Технический перевод. Учебное пособие

"One is the short range that an electric vehicle can travel between charges, and that's based on the size of the battery", he said. "The second is the lack of a sufficient charging infrastructure, and the third is that even if you can charge, it takes a long time to charge – several hours. That means you're going to have to take a break in your trip in order to charge your vehicle".

Researchers and firms are trying to tackle all of these problems. Firms, such as Better Place, have started building battery "switching stations" that allow drivers to pull in and swap their batteries as easily as filling up with gas, whilst countless researchers are developing more efficient batteries.

But Dr Sasson believes there may be another answer: recharging roads.

Engineers in his lab are developing a way to wirelessly charge electric cars from magnetic coils embedded into the road. The car would pick up the power via another coil, meaning – in theory – that you would never have to make a charging stop again.

The system works using a technique called "magnetic resonance coupling". You can think about resonance as the phenomenon that allows an opera singer to smash a glass using only the power of their voice. In that case, when the singer hits a note that has the same resonant frequency as the glass, they couple and energy begins to build up in the glass, eventually causing it to smash.

Instead of using acoustic resonance, the Stanford team use the resonance of electromagnetic waves. A coil in the road that is connected to a power line is made to vibrate with the same resonance frequency as the coil on the bottom of the car, allowing energy to flow between them.

Traffic charge

It builds on pioneering work done at MIT in 2006 which showed the technique could be used in stationary situations, to power televisions and other gadgets. The Stanford system now claims to have upped the efficiency dramatically. They have come up with designs of coil that allow 97% efficient transmission of power over a distance of about 2 m (6 ft). Using models, they estimate they can transfer up to 10 kW of power.

"That number is about the number we'd probably want to transfer to vehicles" says Dr Sasoon.

And to turn this principle into a practical "recharging road" is not as difficult as it seems, he says.

"Road beds are made of asphalt or concrete, but there is often a lot of steel in the roads – a lot of rebar, a lot of ties between the segments of the

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road and so on", he said. "What we want to do is use that to our advantage".

He believes they could use much of the metal in the roadbed as part of the transmitter, and then the receiver would use the metal of the car body, again avoiding too many extra structural components.

It may take years, if not decades, until roads are retrofitted in this way. But various firms, including an MIT spin-out called WiTricity, are already taking the first steps by building charging stations for car parks, garages and beyond. And it has already caught the attention of car firms, including Toyota, Mitsubishi and Audi.

"We aim to offer our customers a premium-standard recharging method – easy to use and fully automatic, with no mechanical contacts", said Dr. Bjorn Elias of Audi Electronics Venture GmbH (AEV), a subsidiary of the car company that is working with WiTricity, recently. "Wherever you park the car, its battery will be recharged – perhaps even at traffic signals".

Audi – and others – are working to create a public standard and believe that the first units – for use in garages – will go into production in a few years' time. At that time, Dr Sasoon believes, electric cars will become the technology of choice, displacing our current love of gas guzzlers and banishing the concept of range anxiety forever.

"You never need to worry about stopping and filling up", he said.

Of course just because our cars can carry on forever does not mean that we will want to. I do not think I can go more than a couple of hundred miles without snacks and a bathroom break. A whole different kind of range anxiety…

Text 5. E-books banish being boring.

With e-books established, a revolutionary idea for the humble novel is taking place – a story told on many different platforms.

Before you decided to click on the link that brought you here, was anything else vying for your attention? A shocking tale of

celebrity indulgence? An amusing picture of a cat? Are you listening to music right now, or keeping a casual eye on email or Twitter updates?

Of course, BBC Future readers may not be sucked in so easily. But this kind of competition for attention has long been a staple of the

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"dumbing down" school of digital thought, which sees a surfeit of choices flattening culture into something close to its lowest common denominator.

The argument is a familiar one, and goes something like this: easy, inane and scandalous things tend to win the battle for our immediate attention. Thus, in the crowded and unfettered digital realm, difficult and excellent ideas are driven into retreat. And among these difficult, excellent things, "good" books come close to the top of most lists.

There is certainly something brutally Darwinian about the modern digital marketplace. Yet I wonder, especially when it comes to serious writing, whether this competition also brings something less dispiriting into play: a direct obligation towards your audience that was too often lacking in pre-digital times.

Take the process of publishing a traditional book of non-fiction: 250 pages of well-edited prose between hard covers, priced at between ten and twenty pounds, hoping for healthy sales off the back of wide reviews.

Making sure the book has an engaging central idea is crucial, both for attracting debate and readers. Often, this means basing the book on an article or "big idea" that has already found a large audience or felt particular timely. This in turn often leads to a book containing 50 pages of interesting prose, padded out with 200 further pages of less-than-thrilling examples, anecdotes and amplifications.

