Text 15. My dog is a very good listener, but how much can he understand?

That depends. Dogs aren’t linguists, but they have remarkably good social cognition skills. Daniel Povinelli, a psychologist at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, tested dogs’ ability to read cues from people. He placed a reward (a scrap of food, for example) under one of two buckets while the dog was out of sight, and he masked both buckets with an odor. Then he brought in the animal and had it guess which bucket held a reward, while researchers gestured toward the correct one. Dogs could determine the correct bucket with the smallest movement, even a slight nod. Povinelli also tested chimpanzees, but they weren’t nearly as good as dogs at reading cues and guessing the correct bucket. Surprisingly, wolves are even worse than chimps at the test, which, Povinelli suggests, is further evidence that dogs’ ability to interpret our movements comes from the two species’ living together for so long that we have co-evolved.

All of that selective breeding has made some dogs better listeners than others. Stanley Coren, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia and the author of The Intelligence of Dogs, tried to determine which breeds were most attentive by having 199 dog-obedience judges fill out a lengthy questionnaire. More than half of the judges ranked the Afghan hound as displaying the poorest “working or obedience intelligence,” and nearly all the judges put the border collie in their top 10. Alliston Reid, a professor of psychology who studies dogs at Wofford College in South Carolina, says that border collies, which were bred to herd sheep, are particularly smart, focused and attentive. Reid’s colleague John Pilley trained a border collie named Chaser to identify and retrieve 1,022 different objects on command.

(Source: http://www. popsci.com)

1. Read the text.

2. Pick up the key words.

3. Divide the text into logical parts.

4. Make up an outline of the text.

5. Find the main idea in each part of the text.

6. Express the main idea of each part in one sentence.

7. Find supporting details in each part of the text.

8. Compress the text excluding the supporting details.

9. Express the main idea of the text in one sentence.

10. Write an annotation/a summary of the text using words and word combinations from your active vocabulary and sample summaries.

Article 1. Darpa and craig venter fire up bio-factories for quick, streamlined genetic engineering

Recombinant E. Coli The blue-dyed bacteria contain a special protein that is disrupted when the DNA is spliced and recombined. When the enzyme is interrupted, the bacteria turns white instead of blue. Wellcome Images

Not content to let scientists figure out how to engineer animals and plants depending on the situation, DARPA wants to generalize the process, creating a manufacturing framework for all living things. The “Living Foundries” program sets up an assembly line paradigm for life and its constituent parts, and the DOD’s crazy-science arm just handed out its first research grants.

Among the recipients are Caltech, MIT and the J. Craig Venter Institute, a fitting result given the latter group’s prior success in creating the first-ever synthetic organism. The full suite of awards was announced May 22, comprising $15.5 million spread among six companies and institutions.

DARPA announced Living Foundries last summer, with a goal toward an engineering framework that could apply to any living thing. Under this program, genetic engineering would no longer be limited to modification of existing organisms - instead, scientists would be able to concoct anything they wanted from scratch, using a suite of ingredients and processes that could apply in any situation. Such a system is better, DARPA argues, than already promising examples of synthetic biology, which are too laborious, lab-specific and expensive to be universally applicable.

In the beginning, Living Foundries creates a basic library of modularized parts that can be assembled in infinite variations. Like computers borne of circuits and wires, endless forms of life could arise from a brew of proteins and DNA - perhaps bacteria that could eat cancer, maybe renewable fuels, and so on. The ultimate goal is a genetic starter set that could be snapped together like so many Legos, forming any system the military might require.

The contract winners will have to come up with this library of parts, as well as a way to test the new bio-products, Danger Room reports. DARPA also wants the teams to compress the biological build, test and design cycle by 10-fold, in both time and cost.

It may not be far-fetched - synthetic biology is already trending toward greater efficiency, both in the engineered organisms themselves and in the tools scientists are using to develop and evaluate them. As one example, consider the cost of genome sequencing now to the Human Genome Project’s gargantuan price tag. If the charter members of Living Foundries are successful, bio-engineering will become as efficient as factory production.

The solution: The AbyssBox can keep deep-sea fauna alive above sea level for months, and possibly much longer. Biologists from the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris and the French Research Institute for Exploitation of the Sea spent three years developing the 1,300-pound, four-gallon tank, which mimics the conditions found near deep-sea hydrothermal vents. (The actual vents on the ocean floor shoot hot water that attracts marine life.)

The team set the tank’s water to about 60°F and added a hot jet. A water pump raises the pressure to 3,000 pounds per square inch. Three-inch-thick steel walls withstand the pressure. The researchers feed the tank’s residents using an exchange tube with a pressure lock and watch them through a strong plastic porthole. Deep-sea-vent crabs and shrimp originally from the Lucky Strike hydrothermal field on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge are now living in two separate AbyssBoxes on display at the Océanopolis aquarium in Brest, France. They have survived since August.

(Source: http://www. popsci.com)

1. Read the article.

2. Make some general remarks concerning the content of the paper using words and expressions from Useful Vocabulary Section.

3. Discuss the structure of the paper.

4. Give some positive comments.

5. Express your criticism or objections.

6. Analyze the data, results and their presentations.

7. Make a conclusion.