Аннотирование и реферирование научно-популярной литературы на английском языке. На материале научно-популярных статей из американской прессы. На обл.

designed to last for three months or 1000 hours of operation. The company has introduces three versions of the system. All models contain the LTC-95 filter, and the more expensive versions have a timing mechanism that can be programmed to turn the machine on and off automatically. According to the manufacturer, the machine uses no more than a 100-watt light bulb.

Using charges to eliminate dust

A different approach to air purification makes use of ionization to get rid of pollutants. An ionizer emits negative ions that negatively charge airborne particles such as dust and pollen. The negative particle then seeks a positively charged surface - such as walls or carpeting - to attach to. First-generation ionizers removed particles from the air only to turn walls and carpeting black with accumulated charged particles. To prevent this problem a bipolar ionizer sends out negative ions, then charges part of its own surface positively to attract the particle laden ions; in that way the replaceable filter attracts the dirt, keeping the surfaces of the room clean.

The Pulsair Ionization Air Cleaner is a sealed-down version of equipment that was developed to meet the needs of clean rooms" for manufacturers of computer chips. The machine, which looks a bit like a small stationary version of the perky Star Wars computer R2D2, alternates 8 seconds of negative ion emission to the room with 22 seconds of positive charging to its filter. (The collection time is longer because the ions are heavier once they are loaded up with dirt, dust and pollen.) Although toxic gases or fumes cannot be removed by this process, the manufacturer claims that Pulsair can remove cigarette smoke, viruses and cooking odors.

Clean air in a warm room

Other products use more conventional technology in unusual ways. The Bionairе Corp., of Franklin Lakes, N.J., is currently marketing a product that can heat a room while purifying the air. The Bionairе BT-750 has an activated carbon prefilter to remove large particles and an ionizer and charged filter to remove smaller particles. The heating and purification functions can be used independently or simultaneously. The Gemini air purifier,

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manufactured by Purified AIR Ltd., based in Upminster, England, combines the ionization process with a fan in a disc shaped unit that can be attached to a wall or ceiling or placed on a table. As air is drawn into the unit, it passes through an electrostatic field that charges the particles negatively. They are then attracted to a positively charged carbon-collection filter after which clean air is circulated back into the room.

Статья 4. Making fertilizer from what?

A uranium processor’s novel experiment starts a national furor

Two years ago Justin Suddeth, then 14 found a deformed, nine - legged frog at a pond near the Sequoyah Fuels plant in Gore, Okla. In 1981 an eyeless baby girl was born to parents living a few miles from the same plant. The National Cancer Institute has reported that the leukemia rate for white men in counties surrounding Sequoyah Fuels is five percent-age points higher than the national average. Is there a connection? Local residents think so: Sequoyah Fuels processes uranium concentrate into ingredients for bombs and nuclear-power- plant fuel. The factory has been cited in the past for safety lapses, including a 1986 leak that killed one worker and released toxic uranium hexafluoride gas into the environment. Moreover, it is owned by Kerr-McGee, the Oklahoma City-based company implicated in the radioactive contamination of 73 workers at another facility-the case uncovered in 1974 by the late Karen Silkwood.

But if Kerr-McGee hoped its $1.38 million settlement with Silkwood’s heirs had lifted the cloud of controversy from its operations, the furor that erupted dashed that hope. A spate of news reports revealed that Sequoyah has for more than a decade, with Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) approval, been converting radioactive wastewater, called raffinate, into fertilizer and spraying it over company-owned fields. Hay grown on the fields has then been sold as feed to farmers and ranchers. Nearby residents charge that the fertilizer may be contaminating the Arkansas River and the water table near the Oklahoma-Arkansas border Local Veterinarian Gary

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Jonnson is concerned that the “hay is getting into the food chain”. Jessie Deer in Water, who chairs the local Native Americans for a Clean Environment, calls it the “ultimate in cheap waste disposal”.

Nonsense, responds Kerr-McGee Spokesman Rick Pereles. “Our product is no more dangerous than normal fertilizer”. Indeed, company tests show the substance to be no higher in radioactivity or most toxic heavy metals than many other fertilizers. Aberrations like the freak frog occur naturally, note company officials; no one has conclusively linked the product to environmental or health problems.

