Bees are unimaginably territorial (有地盘意识的), fighting to death to defend their home with painful stings (螫刺). But killer bees are particularly fierce. They appeared after African bees were imported to Brazil in the 1950s. By the 1980s, they had spread north to the United States, outgunning native bees along the way. Their massive attacks have killed more than 1,000 people.
Mario Palma, a biochemist at Sao Paulo State University in Rio Claro, Brazil, who studies social behavior in bees, wanted to understand the basis of this aggression. So he and his colleagues swung a black leather ball in front of some killer bees and collected the bees whose stingers got stuck in the ball during the attack. They also collected killer bees that remained in the cell. The analysis suggested that killer bee brains have two proteins that—in the aggressive bees—quickly break into pieces to form a so-called “neuropeptide (神经肽)”, they reported this week in the Journal of Proteome Research.
Palma and his colleagues already knew that bee brains have these two proteins. “We were astonished when we identified some very simple neuropeptides, which were produced in a few seconds,” Palma said. Killer bees that remained in the cell did not make these neuropeptides, he reported. And when his team put these neuropeptides into young, less aggressive bees, they “became aggressive like older individuals”.
Palma added that these neuropeptides also increase the production of energy and alarm chemicals. They could also encourage the nerve cells in killer bees needed to make the stinging attack. “There is a fine biochemical regulation in the killer bee brain,” he said. Researchers have found these neuropeptides in other insects, but few had associated them with “fight” behavior.
1. What is special about bees?A.They are particularly fierce. | B.They show territorial behavior. |
C.They were imported to Brazil. | D.They live in harmony with other insects. |
A.To understand bees’ social behavior. |
B.To study why killer bees are aggressive. |
C.To prove bees love flying around. |
D.To learn how bees communicate with each other. |
A.There are two proteins in killer bee brains. |
B.Young killer bees are fiercer than older ones. |
C.The killer bees make an attack immediately. |
D.Killer bee brains produce neuropeptide quickly. |
A.The form of these neuropeptides in killer bees. |
B.The function of these neuropeptides in other insects. |
C.The application of these scientific methods in other insects. |
D.The production of energy and alarm chemicals in killer bees. |
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【推荐1】Winter begins in the north on December 22nd. People and animals have been doing what they always do to prepare for the colder months. Squirrels(松鼠), for example, have been busy gathering nuts from trees. Well, scientists have been busy gathering information about what the squirrels do with the food they collect.
They examined differences between red squirrels and gray squirrels in the American state of Indiana. The scientists wanted to show how these differences could affect the growth of black walnut(黑胡桃) trees. The black walnuts is the nut of choice for both kinds of squirrels. The black walnut tree is also a central part of some hardwood forests.
Rob Swihart of Purdue University did the study with Jake Goheen, a former Purdue student now at the University of New Mexico. The two researches estimate(估计) that several times as many walnuts grow when gathered by gray squirrels as compared to red squirrels. Gray squirrels and red squirrels do not store nuts and seeds in the same way. Gray squirrels bury nuts one at a time in a number of places. But they seldom remember where they buried every nut. So some nuts remain in the ground. Conditions are right for them to develop and grow the following spring. Red squirrels, however, store large groups of nuts above ground. Professor Swihart calls “death traps for seeds”.
Gray squirrels are native to Indiana. But Professor Swihart says their numbers began to decrease as more forests were cut for agriculture. Red squirrels began to spread through the state during the past century.
The researchers say red squirrels are native to forests that stay green all year, unlike walnut trees. They say the cleaning of forest land for agriculture has helped red squirrels invade Indiana. Jake Goheen calls them a sign of an environmental problem more than a cause.
1. The study done by Rob Swihart and Jake Goheen is to ________.A.find out how squirrels collect walnuts |
B.learn squirrels’ influence on black walnut trees |
C.do something to get rid of squirrels |
D.save the forests in the American state of Indiana |
A.the way they gather the walnut | B.the time they have winter sleep |
C.the place they have winter sleep | D.the place they store the walnuts |
A.Agricultural in Indiana has been well developed. |
B.Gray squirrels will be replaced by red squirrels in Indiana. |
C.The spread of red squirrels will do harm to walnuts trees in Indiana. |
D.The government will take some measures to protect black walnut trees. |
【推荐2】Dyeing eggs has long been an Easter tradition, but it’s the dyeing of baby chicks that is upsetting in some states.
The dye, which is often ordinary food coloring, is either injected into eggs being hatched or sprayed onto newly hatched chicks. Although hatchery owners say the practice is harmless, critics argue that spraying the birds with color is stressful and that dyeing the animals transforms them into something attractive that can be thrown away when their colorful feathers disappear.
“These are living creature and dyeing them sends out a message saying that they are more of a new and unusual object than a living animal,” said Dr. Marc Copper, senior scientific manager for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Dyed chicks --- and sometimes rabbits --- have been a traditional part of the Easter holiday in some parts of the world, but the practice has gone largely underground in the U.S. because many people view it as cruel.
