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

hurricanes. If left alone, barrier islands will bend to the ocean’s force, absorbing the punch of a hurricanes’ 120-mile-a-hour winds, 6-foot waves and wind-driven water. But when dunes and grasses are disturbed by constructions, much of the island’s elastic strength is lost, and storm waves slam into unyielding beach fronts with jackhammer force, landing with 1,700 pounds per cubic yard. “The instability of coastal barriers and their susceptibility to storm damage,” says Interior Assistant Secretary William Horn, “make development hazardous and too costly to subsidize at the tax-payer’s expense.”

As costly as such development is – and insurance industry researchers estimate property losses from Hyrricane Betsy, which caused 715 million dollars in damage in 1965, would total 5.8 billion dollars today – more new buildings are appearing and more beach front is disappearing. In Texas, Florida and Maryland, high-rises are going in record number even as the danger of erosion becomes increasingly apparent. In Kure Beach, N. C., for example, the story is still told of a newcomer who, after purchasing a beach-front condominium, learned that Hurricane Hazel has demolished houses in that very area in 1954. “It wasn’t until I was driving away from the real-estate closing,” the newcomer is quoted as saying, “that the question arose: Why was the address on Second Street if it was ocean-front?”

Статья 17. A celestial odd couple

Two massive stars carry closeness a bit far

Astronomers are used to dealing in extremes, but no one had ever discovered anything like this before: a pair of superdense stars a mere 80,000 miles apart, locked in a gravitational embrace, one orbiting the other every 11 1/2 minutes and spewing X rays at a temperature of 50 million degrees Fahrenheit. Says Nicholas White of the European Space Agency's EXOSAT observatory in Darmstadt, West Germany: "What we've got is a system you could fit between the earth and the moon that generates 100,000 times more luminosity than the sun."

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That luminosity is largely manifested not in visible light but in invisible X-rays that every 11 1/2 minutes, like clockwork, momen- tarily become more intense. It was the brilliant radiation that enabled EXOSAT, a European X-ray-detecting satellite to find the binary which were hidden from ordinary telescopic view in a globular cluster of stars 20,000 light years away from the earth.

colleagues, one member of the strange duo is a neutron star — the burned-out remnant of a large star that has collapsed under its own gravity and then exploded, leaving behind a spinning, tightly packed ball of neutrons. Incredible as it seems, that ball, which is more massive than the sun, is only ten miles or so in diameter and is so dense that a cubic inch would weigh 100 billion tons on earth. Its partner in the celestial dance is a white dwarf, a dying star once comparable in size and mass to the sun that has burned up its fuel and shrunk to about three times the size of the earth. But the dwarf still glows like an ember as it slowly radiates away the last of its heat, and, while nowhere near as squeezed as a neutron star, it is still thousands of times as dense as the sun.

Put the two close together and the fireworks begin. The monumental gravity of the neutron star raises such high tides on its companion that gases are torn wholesale from the white dwarf's surface and pulled into orbit around the neutron star, forming a socalled accretion disk. Some of that material continuously spirals down to smash into the surface of the neutron star — at rate of a trillion tons a second - striking so violently that it literally explodes. Says CoDiscoverer William Priedhorsky of Los Alamos National Laboratory: "A neutron star can convert about 10% of the mass that falls on it into radiation. If you toss on a marshmallow, you get out the energy of a Hiroshima bomb." A trillion-ton rnarshmallow every second makes an even bigger splash; the stupendous energy from this perpetual explosion radiates outward as a steady torrent of X-rays.

Priedhorsky, White and Colleague Luigi Stella, also of the European Space Agency's observatory, were in Darmstadt analyzing

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data from the now defunct EXOSAT satellite when they made their discovery. They had been looking for variations in the luminosity of a familiar X-ray source known to astronomers as 4U 1820-30. The very fact that the mysterious source emitted X-rays implied that it was a binary system consisting of a star feeding matter and energy to a ravenous neutron-star companion - and variations in X-ray intensity would provide clues to the nature of that system. In most of the known X-ray binary systems, the periodic irregularities caused by the orbital motions of the stirs are several hours apart; thousandth-of-a- second variations, on the other hand, are generated by the rapid rotation of the neutron star.