Sequoyah has been converting its wastewater into fertilizer since 1973 by chemically removing most of the uranium and heavy metals and adding potash and phosphate during application. The liquid was first tested on small plots of company land. In the early 1980s the NRC, finding “no adverse environmental impacts”, authorized more widespread testing. That assessment was circulated to the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and the US Department of Agriculture, and each passed it with no comments.

It is just this seemingly lackadaisical review process that concerns critics. According to Oklahoma Congressman Mike Synar, who headed an investigation of the 1986 incident, the EPA and other agencies tend to defer to the NRC in matters involving radioactive materials. But the NRC, he says, “fixes almost exclusively on the radioactive, not chemical, hazards”, which may be more to the point in this case. State efforts to regulate the spraying have meanwhile been stymied by jurisdictional questions, which were finally resolved that last spring when the Oklahoma water resources board asserted its right to address the possible threat to groundwater. Its decision on whether the spraying can continue is expected in the spring. ”The question is whether raffinate is toxic”, says Board Spokesman Brian Vance. ”We don’t know that yet”.

Indeed, the only information available about the fertilizer comes from its manufacturer. According to Herschel Elliott, an agricultural engineer at Penn State University, data released so far inadequately, address organic pollutants, in which case, he says, “we

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should look for mutagenic and carcinogenic effects”. Elliott notes that the studies show near unsafe levels of molybdenum. Such heavy metals can cause birth defects.

Even if there are no such dangers, the public relations fallout for Kerr-McGee might be worrisome – except that the company announced an agreement in principle to see the Sequoyah operation to GA Technologies of San Diego. The agreement’s scheduling, says Pereles, is “absolutely coincidental”. But for Kerr-McGee, smarting from its earlier run-ins with an angry public, it may have come just in time.

Статья 5. Probing the chambers of Cheops

Space-age technology reveals. A 4,600-year-old wooden boat.

Recently, under the orange glow of a crescent moon, a small group of scientists gathered expectantly at an archaeological site south of the Great Pyramid of Cheops at Gisa, just outside Cairo. They did not carry hand picks or shovels. Instead, they watched a TV monitor as a miniature camera was lowered into a narrow hole in the ground. When the video image flickered to life, the group gasped. There before them, inside a chamber that had been sealed 4,600 years ago, lay the dismantled timbers of a wooden ship. The archaeologists immediately recognized it as the long-sought companion to the famous royal ship of Cheops that now resides in a Gisa museum.

The dramatic find was a triumph of space-age technology and archaeological investigation. The existence of the sister ship had been suspected since 1954, when the first vessel was discovered near the tomb of the Fourth Dynasty Pharaoh Cheops, or Khufu. Work at the new site began two weeks ago. The trick was to probe the chamber without disturbing the interior-including the 4,600-years-old air that might reveal secrets of the ancient atmosphere.

Bob Moores, a Black & Decker engineer who helped design a lunar-surface drill for the Apollo program, mated one of his company’s drills with an ingenious air-lock seal. An industrial vacuum cleaner at the site sucked the dust from around the hole once

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the drilling got under way. To see inside the vault, technicians modified a miniature remote-controlled video camera so it could be inserted into the 3,5-in.-wide entrance hole. The camera, originally designed to probe the interior of nuclear reactors, provided fiber-optic light without introducing any heat into the chamber. Over the site there was a makeshift scaffold and the flags of Egypt and the National Geographic Society, the principal sponsor of the $250,000 project.

For three days the scientists drilled, an inch at a time. Last Monday morning, 62 in. into the porous limestone, the carbide-tipped drill broke through. Pieter Tans, a research scientist from the University of Colorado in Boulder, filled six canisters with 159 quarts of air drawn from the chamber. He also took a sniff. Said Tans: “I did not smell history. I didn’t smell anything, except maybe staleness.”

The inside of the chamber remained a mystery until early the next morning, when the video camera was finally lowered into place. What the scientists saw on the monitor looked like a pile of lumber under reed matting. Even so, recalled Tans, “as soon as we saw it, we knew it was a boat.” Tohamy Mahmoud Ali, an Egyptian worker who had helped excavate the first vessel, broke into excited Arabic as he recognized the disassembled ship lying in its narrow pit. At one end were several upright pieces, perhaps parts of the prow.