Today, about half of U.S. states ban the dyeing of animals, but last month the Florida Legislature passed a bill to remove the state’s 45-year-old ban. The drive to end the law wasn’t related to Easter chicks; it was done at the request of a dog groomer(美容师) who wanted to enter pet beauty contests.
Florida governor Rick Scott must agree to remove the ban, which would be lifted July 1, but the Animal Rights Foundation of Florida(ARFF) has asked him not to remove the ban. In addition to allowing animals dyeing, the law would also lift a ban on selling baby animals as pets, and the organization fears that next year the state could see hundreds of dyed baby chicks on the market.
As long as the dye is not poisonous, experts say the birds’ health isn’t affected, and there are scientific reasons to dye animals. Wildlife researchers often inject eggs with dye to track birds in the wild, and teachers have dyed chicks for educational purposes. However, animal advocates are quick to point out that dyeing baby chicks for Easter isn’t educational --- it’s done simply to earn profits.
1. What can we infer from Cooper’s words?A.He finds it dangerous to dye eggs. |
B.He likes dyed birds’ colorful feathers. |
C.He is in support of the hatchery owners. |
D.He is among the critics of dyeing animals. |
A.They are mainly sold in secret. |
B.They are as common as dyed eggs. |
C.They are welcomed by most Americans. |
D.They are getting more popular in the world. |
A.To protect Easter chicks. |
B.To ban pet beauty contests. |
C.To make animals dyeing legal. |
D.To prevent the sale of baby animals. |
A.Tolerance. |
B.Opposition. |
C.Doubt. |
D.Caution. |
【推荐3】In the late 1970s, archaeologists (考古学家) uncovered the remains of a woman and a young dog, her hand resting on the puppy’s chest in a 12,000-year-old village.
The find is some of the earliest evidence of the bond between humans and dogs. But even after years of study researchers are divided on how this bond began. Did it arise over thousands of years, as early dogs became tamer (驯服的) and more accustomed to human behaviors? Or was this fire already burning in the ancestors of dogs: the gray wolf?
Christina Hansen Wheat, a behavioral ecologist at Stockholm University, and workmates hand-raised 10 gray wolves from the time they were 10 days old. When the animals were 23 weeks old, a caregiver led them one at a time into a mostly empty room. Over the course of several minutes, the caregiver exited and entered the room, sometimes leaving the wolf alone, sometimes leaving it with a complete stranger. The team repeated the experiment with 12 23-week-old Alaskan huskies (哈士奇), which they’d raised similarly since puppyhood.
For the most part, the scientists saw few differences between the wolves and the dogs. When their caregiver entered the room, both species scored 4.6 on a five-point scale of “greeting behavior”—a desire to be around the human. When the stranger entered, dog greeting behavior dropped to 4.2 and wolf to 3.5, on average, suggesting both animals made a distinction between the person they knew and the one they didn’t. It’s this distinction that the team counts as a sign of attachment.
In addition, dogs barely paced—a sign of stress—during the test, while wolves paced at least part of the time. However, the wolves stopped pacing almost entirely when a stranger left the room and their caretaker returned. Hansen Wheat says that’s never been seen before in wolves. It could be a sign, she says, that the animals view the humans who raised them as a “social buffer”.
For her, that’s the most interesting part of the study. “If this is true, this sort of attachment is not what separates dogs from wolves,” she says. In other words, it didn’t have to be bred into them by humans, but could have been the seed we selected for, and then strengthened over thousands of years.
1. What’s the purpose of Hansen Wheat’s experiment?A.To find out what makes gray wolves and dogs different. |
B.To explain the reasons why humans raised dogs from ancient times. |
C.To argue gray wolves after being tamed are easier to keep than dogs. |
D.To prove whether gray wolves can make doglike attachment to people. |
A.Researchers began to raise gray wolves from their birth. |
B.Researchers used equal numbers of gray wolves and dogs. |
C.Gray wolves felt more stressful than dogs when a stranger came. |
D.“Greeting behavior” of the two animals was significantly different. |
A.A reminder of feeding. | B.A sign of social attachment. |
C.A source of comfort and support. | D.A warning of stopping pace. |
A.Dogs are more attached to humans than gray wolves. |
B.It is the attachment to humans that sets gray wolves apart from dogs. |
C.The attachment between dogs and humans is the result of being tamed. |
D.The attachment to humans plays a role in the choice of dogs or gray wolves. |
【推荐1】What colour is it today?What shape is that smell? What does that pain sound like? These questions might seem like nonsense, but four people in 100 might think they make perfect sense.
As scientists continue to study synesthesia, certain advantages have been noticed. Studies show that the sensation connections that synesthetes experience aid them in abilities related to memory. Researchers believe that this advantage may help stop the loss of cognitive (认知) function in the elderly.
A.Scientists are training adults to establish letter-color connections to prove the possibility. |
B.This aspect of synesthesia could even help patients recover from brain injuries. |
C.Words taste like our favorite foods and our favorite songs look like fireworks. |
D.Strong drugs and increasing blindness have been known to cause synesthesia, but these are not good options for obvious reasons. |
E.That four percent have synesthesia, and they naturally experience certain senses together. |
F.Synesthesia is not completely understood though it is in our genes. |
【推荐2】In the movie Jurassic Park (1993) a billionaire creates a theme park filled with dinosaurs, brought back from extinction through cloning by a team of scientists.
