外报阅读外报阅读12-13

文登考研英语钻石卡（VIP）外报阅读第12-13期 Passage 1： U.S. Calls Radiation ‘Extremely High;’ Sees Japan Nuclear Crisis Worsening By NORIMITSU ONISHI, DAVID E. SANGER and MATTHEW L. WALD Published: March 17, 2011 TOKYO — Amid widening alarm in the United States and elsewhere about Japan’s nuclear crisis, the authorities reached for ever more desperate and unconventional methods on Thursday to cool stricken reactors, deploying helicopters and water cannons in a race to prevent perilous overheating in spent fuel rods. But the Japanese efforts seemed to focus on a different part of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, 140 miles northeast of here, than a unit depicted in Washington on Wednesday as presenting a far bleaker threat than the Japanese government had offered. The American assessment opened a new and ominous chapter in the effort by Japanese engineers to bring the six side-by-side reactors under control after their cooling systems were knocked out by an earthquake and a tsunami last Friday. It also suggested a serious split between Washington and its closest Asian ally at a delicate moment. On the ground and in the air around the stricken plant, Japan’s Self-Defense Forces started dumping seawater from a helicopter on Reactor No. 3 Thursday morning, making four passes and dropping a total of about 8,000 gallons over the reactor as a plume of white smoke billowed. The tactic was supposed to cool spent fuel rods stored there. But the helicopter drop — more often used to tamp down forest fires — seemed to prove ineffective because the water was blown off target. The Self-Defense Forces later said the measure had little effect on reducing the temperature. The military also announced that it had postponed plans to drop water on Reactor No. 4, which Gregory Jaczko, the chairman of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, on Wednesday pinpointed as a cause for serious alarm. On Thursday afternoon, the Self-Defense Forces and the Tokyo Metropolitan Police began deploying eight water cannon trucks to Reactor No. 3. But for reasons that were not clear, despite several announcements on the public broadcaster NHK that they would start spraying water into the reactor at any moment, they had not begun their operations as even as dusk settled. Instead, NHK live television continued to broadcast images, taken from a helicopter from a distance of about 30 miles, of white smoke billowing from the reactor. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police had planned to use the high-pressure water cannons, which are usually used in riot control. A crew of 13 officers in three trucks was preparing to approach within 50 yards of the reactor and at an angle of 30 degrees spray at least 12 tons of seawater into it. The Self-Defense Forces also were preparing to send five trucks, carrying a total of 30 tons of seawater. The Japanese government said that the reactor typically needs 50 tons of water a day to keep from overheating. Tokyo Electric Power Company, which operates the reactors, was also working to complete a high-power line to the plant to restore the electricity needed to run the cooling systems, according to a senior Japanese nuclear industry executive. The maneuvers seemed at odds with the most startling assertion by Mr. Jaczko that there was now little or no water in the pool storing spent nuclear fuel at the No. 4 reactor, leaving fuel rods stored there exposed and bleeding radiation into the atmosphere. His Congressional testimony was the first time the Obama administration had given its own assessment of the condition of the plant, apparently mixing information it had received from Japan with data it had collected independently. “We believe that radiation levels are extremely high, which could possibly impact the ability to take corrective measures,” Mr. Jaczko said. His statement was quickly but not definitively rebutted by officials of Tokyo Electric, the plant’s operator. “We can’t get inside to check, but we’ve been carefully watching the building’s environs, and there has not been any particular problem,” Hajime Motojuku, a spokesman for Tokyo Electric, said Thursday morning in Japan. Later, a spokesman for Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, Yoshitaka Nagayama, was more equivocal, saying, “Because we have been unable to go to the scene, we cannot confirm whether there is water left or not in the spent fuel pool at Reactor No. 4.” At the same time, officials raised concerns about two other reactors where spent fuel rods were stored, Nos. 5 and 6, saying they had experienced a slight rise in temperature. On Wednesday night, Mr. Jaczko reiterated his earlier statement and added that commission representatives in Tokyo had confirmed that the pool at No. 4 was empty. He said Tokyo Electric and other officials in Japan had confirmed that, and also stressed that high radiation fields were going to make it very difficult to continue having