Not this time.'' Priedhorsky noticed an occasional ripple in the data,'' says White, "so we ran a quick analysis, and to our astonishment, there was a peak every 685 seconds." Reviewing data from earlier observations, the team found evidence for the same pattern going back at least ten years, and the fact that the period had remained virtually unchanged in that time confirmed that the variations were orbital in character. If they had been caused by the rotation of the neutron star, they would gradually have sped up. Reason: angular momentum of the material zooming in from the accretion disk is added to the momentum of the neutron star, increasing its spin rate. Given the 11 1/2-minute orbital period of the star system and the mass of known neutron stars (they are all approximately the same), the scientists were able to calculate that the stars were separated by only 80,000 miles.

The concensus among binary-star experts is that the system was created when two previously unrelated stars collided or had a near miss. Scientists believe such encounters are common in globular clusters, where stars arc packed a million times as tightly as they are in the neighborhood of our solar system. And all seem to agree that the discovery will serve to a cosmic laboratory, yielding information about the dynamics and evolution of interacting stars. Says Princeton Astrophysicist Bohdan Paczynski: "It is a type of binary that has not been seen before - a white dwarf close enough to lose mass to a

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neutron star. It is almost a dream system to study because it is so simple. Usually, nature is not so generous."

Статья 18. Historic cometary tales

Halley’s comet and countless others that blaze across the night skies have had a profound effect on history. They have influenced literature, art, religion and warfare, perhaps even evolution and very beginning of life. For centuries comets were widely regarded as harbingers of disaster, omens of death, pestilence, wars, drought, earthquakes and floods. Modern science has dispelled many of these myths, but some persist today. In a bizarre twist, scientists themselves are beginning to attribute great cataclysms of the past to what the ancients called “hairy stars”.

The Chinese, who recorded the appearances of comets as early as 613 B.C., thought that the glowing specters were celestial brooms wielded by the gods to sweep the heavens free of evil, which then fell to earth, bringing wars, floods, droughts and other disasters.

Comets have borne that stigma even since. Aristotle thought the night visitors were earthly “exhalations” that rose into the atmosphere and were ignited in fiery upper regions, causing drought and high winds on earth. On its pass in A. D. 66, Halley’s, in the words of the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, “hung like a sword in the sky” and presaged the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. Halley’s return in 451 was thought to portend the defeat of Attila the Hun’s armies at Chalons by Flavius Aetius.

Comets came to be so closely associated with the deaths of great leaders, says Astronomer Donald Yeomans, that historians waited expectantly for a celestial sign every time a monarch died. When the Emperor Charlemagne expired in 814 and no comet appeared, Yeomans says, “historians made one up and inserted it into history”.

Halley’s appearance in 1066, complete with a forked tail, was stitched into the renowned Bayeux tapestry, which depicted the

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Norman Conquest. Being the comet’s tail, above six cringing and pointing figures (apparently Saxons), are the words THEY ARE IN AWE OF THE STAR. While the Saxons may have attributed their defeat to the comet, William the Conqueror probably forever afterward considered comets to be good omens. In 1301 Halley’s so inspired the Italian artist Giotto that in his famed nativity scene he portrayed the star of Bethlehem as a comet. The comet heralded the descent of Turkish armies on Belgrade in 1456, and in the year was blamed for the birth of two-headed calves.

Shakespeare’s works reflect the cometary myths of the 16th and early 17th centuries. In Julius Caesar, for example, the Emperor’s wife, after seeing a comet, warns the noblest of Romans: “When beggars die there are no comets seen: the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes”. But in the same play, as Cassius and Brutus plot Caesar’s assassination, Cassius says: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves”.

The winds of change, however, were slow to reach Boston, where in 1682 the Puritan minister Increase Mather, awestruck by the same comet that inspired Edmond Halley, asked the members of his congregation if they would continue their evil ways “ until God sends his arrows from heaven, to smite them down into the grave”.

Indeed, superstition about comets has persisted into 20th century. As Halley’s came into view in 1910, some residents of Chicago prepared themselves for death by cyanogen-gas poisoning when, as it was widely predicted, the earth passed through the comet’s tail.

The 20th century has spawned some notions about comets that seem even more fantastic than the ancient myths. British Astronomers Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe have suggested that over hundreds of millions of years, primitive biological entities, perhaps even cells, developed within some comets. These may have been delivered to the earth as the first form of terrestrial life by a comet that impacted billions of years ago.