Since there are no immediate plans to excavate the ship, the scientists resealed the entrance hole after meticulously filming every inch of the chamber for later study and mapping. Using a special zoom lens, they filmed everything from the markings on the walls to the lengths of the boat’s cedar planks. From the film, archaeologists hope to determine the size of the ship - and perhaps even discover clues to its purpose. Some scholars believe the vessels were intended to carry the spirits of the dead on their eternal journey around the earth with the sun-god Ra. They disagree, though, about whether they are so-called solar boats built for the day-time sojourn across the sky or ships intended for the nighttime voyage through the underworld. Still others speculated that they were simply funerary boats used to ferry Cheops’ body down the Nile for burial. Whatever the purpose,

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Egyptian officials must now decide how to display their new, but still untouched, vessel.

products such as VCR's, camcorders and computers fascinate adults, they can probably be made into eye-catching toys and audiovideo products for kids as well. You simplify the technology, reduce the cost, then sell the brightly packaged items to the parents. And what is better time than Christmas to introduce them? Here are some new ideas that kids should find appealing. But for how long?

Computersmarts

In the early 1980s video games were the darling of the toy industry. Played on television sets, they were an overnight sensation. But they were also predictable and repetitive. And they lost favor with consumers almost as fast as they had gained it. Toy companies now believe that the best way to catch and keep a kid's attention is by selling him toys that "interact" with his TV. Interactive toys stimulate the imagination, officials at the firms say, and require the user to make decisions. Wisconsin-based Connor Toy has taken the concept one step further: it sells interactive toys that educate as well as entertain.

In October Connor began to sell Computer Smarts - a simple computer that when used with 40-minute video-cassette tapes is said to introduce children six years old and up to basic math, language and computer skills. The tapes, developed with the aid of experts in child education, use graphics, animation, music and humor to teach such topics as sentence construction and word usage. "ComputerSmarts is an educational tool," says Jan Allan Nowak of Connor. "That it is a toy is secondary in importance."

During a lesson the child is asked questions that can be answered by using a color-coded keyboard. When a question is answered correctly, a human-sounding voice praises the user - "fantastic" - and the tape continues. In one lesson, a child is taught

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the fundamentals of typing; letters float across the screen and the child is given a few seconds to type them on the keyboard. The kids don't have time to hunt and peck, because they must keep their eyes on the screen. If a letter moves from one side of the screen to the other before being typed, it's counted as a miss. If a round is successfully completed, the game speeds up. ComputerSmarts can be detached from the VCR and used as a freestanding toy. The computer costs $110 to $130, and the four tapes now available are $10.95 each.

Captain power

The year is 2147. The place is Earth. The Metal Wars have ended, but fierce battles for survival continue. A Future Phantom Striker - a plastic jet with a handgrip - is exchanging infrared gunfire with a Bio Dread robot. The jet is a Mattel Inc. toy being operated by a child. The robot is a part of a new TV series called "Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future". There's nothing special about a company's selling toys based on a TV show. What's unique, says Matt Bousquette of Mattel, is that "the TV program affects the operation of the toy, and no wires connect them.'

For three to five minutes during each 30-minute episode the toy user can "participate" in the TV show. A ‘Mattel jet’, for example, shoots invisible, harmless infrared rays at the TV robots when a trigger is pulled. At certain times during the program, specific spots on the TV film - in the form of particular robots - also emit signals. When a light ray from a jet meets a signal from the robot, a "hit" is registered by a minicomputer inside the toy, and the user scores points. If a light ray from a jet hits an object on the TV screen when no corresponding signal is being emitted, the user has missed, and his score is lowered. If there are too many misses and the user’s score drops to zero, the jet pilot is jettisoned from the aircraft.

Mattel developed the infrared technology for the toys, and Landmark Entertainment Group created the Captain Power TV series. Landmark licensed Mattel to make and sell the toys. Consumer groups have strongly criticized Mattel for, as they see it, commercializing a TV show. Peggy Charren, president of Action for

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Television, says it is "discriminatory" for firms to sponsor TV programs that require the purchase of toys to be enjoyed. Mattel insists that there is no reference to the toys in Captain Power and that the program can be enjoyed by itself.

The show has 26 episodes and is now being broadcast in the United States; in the weeks ahead, it and the toys will be available in countries throughout the world. The jets - which can also fight each other, toy-to-toy, and be used with separate Captain Power videotapes that offer 15 minutes of interactive play - cost from $25 to $-40.