people work at the plant. If the American analysis is accurate and emergency crews at the plant have been unable to keep the spent fuel at that inoperative reactor properly cooled — it needs to remain covered with water at all times — radiation levels could make it difficult not only to fix the problem at No. 4, but to keep servicing any of the other problem reactors at the plant. In the worst case, experts say, workers could be forced to vacate the plant altogether, and the fuel rods in reactors and spent fuel pools would be left to melt down, leading to much larger releases of radioactive materials. While radiation levels at the plant have varied tremendously, Mr. Jaczko said that the peak levels reported there “would be lethal within a fairly short period of time.” He added that another spent fuel pool, at Reactor No. 3, might also be losing water and could soon be in the same condition. On Wednesday, the American Embassy in Tokyo, on advice from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, told Americans to evacuate a radius of “approximately 50 miles” from the Fukushima plant. The advice to Americans in Japan represents a graver assessment of the risk in the immediate vicinity of Daiichi than the warnings made by the Japanese themselves, who have told everyone within 20 kilometers, about 12 miles, to evacuate, and those within about 20 miles to take shelter. While maps of the plume of radiation being given off by the plant show that an elongated cloud will stretch across the Pacific, American officials said it would be so dissipated by the time it reached the West Coast of the United States that it would not pose a health threat. According to a Swedish government researcher, Lars-Erik De Geer, , low concentrations of radioactive particles are heading eastward from the power plant toward North America, but not at levels dangerous for humans, Reuters reported. He was citing data from a network of international monitoring stations. Close to the site, however, Mr. Jaczko said, “We would recommend an evacuation to a much larger radius than has currently been provided by Japan.” That assessment seems bound to embarrass, if not anger, Japanese officials, suggesting they have miscalculated the danger or deliberately played down the risks. Late Wednesday night, the State Department announced what it described as a “voluntary” evacuation of dependents of American government personnel in northeastern Japan, and down to Tokyo and Yokohama. The undersecretary of state for administration, Patrick Kennedy, said that no one would be ordered to leave, but that the government would provide charter flights for dependents who wanted to leave. On Thursday evening, the American Embassy in Tokyo began offering seats aboard chartered flights to Americans wishing to evacuate from Japan. Americans who show up at the two main airports serving Tokyo, Narita and Haneda, would be flown to still unspecified “safe haven locations” from where they would be expected to arrange onward travel on their own, said Karen Kelley, a spokeswoman for the embassy. The American move followed advisory notices from several European countries urging their nationals to move away from Tokyo or leave Japan altogether. It was not immediately clear how many people live within the zone around the plant that American officials believed should be evacuated. But the zone gets far closer to the city of Sendai, with its population of one million, which took the brunt of the earthquake last week. American officials who have been dealing with their Japanese counterparts report that the country’s political and bureaucratic leadership has appeared frozen in place, unwilling to communicate clearly about the problem’s scope and, in some cases, unwilling to accept outside assistance. Two American officials said they believed that the Japanese government itself was not getting a clear picture from Tokyo Electric. United States Air Force officials announced Wednesday that a Global Hawk remotely piloted surveillance plane would be sent on missions over Japan to help the government assess damage from the earthquake and the tsunami. A Pentagon official said the drone was expected to fly over the stricken nuclear plant. General Electric said it will send about 10 gas turbine generators to Japan to help replace lost power generating capacity. Michael Tetuan, a spokesman for the company, said that the operators of the damaged plant had requested generators, but he did not know what they would be used for. The units can produce roughly the same amount of power as the diesel generators at nuclear plants. Though the plant’s reactors shut down automatically when the quake struck on Friday, the subsequent tsunami wiped out the backup electronic pumping and cooling system necessary to keep the fuel rods in the reactors and the storage pools for spent nuclear fuel covered with cool water. The spent fuel pools can be even more dangerous than the active fuel