats’ buzzing were, indeed, similar.

Then the researchers recruited several owls. They put the owls, one at a time, in an enclosure with branches for them to stay on, and two boxes with holes in them. They placed a loudspeaker alongside one of the boxes and, after the birds had settled in, broadcast through it five seconds of uninterrupted bat buzzing and a similar amount of insect buzzing three times in a row for each noise. As a control, they broadcast in like manner several non-buzzing sounds made by bats.

During the broadcasts and for five minutes thereafter, they videoed the owls. After analysis, the results were unequivocal. When they heard both the bat buzzing and the bee buzzing, the owls moved as far from the speakers as they could. In contrast, when the non-buzzing bat sounds were played, they crept closer.

Dr. Russo believes this is the first reported case of a mammal using auditory mimicry to scare away a predator. They strongly suspect, however, that it is not unique. Anecdotes suggest several birds also make buzzing noises when their nests are disturbed. And with the result of the experiment, he therefore predicts that auditory mimicry is far more widespread than currently realized.

【推荐1】Shortly before Christmas last year, one of Brazilian pianists Joao Carlos Martins invited his friends to a bar near his home. He wanted to show them the best gift he had received: a new pair of gloves. They are not just any gloves, however. The special bionic devices let the 79-year-old pianist play with both hands for the first time in more than 20 years.

By his retirement last March, Martins had received 24 medical operations to try to reduce pain caused by a disease and from a series of accidents. Before the gloves, which were especially developed for him, Martins could only play songs slowly with his thumbs and, sometimes, his pointer fingers.

However, one designer believed Martins’ retirement had come too early. The designer, Ubirata Bizarro Costa, created special bionic gloves for Martins’ hands. The gloves help move his fingers up after they press on the piano keys. Costa said he created early models based on images of Martins’ hands, but he said those models were not good. He then decided to tell Martins about his work. Costa and Martins then spent several months testing different models. Finally, the perfect model came in December, and cost only $125.

These days, Martins never takes off his new gloves, even when he goes to sleep. Martins said, “I have received more than 100 devices in the last 50 years. None of those devices worked well or long enough, but these gloves do. ”

The new gloves have given Martins a new goal. He hopes to play the piano at New York’s Carnegie Hall in October. He is already set to conduct a concert celebrating the 60th anniversary of his first appearance there.

【推荐2】Many animals depend upon sound to find food and communicate with one another. These species understandably suffer when loud motorways cut through their habitats. Some cope by singing more loudly, some change the timing of their calls to occur when fewer people are driving, others just move to quieter locales.

All of these actions come with significant costs attached and scientists have long documented the ecological damage caused by noise pollution. It has always been assumed, however, that noise is a problem unique to animals. But a new study by Ali Akbar Ghotbi-Ravandi, a botanist at Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran, has revealed that plants suffer too.

Working with a team of colleagues, Dr Ghotbi-Ravandi grew two species in his lab that are commonly found in urban environments — French marigolds and scarlet sage. The plants were grown from seed and allowed to mature for two months in the same space before they were divided into two groups. One group was exposed to 73 decibels (分贝) of traffic noise recorded from a busy motorway in Tehran for 16 hours a day. The other group was left to grow in silence. After 15 days had passed, samples were taken from the youngest fully expanded leaves on every plant in the experiment and studied.

None of the plants exposed to the traffic noise did well. Analysis of their leaves revealed that all of them were suffering. The chemical compounds hydrogen peroxide (过氧化氢) and malondialdehyde (丙二醛) are indicators of stress in plants and both were found at much higher levels in the specimens exposed to the traffic noise. Most notably, malondialdehyde levels in the sage plants exposed to noise were double what they were in those grown in silence and hydrogen-peroxide levels were three times higher in French marigolds grown with the noise than those grown in silence.

Dr Ghotbi-Ravandi’s results were published in the journal Basic and Applied Ecology. His findings make it clear that, though plants lack ears, the noise of traffic still bothers them enough to trigger strong stress responses.

【推荐3】If you’ve ever passed the cockpit(驾驶舱)while boarding a flight and tried to pick up bits from your pilots’ conversation, you probably didn’t understand much of them. Do they want to keep something in the dark? For terms like “niner” to “Zulu”, pilot-speak may sound like all Greek to you. But in this way, what happens to pilots can be expressed clearly and briefly. That’s why it is well-recognized in this industry.

Pan-pan. Airline passengers likely won’t ever hear their pilot use this term, which is reserved for communication with air traffic controllers. When pilots notice something unusual with their aircraft that stops short of an immediate emergency, they use “pan-pan”. For example, if one of a multi-engine aircraft’s engine has failed, pilots might say “pan-pan” to get controllers’ attention and request an emergency landing.

George is flying the plane now. There is a “George” on nearly every commercial aircraft. Pilots often allocate George to command the plane when it reaches cruising(巡航)altitude or when they’ve flown for more than 10 hours, when they’re required to rest according to rules for two-pilot planes.

We’re flying through an air pocket. “Air pocket” is a more acceptable expression for the word “turbulence”, a sudden and violent changes in the direction that air is moving in. This term might ease the sudden and strong impact on ears and causes less panic among passengers in an emergency.

There are 155 souls on board. The number of “souls” on an aircraft refers to the total living bodies on the plane, including every passenger, pilot, flight attendant and crew member. Pilots report the number of “souls” only when declaring an emergency to avoid confusion between the number of passengers and the number of the crew.

“A lot of the ways we say things to be meaningful to other pilots is kind of monkey-see, monkey-do,” says Ferdi Mack, senior manager at the Pilot Information Center. “But the most important part of the challenge is that a smooth flight can be thus ensured.”