Buy an e-book through, say, a Kindle, and one of the first things you will notice is that the length of the text itself is nowhere to be seen. Unlike a hardback, an e-book doesn't have to have 250 pages any more than it has to cost a set amount, or sit handsomely on your shelf. There are some great losses wrapped up in these facts. As far as actually writing a book goes, though, the digital format has one significant advantage over the physical: it is much harder to get away with producing boring waffle.

Take the purchasing procedure for most e-books. Unless an author is unimpeachably famous, or you are buying a sequel, the motto of most digital consumers is "try before you buy". Free samples are becoming as standard a part of all electronic booksellers’ operations as readers' reviews and ratings. Gone is the marvellous serendipity of browsing the shelves of a bookshop. But going, too, is the likelihood of being seduced by a book's cover, elegance of production, and titillating blurb.

In this sense, the digital playing field is far more level than the world of print. It asks us to judge an author by the words they write (or choose not to write); and by what other readers, rather than paid publicists, have said about them. There are even community e-book review sites popping up to alert about and discuss new releases – such as "Download the Universe", a site recently launched by a group of A-list science writers.

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When it comes to prose itself, this levelling is a paradoxically conservative pressure. For, while the realm of apps is steadily increasing everyone's expectations of interactive media, it's the most old-fashioned virtues that tend to bring the greatest rewards with words: force and clarity of style; hard-hitting themes; engaging plots and characters.

For some critics, this is precisely the apocalypse of mediocrity that doomsayers have spent the last few decades predicting. For others, though – and I number myself among them – it's more of a wake-up-call than a last trumpet. The economics of traditional publishing may be in dire straits. But the incentive for writers themselves to be interesting – and to try to be interesting on every page – has never been sharper.

Shorn of its covers, even the word "book" is beginning to look a little shaky. Substantial, ambitious texts are one thing; but dressing them up as permanent, premium objects is quite another. Who's to say that subscribing directly to your favourite author's output is not a better bet than waiting for it to appear in hefty chunks; or that an audience should have no input into what gets written next, rather than simply waiting to be told?

Consider how digital media have already affected journalism. Economically, the results have often been disastrous; and the related cuts in resources have done great damage to journalism as an institution. Stylistically, though, the digital deluge has compelled the profession and its practitioners at the "quality" end of the market to shed a good deal of complacency, self-indulgence, and general lack of interest in their audience.

In any case, the competition on our screens is only going to get more intense. And when it comes to winning the next century of serious readers, there's only one certainty: the moment someone can simply switch you off, being boring is the last thing you can afford.

Text 6. Panama canal upgrade and bubbles set to transform ships.

The world's first hybridpowered ferry fleet in Hong Kong is a proving ground for technology that could transform the future of marine travel.

Just under a century ago the world of shipping changed forever.

On 7 January 1914, an old French crane boat called the Alexandre La Valley chugged into the Pacific ocean marking the first complete journey through the newly constructed Panama canal.

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Now, ships were able to make the journey from the Atlantic to the Pacific in record time, bypassing the need to round the Cape Horn at the foot of South America and shaving 8000 nautical miles off their journey.

But the opening of the canal had a much more profound effect on shipping – effectively dictating the size of most ships for the next century. The width of the channel and its locks placed a limit on the width – or beam, as it is known – of ships passing through the canal at 32.3 m. Any bigger and you simply could not squeeze through its narrow channels.

As a result, notwithstanding oil-carrying super tankers and some naval supercarriers, ship owners rarely built ships larger than this "Panamax constraint" as it is known, in case one day they had to make the journey.

"Trades through the canal are actually fairly minor – they are 2.5 to 3% of the total of world trade", says Paul Stott, a naval architect from Newcastle University in the UK recently told me. "But the issue is that you have to meet that constraint as a ship owner to maintain the value of your fleet".

But now all that is set to change. The canal is undergoing a major facelift, widening the beam to 49 m, and ushering in a new era of shipbuilding. Boat builders are bracing for orders as shipping companies look to buy wider, bigger vessels. And at the same time maritime engineers are being given the chance to start with a clean sheet and design ships from scratch.

Research published in the International Journal of Maritime Engineering shows that the wider canal is likely going lead to new cleaner, greener, more fuel-efficient ships.

"The larger the ship, the less fuel it uses per ton mile of cargo it carries", says Stott. "If you get up to 110,000 dead weight tons you can get up to 16% reduction in fuel use per ton mile shipped".

Bubbling behemoths

But it is not just a bigger beam that is going to make them more efficient. Engineers have a few tricks up their sleeves that could make these behemoths slip through the seas faster and more efficiently than ever before.