Статья 7. “Hey, computer, take a letter”

It sounds like a scene from an old “Star Trek” episode. An executive dictates a memo to his personal computer. As he speaks, his words appear on the computer screen – accurately spelled, properly punctuated – and his hands never touch the keyboard. Today reality is moving back to the future. Nearly 400 computer firms are studying speech recognition, and many are already marketing voice-activated systems, though with distinctly limited vocabularies. Still, the day may be fast approaching when you can do all your correspondence by voice command.

Dragon Systems, Inc., a software firm in Newton, Mass., has developed a voice-activated word-processing program with a 1,000word vocabulary; it sells for £1,195 and runs on a personal computer. A Voice-Scribe-1000 user must first “train” the system to his voice by repeating each word into a microphone. Speech must be slower than normal, leaving brief pauses between words to let the machine recognize them. Continuous speech creates slurs between words – such as “I scream” and “ice cream” – that computer technology cannot differentiate.

Dragon’s software uses statistical theory to analyze speech. If the program hears a word with several possible spellings, it quickly calculates the most likely choice. If a speaker were to say “to be or not to be”, for instance, the system, after analyzing such homonyms

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as “two” and “too”, would decide that “to” is the most likely choice in that context. Voice-Scribe’s vocabulary can be customized for routine tasks that require only a limited number of words, such as writing sales letters or completing medical forms. Dragon is also working in a new program with a larger vocabulary.

One of the more eagerly awaited systems is a word-processor being developed by Kurzweil Applied Intelligence in Waltham, Mass. Called Voiceworks, the machine is designed to recognize a 20,000-word vocabulary. The computer employs eight systems to distinguish words: four linguistic programs that “understand” parts of speech and sentence construction; three acoustic programs that recognize individual speech; plus an artificial intelligence, or “expert” system that decides how to combine the programs most effectively.

Matching sounds: Chairman Raymond Kurzweil says Voiceworks will be on the market by midyear and will sell for between £ 5,000 and £ 10,000. Some experts in the field are skeptical since Kurzweil had said the machine would be available last year. But most industry analysts say that Kurzweil, who also invented a music synthesizer and a computer that reads aloud to the blind, will eventually deliver. His machine is currently being tested by Xerox and Wang laboratories, which have invested in his firm.

IBM recently demonstrated an experimental personal computer designed to handle 20,000 words. Speakers can dictate at a rate of 60 words a minute; the text flashes on the screen after a three-word delay, giving the system a chance to analysis each word in context. IBM’s word-analysis program uses two information-theory models. The first model draws on 200 sounds matches these sounds against a data-base containing 25 million words of office correspondence.

IBM says that it has no immediate plans to market the computer. Demand for voice-activated products won’t reach massmarket levels until technology offers continuous speech recognition for large vocabularies. While that will require tremendous computational power, analysts say that such machines could become commercially viable within 10 years. But Harvey Newquist, editor of

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Al Trends newsletter, warns that talking to computers could cause “social complications”. When he started giving orders to his word processor, “people across the room thought I was talking to them and kept shouting “What?”

Статья 8. The risk from radon

EPA urges testing for all homes for the deadly gas

Few hazards are as insidious as radon. A product of the radioactive decay of the uranium in rocks and soil, the gas is invisible and odorless. It can accumulate silently in the home, drawn into the basement through cracks or drainpipes. It kills slowly and with little warning, its victims succumbing to lung cancer after years of unsuspected exposure. And, the government now says, radon threatens even more households than commonly believed.

The Environmental Protection Agency and the surgeon general's office urged that every home, as well as every apartment below the third floor, be tested for the gas. Citing a new survey of 11,000 households in seven states, EPA officials estimate that 8 million U.S. homes contain potentially hazardous levels of radon, which is now blamed for 5,000 to 20,000 deaths annually. Because cigarettes and radon together are especially carcinogenic, smokers - about 100,000 of whom die each year of lung cancer - face double jeopardy.

Dangerous levels: The new EPA survey found that nearly one third of the residences tested exceeded the agency's recommended action level of four picocuries of radon per liter of air. (A picocurie is one-trillionth of a curie, a standard measure of radiation. For comparison, the air outdoors contains just 2pCi of radon per liter). In Minnesota, over 46 percent of the houses surveyed had more than 4 pCi per liter of radon. In North Dakota, a surprising 60 percent exceeded that level. The survey was also conducted in Arizona, Indiana, Massachusetts, Missouri and Pennsylvania. Extrapolating from this and other studies, the EPA estimates that more than 200,000 homes nationwide have radon levels above 20 pCi per liter;

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