rods, as they are not contained in thick steel containers like the reactor core. As they are exposed to air, the zirconium metal cladding on the rods can catch fire, and a deadly mix of radioactive elements can spew into the atmosphere. The most concern surrounds Cesium-137, which has a half-life of 30 years and can get into food supplies or be inhaled. Mr. Jaczko (pronounced YAZZ-koe) said radiation levels might make it impossible to continue what he called the “backup backup” cooling functions that have so far helped check the fuel melting inside the reactors. Those efforts consist of using fire hoses to dump water on overheated fuel and then letting the radioactive steam vent into the atmosphere. Those emergency measures, carried out by a small squad of workers and firefighters, represent Japan’s central effort to forestall a full-blown fuel meltdown that would lead to much higher releases of radioactive material into the air. Mr. Jaczko’s testimony, the most extended comments by a senior American official on Japan’s nuclear disaster, described what amounts to an agonizing choice for Japanese authorities: keep sending workers into an increasingly contaminated area in a last-ditch effort to cover nuclear fuel with water, or do more to protect the workers but risk letting the pools boil away — and thus risk a broader meltdown. Passage 2： The Creature Connection By NATALIE ANGIER Published: March 14, 2011 Bashert is a gentle, scone-colored, 60-pound poodle, a kind of Ginger Rogers Chia Pet, and she’s clearly convinced there is no human problem so big she can’t lick it. Lost your job, or bedridden for days? Lick. Feeling depressed, incompetent, in an existential malaise? Lick. “She draws the whole family together,” said Pamela Fields, 52, a government specialist in United States-Japan relations. “Even when we hate each other, we all agree that we love the dog.” Her husband, Michael Richards, also 52 and a media lawyer, explained that the name Bashert comes from the Yiddish word for soul mate or destiny. “We didn’t choose her,” he said. “She chose us.” Their 12-year-old daughter, Alana, said, “When I go to camp, I miss the dog a lot more than I miss my parents,” and their 14-year-old son, Aaron, said, “Life was so boring before we got Bashert.” Yet Bashert wasn’t always adored. The Washington Animal Rescue League had retrieved her from a notoriously abusive puppy mill — the pet industry’s equivalent of a factory farm — where she had spent years encaged as a breeder, a nonstop poodle-making machine. By the time of her adoption, the dog was weak, malnourished, diseased, and caninically illiterate. “She didn’t know how to be a dog,” said Ms. Fields. “We had to teach her how to run, to play, even to bark.” Stories like Bashert’s encapsulate the complexity and capriciousness of our longstanding love affair with animals, now our best friends and soul mates, now our laboratory Play-Doh and featured on our dinner plates. We love animals, yet we euthanize five million abandoned cats and dogs each year. We lavish some $48 billion annually on our pets and another $2 billion on animal protection and conservation causes; but that index of affection pales like so much well-cooked pork against the $300 billion we spend on meat and hunting, and the tens of billions devoted to removing or eradicating animals we consider pests. “We’re very particular about which animals we love, and even those we dote on are at our disposal and subject to all sorts of cruelty,” said Alexandra Horowitz, an assistant professor of psychology at Barnard College. “I’m not sure this is a love to brag about.” Dr. Horowitz, the author of a best-selling book about dog cognition, “Inside of a Dog,” belongs to a community of researchers paying ever closer attention to the nature of the human-animal bond in all its fetching dissonance, a pursuit recently accorded the chimeric title of anthrozoology. Scientists see in our love for other animals, and our unslakable curiosity about animal lives, sensations, feelings and drives, keys to the most essential aspects of our humanity. They also view animal love as a textbook case of biology and culture operating in helical collusion. Animals abound in our earliest art, suggesting that a basic fascination with the bestial community may well be innate; the cave paintings at Lascaux, for example, are an ochred zooanalia of horses, stags, bison, felines, a woolly rhinoceros, a bird, a leaping cow — and only one puny man. Yet how our animal urges express themselves is a strongly cultural and contingent affair. Many human groups have incorporated animals into their religious ceremonies, through practices like animal sacrifice or the donning of animal masks. Others have made extensive folkloric and metaphoric use of animals, with the cast of characters tuned to suit local reality and pedagogical need. David Aftandilian, an anthropologist at Texas Christian University, writes in “What Are the Animals to