One of the most promising technologies is something called air lubrication – a cloak of air bubbles that encase the hull of the ship, reducing drag and saving fuel.

"What you'd like to do, in the simplest terms, is to separate the liquid (water) from the metal surface of the ship. If you can put gas between the liquid and the metal, you get benefits", says Steven Ceccio, Chairman of the

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Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering department at the University of Michigan, in the US.

In practice this means blowing air out of holes in the ship′s hull to act as a lubricant between the vessel and the water, reducing drag by up to 80%.

"The density of the gas is much less, so the resulting friction is a lot less", says Ceccio.

It is an idea that has been around for some time. Russian scientists tried it in the 60 s and 70 s and over the years there have been a number of significant sea trials. But there has never been significant take-up – partly because of the cost of retrofitting old ships with the technology, but also because engineers wanted to understand the impact it could have. For example, whilst it could reduce friction, the bubbles could also reduce the efficiency of the turbines used to propel the ship. Or, if the ship's hull is the wrong shape, the gas just escapes.

In addition, engineers needed to ensure they fully understand the socalled boundary layer physics – the places where the ship, bubbles and water meet.

"The ironic thing is that even though the ships are very large, the region near the metal surface that actually ends up making up a lot of the skin friction is on the order of less than one tenth of a millimetre. That 'very near wall flow' is where all the bad stuff happens to cause friction" says Ceccio.

The physics is complicated, and has taken a long time to perfect. But the set-up itself is physically pretty simple though. Engineers install openings on a flat-bottomed hull connected to a compressor on the deck. The trick is then injecting just enough air. Too little and there is no improvement, too much and you get no extra benefit. Get it right and the gas starts to collect under the ship allowing it to glide along.

Recently Mitsubishi Heavy Industries have started to commercialize what it calls the "Mitsubishi Air Lubrication System". Sea trails have shown a 10% reduction in CO2 emissions, whilst computer models of more efficient hull designs suggested there could be a reduction of up to 35%. And already orders have been placed for huge new ships using the technology. Late last year, grain conglomerate Archer Daniels Midland ordered three giant dry-bulk carriers with innovative hull shapes, propulsion systems and the lubrication technology. It claims the designs will help reduce CO2 emissions by up to 25%.

The trio will be launched in 2014, some of the first ships of the postPanamax era. Exactly 100 years after the Panama canal first revolutionized shipping, its redesign looks set to do it again.

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Text 7. Adaptation: Why your brain loves to tune out.

Our brains are remarkably good at tuning out all sorts of constants in our everyday lives. If you don't believe so, try a simple, but startling experiment.

Our brains are remarkably good at cancelling out all sorts of

constants in our everyday lives. The brain is interested in changes that it needs to react or respond to, and so brain cells are charged with looking for any of these differences, no matter how minute. This makes it a waste of time registering things that are not changing, like the sensation of clothes or a chair against your body, so the brain uses adaptation to tune this background out, allowing you to focus on what is new.

If you don't believe me, try this simple, but startling demonstration. First, hold your eyeball perfectly still. You could use calipers to do this, or adrug that paralyses the eye muscles, but my favourite method is to use my thumb and index finger. Using the sides of your thumb and finger, press on the bone of the eye socket, through your upper and lower eyelids. Do this gently. Try it with one eye first, closing the other eye or covering it with your hand.

With your eye fixed in position, keep your head still and soon you will experience the strangest thing. You will have to stop reading at this point. I don't mind. We will pick up when you have finished. After a few seconds the world in front of you will fade away. As long as you are holding your eyeball perfectly still, you will very quickly discover that you can see nothing at all. Blink, or move your head, let go of your eye and the world will come back. What's going on?!

Now you see it…

For all of our senses, when a certain input is constant we gradually get used to it. As you are holding your eye still, exactly the same pattern of light is falling on each brain cell that makes up the receptors in the back of your eye. Adaptation cancels out this constant stimulation, fading out the visual world. The receptors in your eye are still processing information. They have not gone to sleep. They simply stop firing as much, reducing the

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messages they pass on about incoming sensations – in effect the message passed on to the rest of the brain is "nothing new... nothing new... nothing new…". You can make your brain cells spring into action by moving your eye, or by waving your hand in front of your face. Your hand, or anything moving in the visual world, is enough of a change to counteract the adaptation.

This sounds like it could go badly wrong. What if I am watching something, or someone, I am thinking hard about it, and I forget to move my eyes for a few seconds. Will adaptation mean that thing disappears? Well, yes, it could in principle. But the reason it does not happen in practice is due to an ingenious work-around that the evolution has built into the design of the eyes – they constantly jiggle in their sockets. As well as the large rapid eye movements we make several times a second, there is also a constant, almost unnoticeable twitching of the eye muscles that means that your eyes are never absolutely still, even when you are fixing your gaze on one point. This prevents any fading out due to adaptation.