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Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the DNA molecule’s structure, and Organic Chemist Leslie Orgel have proposed a less fanciful theory: Comets brought with them the chemical precursors of life, in the form of amino acids and other molecules.

That comets do occasionally strike the earth seems certain. Some scientist think a tiny chuck of a comet, exploding in the atmosphere above Siberia in 1908, caused a tremendous blast and fireball in the Tunguska region, felling trees in a 200-sq.-mi. area and knocking the nearest residents (40 miles away) off their feet.

During the past few years, evidence has been accumulating to support Physicist Luis Alvarez’s theory that a giant comet (or asteroid) struck the earth 65 million years ago, pulverizing a huge area and spewing so much debris into the atmosphere that the skies darkened for months, temperatures dipped, and much of the life on earth - most notably the dinosaurs perished. It was the demise of the dinosaurs, many evolutionists believe, that enabled man’s tiny mammalian ancestors to emerge from hiding, occupy the environmental niches left vacant by the great beasts and other destroyed species, and evolve into Homo sapiens. Impacts by comets may have been responsible for mass extinctions of life at other times in the past. And scientists are certain that it can happen again.

Статья 19. Japan’s runaway trains

For more than a century Japan’s railroads have been running smoothly - and have borne along with them a good measure of national pride. Clean and safe, the trains really do run like clockwork, and Japan National Railways can take credit for designing the speedy shinkansen or bullet trains that ushered the industry into the high-tech age. In recent years, however, the government-owned system has become derailed. It is overstaffed with some 275,000 employees, many of them demoralized because of frequent disputes between their labor unions and the Tokyo,

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government. Politically inspired projects to expand rail lines have cost billions of dollars - and have little chance of ever paying for themselves. With increasingly stiff competition from airlines, new trucking services and private rail companies, National Railways has plunged into operating deficits: now losing money at the rate of $42 million per day, it has amassed a staggering $150 billion in liabilities and debt.

As part of his “administrative reform” program launched in 1983, Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone is eager to tame this monster. He came close to his goal recently when the lower house of Parliament passed controversial bills to break up, pare down and denationalize Japan’s railroads.

The reform package will create some new problems even as it solves some old ones. Tokyo will still have to provide at least $7 billion to subsidize the financially weaker parts of the system that serve outlying islands, since they will be spun off from the more profitable sector on the main island of Honshu. The Honshu division itself will be split into three parts, requiring long-distance trains to stop at the borders of each region to change personnel and threatening to cause delays in rail service. The government’s plan to sell 8,200 acres of National Railways surplus land - at a high market price of $48 billion or more - has angered local governments seeking to buy the properties at cut-rate prices for urban-development projects.

Eliminating employees: The most controversial element of the reorganization plan is the proposal to eliminate 60,000 surplus rail employers. After World War II the National Railways provided jobs for thousands of demobilized soldiers, and the ranks soon swelled with legions of ticket punchers, station sweepers and other unskilled workers. By dismantling what has become a kind of vast welfare system, Nakasone’s Liberal Democratic Party has drawn angry protests from the political opposition. The railway’s largest union, Kokuro, which is affiliated with the Socialist Party, has refused to cooperate with the restructuring, even though the government has promised to find new jobs for its dismissed workers. Japan’s radical

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left has turned to violence: last year members of the Middle Core Fraction cut rail cables and set fire to transformer stations, and the group is believed to have sabotaged six rail lines in the Tokyo area two months ago.

Neither the violence nor the barrage of criticism has touched Nakasone and his conservative LDP. The horrific size of the railways’ debt has persuaded them that something must be done and that this is the moment to seize: Nakasone may be in his last year as prime minister, and having won a landslide victory in July’s parliamentary elections, he and the LDP can afford to take the political heat. The restructuring bills, scheduled to take effect next April, will go to the upper house, where they are expected to be approved.

