1 . Plastic—Eating Worm
Humans produce more than 300 million tons of plastic every year. Almost half of that ends up in landfills(垃圾填埋场) , and up to 12 million tons pollute the oceans. So far there is no effective way to get rid of it, but a new study suggests an answer may lie in the stomachs of some hungry worms(幼虫).
Researchers in Spain and England found that the worms of the greater wax moth(大蜡螟) can break down polyethylene(聚乙烯), which accounts for 40% of plastics.
That is to say, part of plastics can be consumed by this kind of worms. The team left 100 wax worms on a plastic shopping bag for 12 hours, and the worms consumed and broke down about 92 milligrams, or almost 3% of it. To confirm that the worms' chewing alone was not responsible for the polyethylene breakdown, the researchers made some worms into paste(糊状物)and applied it to plastic films. 14 hours later the films had lost 13% of their mass—apparently broken down by enzymes(酶)from the worms' stomachs. Their findings were published in Current Biology.
Federica Bertocchini, co—author of the study, says the worms' ability to break down their everyday food—beeswax—also allows them to break down plastic." Wax is a complex mixture, but the basic bond in polyethylene, the carbon—carbon bond, is there as well," she explains. "The wax worm developed a method or system to break this bond."
Jennifer Debruyn, a microbiologist at the University of Tennessee, who was not involved in the study, says it is not surprising that such worms can break down polyethylene. But compared with previous studies, she finds the speed of breaking down in this one exciting. The next step, DeBruyn says, will be to identify where the enzyme comes from. Is it an enzyme produced by the worm itself or by its gut microbes(肠道微生物)?
Bertocchini agrees and hopes her team's findings might one day help make use of the enzyme to break down plastics in landfills. But she expects using the chemical in some kind of industrial process—not simply "millions of worms thrown on top of the plastic."
1. What can we learn about the worms in the study?| A．They take plastics as their everyday food. |
| B．They can consume plastics. |
| C．They end up in landfills. |
| D．They are new creatures. |
| A．prove the research findings |
| B．discover other kinds of worms |
| C．increase the breakdown speed |
| D．find out the source of the enzyme |
| A．help to raise worms |
| B．help make plastic bags |
| C．be used to clean the oceans |
| D．be produced in factories in future |
| A．To propose new means to keep eco—balance. |
| B．To present a way to break down plastics. |
| C．To introduce the diet of a special worm. |
| D．To explain a study method on worms. |
2 . The Notre Dame (巴黎圣母院) fire has been put out, but its wooden roof have been largely damaged. The terrible accident causes a sudden sharp pain to people around the world, “What a pity that we cannot see the damaged parts of the wonder anymore.”
But the good news is that there is at least one way of seeing them, namely via a video game called Assassin's Creed: Unity. In this game, the player can travel to one city after another and enter the buildings exactly like what they are in reality, and see Notre Dame as it was before the fire. In addition, with VR technology, which is already quite mature, one can even look around the undamaged Notre Dame as if it is still there. Maybe digital technology could help to better protect architectural cultural heritage.
The idea of digitizing ancient buildings, making digital models of them so their data can be saved, dates back to the 1990s and the necessary technology has continued to advance since then. By scanning the ancient buildings with lasers, building 3D models with hundreds of images, as well as measuring everything precisely, engineers can make a copy as “same” as the real one.
As computers and smartphones are hugely popular，the digital replica or digital copy has great pratical value. First, it allows tourists to feel the cultural relics without touching them, which helps protect them. The virtual tour of Dunhuang Grottoes in Gansu Province is a good example of this as tourists can view the paintings without standing near them. Furthermore, it can make the digitized cultural relics more famous by spreading awareness about them via the Internet. In 2000, a virtual tour of the Great Wall became very popular at the Hannover World Expo, which increased the number of foreign tourists visiting it in the following years. Above all, it preserves all the information of the cultural relics. Even if the original ones are damaged one day, people can still know what they were like and can build a replica if desired.
Time is the biggest problem to architectural heritage. Maybe we will have better technologies in the future，but the digital technology offers a practical way to preserve architectural cultural heritage at the moment.
1. Which of the following statement is true?| A．The big fire has damaged the whole Notre Dame. |
| B．Only people in Paris felt pain for losing Notre Dame. |
| C．The damaged parts of Notre Dame have already been repaired. |
| D．A video game can help people see the original look of Notre Dame. |
| A．Scan the photos of the buildings | B．Build 3D models of full size. |
| C．Improve the technology needed. | D．Measure all the parts exactly. |
| A．By comparison. | B．By listing data. |
| C．By giving examples. | D．By classification. |
| A．The Damage of Notre Dame |
| B．The Value of Digital Replica |
| C．VR Technology Helps Repair the Cultural Relics |
| D．Digital Technology Helps Protect Ancient Buildings |
“It’s extremely important for us to think about this as a whole system and not just the sum of a bunch of individual components (元件),” said Robert Wood, the Harvard engineering professor who has been working on the robotic fly project for over a decade. A few years ago, his team got the go-ahead to start piecing together the components. “The added difficulty with a project like this is that actually none of those components are off the shelf and so we have to develop them all on our own,” he said.
They engineered a series of systems to start and drive the robotic fly. “The seemingly simple system which just moves the wings has a number of interdependencies on the individual components, each of which individually has to perform well, but then has to be matched well to everything it’s connected to,” said Wood. The flight device was built into a set of power, computation, sensing and control systems. Wood says the success of the project proves that the flying robot with these tiny components can be built and manufactured.
While this first robotic flyer is linked to a small, off-board power source, the goal is eventually to equip it with a built-in power source, so that it might someday perform data-gathering work at rescue sites, in farmers’ fields or on the battlefield. “Basically it should be able to take off, land and fly around,” he said.
Wood says the design offers a new way to study flight mechanics and control at insect-scale. Yet, the power, sensing and computation technologies on board could have much broader applications. “You can start thinking about using them to answer open scientific questions, you know, to study biology in ways that would be difficult with the animals, but using these robots instead,” he said. “So there are a lot of technologies and open interesting scientific questions that are really what drives us on a day to day basis.”
1. The difficulty the team of engineers met with while making the robotic fly was that __________.
| A．they had no model in their mind |
| B．they did not have sufficient time |
| C．they had no ready-made components |
| D．they could not assemble the components |
| A．consists of a flight device and a control system |
| B．can just fly in limited areas at the present time |
| C．can collect information from many sources |
| D．has been put into wide application |
| A．The robotic flyer is designed to learn about insects. |
| B．Animals are not allowed in biological experiments. |
| C．There used to be few ways to study how insects fly. |
| D．Wood’s design can replace animals in some experiments. |
| A．Father of Robotic Fly |
| B．Inspiration from Engineering Science |
| C．Robotic Fly Imitates Real Life Insect |
| D．Harvard Breaks Through in Insect Study |