You can see this twitching when you look at a single point of light against a dark background (such as a single star in the sky, or a glowing cigarette end in a totally dark room). Without a frame of reference your brain will be unable to infer a stable position of the point of light. Every twitch of your eye muscles will seem like a movement of the point of light (a phenomenon called the autokinetic effect).

Adaptation is so useful for the brain's processing of information that it has been kept by evolution, even in basic visual processing, and this extra muscle twitching has been added in to prevent too much adaptation causing problems for us. But the basic mechanism is still there, as my eye experiment revealed.

Once you understand adaptation, you discover that it is all around us. It is the reason people shout when they come out of nightclubs (they have got used to the constant high volume, so it does not seem as loud to them as it does to the people they wake up on the way home). It is why a smell that might have hit you as overpowering when you first enter a room can actually be ignored after you've got used to it. And it is related to the phenomenon of word alienation, whereby you repeat a word so often it loses its meaning. But most of the time it operates quietly, in the background, helping to filtering out the things that do not change, so that we can concentrate on the more important tasks of those that do.

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Text 8. Earworms: Why catchy tunes get trapped in our heads.

Our resident psychologist Tom Stafford reveals why our brains find it hard to get rid of annoying, catchy songs, but he offers a possible solution.

Researchers have been looking into what makes some songs stick in our heads.

"Earworms", some people call them. Songs that get stuck in your head and go round and round, sometimes for days, sometimes for months. For no apparent reason you cannot help yourself from humming or singing a tune by Lady Gaga or Coldplay, or horror upon horrors, the latest American Idol reject.

To a psychologist – or at least to this psychologist – the most interesting thing about earworms is that they show a part of our mind that is clearly outside of our control. Earworms arrive without permission and refuse to leave when we tell them to. They are parasites, living in a part of our minds that rehearses sounds.

We all get these musical memories, and people appear to have different ones, according to a team at Goldsmiths University in London, who collected a database of over 5,000 earworms. True, the songs that we get stuck with tend to be simple and repetitive, but it seems we are not all singing the same number one song at the same time.

Lost in music

Neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote in his book Musicophilia that earworms are a clear sign of "the overwhelming, and at times, helpless, sensitivity of our brains to music". Music is defined by repetition, just like earworms, and this might make earworms so hard to shake – they are musical memories that loop, say a particular verse or a hook, forever repeating rather than running to completion. Some people report that singing an earworm to the end can help get rid of it (others report in frustration that this does not work at all).

As well as containing repetition, music is also unusual among the things we regularly encounter for being so similar each time we hear it. Fences are visually repetitive, for example, but each time you see the same fence you will look at it from a different angle, or in different light. Put a song on your stereo and the sound comes out virtually identical each time.

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Remembering is powerfully affected by repetition, so maybe the similarity of music engraves deep grooves in our mind. Grooves in which earworms can thrive.

Another fact about earworms is that they often seem to have something interesting or usual about them. Although they will often be simple and repetitive bits of music, tunes that become earworms have a little twist or peculiarity, something that makes them "catchy", and perhaps this is a clue as to why they can take hold in our memory system. If there was nothing unique about them they would be swamped by all the other memories that sound similar too.

Slave to the rhythm

If you have got a particularly persistent earworm you can suffer an attack of it merely by someone mentioning the tune, without having to hear it. This proves that earworms are a phenomenon of long-term memory, rather than merely being a temporary "after-image" in sound.

But this is not the whole story. Human memory researchers have identified so called "slave systems" in our short-term memory, components of the mind which capture sights and sounds, keeping them alive for a short time while we focus on them.

One slave system is the "mind's eye", capturing visual information, another is the "inner ear", the part we use for remembering phone numbers, for instance. It is this second part that seems to get infected with earworms. Rather than rehearse our plans for the day, idle thoughts, or lists of things to remember, the inner ear gets stuck on a few short bars of music or a couple of phrases from a song. A part of us that we normally do not have to think about, that should just do what we ask, has been turned against us, tormenting us with a jukebox request that we never asked for.

That our minds are not a unity is one of the basic insights of modern psychology – it is the story Dr Freud was telling, and, although it differs on many of the details, modern cognitive neuroscience says a similar thing. The sense of our selves is not the only thing going on in our minds, psychology says. The mind is an inner world which we do not have complete knowledge of, or have control over.

Mind games

Fortunately psychology can provide some vital intelligence on how to deal with an unruly mind. Consider the famous "don't think of a white bear" problem, which as it implies involves trying not to think about white bears.

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