Статья 20. Of television and transplants

It was perhaps the television coup of the season. Live on the Phil Donahue show, a call was placed to Butterworth Hospital in Grand Rapids. Looking on were Donahue’s guests for the day: the parents of a California infant known as Baby Jess, who desperately needed heart transplant. A spokeswoman for the hospital got on the line and was persuaded to reveal the impossibly good news. « We are donating a heart to the baby”, she declared. The cameras closed in on Jesse’s stunned parents as they broke into cries of joy, smiles and tears. The audience went wild. For a moment, it seemed that television itself had brought about this triumphant turn of events.

And in a way, it had. A week earlier, the case of Baby Jesse had become a cause caliber, when officials at Loma Linda University Medical Center 60 miles east of Los Angeles, had refused to consider the infant as a candidate for transplant. The hospital had apparently concluded that Jesse’s young, unwed parents – Deana Binkley 17 and Jess Sepulveda, 26, of Pasadena – were incapable of providing him with the exhaustive care he would require after surgery. The infant had been born with a rare, fatal condition called hypoplastic left-heart syndrome, in which the heart’s main pumping chamber is improperly developed. Without a transplant at Loma

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Linda, the only institution in the area that performs such surgery on infants, doctors said Jesse would die in a matter of weeks. «We had an outrageous violation of civil rights here», charged Right-to-Life Spokeswoman Susan Carpenter McMillan. The resulting outcry led Loma Linda to make a deal: if Jesse’s parents surrendered custody to his grandparents, he would become eligible for surgery.

Though Jesse ultimately got a heart, the hospital’s initial rejection sparked a heated debate on how to evaluate transplant candidates. The dearth of donor organs in the US often forces doctors to select one patient over another. Usually the choice is made solely on the basis of medical need, but, says David Rothman, professor or society and medicine at Columbia University, «social criteria sometimes enter in». Few hospitals, he notes, will offer a liver to an unrecovered alcoholic or a heart to an inveterate smoker.

When the patient is a child, the ability of parents to provide care becomes relevant. Young transplant recipients require constant monitoring for rejection, lifelong medication and special precautions to avoid infection. For these reasons, says Ethicist Arthur Caplan of

the Hastings Center at Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. Loma Linda officials «were definitely right in considering whether the family can monitor and care for the baby effectively». Jesse’s surgeon Leonard Bailey also defended the hospital. «You can’t serve up hearts like cherries jubilee», he exclaimed. «The family has to be very dependably and constant».

While Loma Linda refused to reveal the precise nature of its objections to Jesse’s parents, Time learned that Sepulveda has a record of arrests for drunk driving and had been through a «substance abuse» treatment program. Though he downplays these problems, Sepulveda says, “I do think that Loma Linda had good reasons to turn us down.”

Another ethical issue was brought to light by the Baby Jesse case: the growing role of the media in determining who gets organs. Frank Clemenshaw, 22, and Deborah Walters, 33, The Michigan couple who donated their baby’s heart to Jesse, admitted they had been moved to do so by televised reports on Jesse and his parents.

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«Our baby could not live», said Walters, whose son was brain-dead at birth. «We’d seen their plea on TV, and we figured that if our baby could help them, then would not be a total loss».

But what television had failed to reveal was that an infant in Louisville had been waiting even longer for a heart. The parents of Baby Calvin had elected to work quietly through organ-procurement networks rather then seek publicity for their child. Upset that their baby, who should have had priority, had been passed over for the celebrated Jesse, they issued a statement asking Congress to «do everything possible to see that an improved system is set up to identify donors of organs». At present, they charged, «it almost seems like publicity is the only method that’s working».

In fact, Congress has already taken action to improve the organ distribution system. In 1984, it passed legislation creating a national computer bank to match organ donors to recipients. But the Reagan Administration has resisted spending the 2$ million allocated for the network. Senator Albert Gore, a sponsor of the legislation, blasted the Administration for dragging its feet. «What do we tell families», he asked, «that they have to go on the Phil Donahue show? ».

At week’s end, there were happy endings in both Loma Linda and Louisville Jesse’s new heart was beating normally, and he was taken off a respirator. Baby Calvin had meanwhile found a donor, and was in stable condition following surgery. But both infants faced a long and uncertain road ahead. So far, the longest any infant has survived with a neonatal heart is seven months, and two babies who had received transplants in April at Loma Linda were back in the hospital for rejection problems. The mother of one of the infants had a word of warning to the other parents. “It’s easy to put a heart in. It’s hard to keep it there.”

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