Although the film is of course fictional, the methods used in it to bring animals back from the dead may soon become reality.
Scientists from Harvard University in the US are currently working on resurrecting the woolly mammoth, a mammal that became extinct around 4,000 years ago.
However, it wouldn't be an exact copy of the hairy beast. "Our aim is to produce a hybrid elephant-mammoth embryo,” Professor George Church, head of the team of scientists, told The Guardian.
“Actually, it would be more like an elephant with a number of mammoth traits. We're not there yet, but it could happen in a couple of years."
The team is hoping to make a “mammophant”- a mix between an elephant and a mammoth. It would be like a regular elephant but have features from the mammoth that would make it more adaptable to cold weather.
Small ears, a thick layer of body fat and, of course, long hair are what helped the mammoth live in freezing temperatures.
So why go through all the effort and expense to bring back an animal that died out thousands of years ago? The answer lies in climate change.
It's hoped that the creatures will stop frost in the world's tundra from melting and releasing huge amounts of harmful greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Mammoths used to keep the tundra from thawing by punching through snow and allowing cold air to come in," said Church. In the summer, they knocked down trees and helped the grass grow."Church and his team are attempting to mix mammoth DNA, recovered from frozen samples of the animal found in Siberia, with that of the Asian elephant, which is its closest relative.
There are critics who believe that the media has got carried away with the story though, after several websites ran headlines such as Woolly mammoths will be roaming Earth again within two years.
“So far, scientists have managed to incorporate traits of the mammoth into elephant DNA. In a few years, they hope to make an embryo, but that's a long way from creating a viable embryo, "Popular Science magazine wrote.
Some have even gone so far as to call the story “fake news". Paleoanthropologist(古人类学家)John Hawks wrote on blog platform Medium: Is this just another case of the media sensationalizing(大肆渲染) what is otherwise a good science story?"
Although we may not be seeing woolly mammoths at the zoo any time in the near future, it's still exciting to know that there is still the possibility of a real Jurassic Park someday, however tiny that possibility may be.
1. The underlined word “resurrecting” in Paragraph 3 probably means__________.A.making something adaptable to current condition |
B.studying a sample of something |
C.bringing something back to life |
D.producing a hybrid embryo of something |
A.It would be a combination of elephant, mammoth and dinosaur. |
B.It would be an exact copy of the woolly mammoth with long hair. |
C.It would look like a normal elephant but also share some mammoth traits. |
D.It would be like a bigger sized elephant with small ears and short hair. |
A.To improve biodiversity. |
B.To help fight global warming. |
C.To remove frost in the tundra. |
D.To help grass grow in the tundra. |
A.The media holds a cautious attitude toward the mammophant program. |
B.A hybrid elephant- mammoth embryo is likely to be produced within two years |
C.The method used to produce mammophants was borrowed from the movie Jurassic Park, |
D.Scientists still have a long way to fulfill the goals of the mammophant program. |
【推荐3】As people age, the body changes in all sorts of predictable ways. Brains can slow. Wounds take longer to recover. And sleep patterns(模式) shift, too. This can come as news to many, says Michael V. Vitiello, a psychologist at the University of Washington who is expert in sleep in aging.
The most noticeable---and often most annoying---changes are how sleep and wake-up times change and sleep gets lighter, often beginning in middle age. Gone are weekend sleep to 11 a.m. and the ability to sleep through a noisy garbage truck down the block.
But not every restless night can be ignored. Studies have found that poor sleep can create a particular threat to older adults---Falls, depression and anxiety, problems with memory, and increased suicide(自杀) risk are among the effects of sleep issues in this population group that researchers have found. But scientists are still unsure why those risk connections exist.
What is clear is the connection between good sleep and psychological well-being in older adults. A 2010 study showed us that connection when it came to sleep quality, but sleep quantity didn't show the same effects. And that, experts say, may be the key to understanding sleep as you age. If you're sleeping less, but don't feel negative effects out of bed, the changes you notice may just be normal age-related.
Over time, Vitiello says, sleep patterns simply change. "A lot of older adults recognize that they don't sleep the same as they did when they were 18, but they can still function and they're OK. And all is well with the universe."
1. What can we learn from the second paragraph?A.As a person ages, his sleep quality becomes worse. |
B.People in old age often sleep late and wake up early. |
C.People in old age often sleep to 11 a.m. at weekends. |
D.As a person ages, he adapts to the noisy surroundings. |
A.Sleep of low quality. | B.A small quantity of sleep. |
C.Sleep of high quality. | D.A large quantity of sleep. |
A.Negative. | B.Frustrated. | C.Scientific. | D.Disappointed. |
A.Sleep pattern and weight. | B.Sleep pattern and age. |
C.Negative effects of aging. | D.Positive effects of sleep. |