Us?” that the bear is a fixture in the stories of circumpolar cultures “because it walks on two legs and eats many of the same foods that people do,” and through hibernation and re-emergence appears to die and be reborn. “Animals with transformative life cycles,” Dr. Aftandilian writes, “often earn starring roles in the human imagination.” So, too, do crossover creatures like bats — the furred in flight — and cats, animals that are largely nocturnal yet still a part of our daylight lives, and that are marathon sleepers able to keep at least one ear ever vigilantly cocked. Researchers trace the roots of our animal love to our distinctly human capacity to infer the mental states of others, a talent that archaeological evidence suggests emerged anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. Not only did the new cognitive tool enable our ancestors to engage in increasingly sophisticated social exchanges with one another, it also allowed them to anticipate and manipulate the activities of other species: to figure out where a prey animal might be headed, or how to lure a salt-licking reindeer by impregnating a tree stump with the right sort of human waste. Before long, humans were committing wholesale acts of anthropomorphism, attributing human characteristics and motives to anything with a face, a voice, a trajectory — bears, bats, thunderstorms, the moon. James Serpell, president of the International Society for Anthrozoology, has proposed that the willingness to anthropomorphize was critical to the domestication of wild animals and forming bonds with them. We were particularly drawn to those species that seemed responsive to our Dr. Dolittle overtures. Whereas wild animals like wolves will avert their eyes when spotted, dogs and cats readily return our gaze, and with an apparent emotiveness that stimulates the wistful narrative in our head. Dogs add to their soulful stare a distinctive mobility of facial musculature. “Their facial features are flexible, and they can raise their lips into a smile,” Dr. Horowitz said. “The animals we seem to love the most are the ones that make expressions at us.” Dogs were among the first animals to be domesticated, roughly 10,000 years ago, in part for their remarkable responsiveness to such human cues as a pointed finger or a spoken command, and also for their willingness to work like dogs. They proved especially useful as hunting companions and were often buried along with their masters, right next to the spear set. Yet the road to certification as man’s BFF has been long and pitted. Monotheism’s major religious texts have few kind words for dogs, and dogs have often been a menu item. The Aztecs bred a hairless dog just for eating, and according to Anthony L. Podberscek, an anthrozoologist at Cambridge University, street markets in South Korea sell dogs meant for meat right next to dogs meant as pets, with the latter distinguished by the cheery pink color of their cages. As a rule, however, the elevation of an animal to pet status removes it entirely from the human food chain. Other telltale signs of petdom include bestowing a name on the animal and allowing it into the house. Pet ownership patterns have varied tremendously over time and across cultures and can resemble fads or infectious social memes. Harold Herzog, a professor of psychology at Western Carolina University, describes in his book “Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat” how the rapid growth of the middle class in 19th-century France gave rise to the cartoonishly pampered Fifi. “By 1890, luxury and pet ownership went hand in hand,” he writes, and the wardrobe of a fashionable Parisian dog might include “boots, a dressing gown, a bathing suit, underwear and a raincoat.” In this country, pet keeping didn’t get serious until after World War II. “People were moving to the suburbs, ‘Lassie’ was on television, and the common wisdom was pets were good for raising kids,” said Dr. Herzog in an interview. “If you wanted a normal childhood, you had to have a pet.” Pet ownership has climbed steadily ever since, and today about two-thirds of American households include at least one pet. People are passionate about their companion animals: 70 percent of pet owners say they sometimes sleep with their pets; 65 percent buy Christmas gifts for their pets; 23 percent cook special meals for their pets; and 40 percent of married women with pets say they get more emotional support from their pets than from their husbands. People may even be willing to die for their pets. “In studies done on why people refused to evacuate New Orleans during Katrina,” said Dr. Herzog, “a surprising number said they could not leave their pets behind.” Pets are reliable from one year to the next, and they’re not embarrassed or offended by you no matter what you say or how much weight you gain. You can’t talk to your teenage daughter the way you did when she was 3, but your cat will always take your squeal. And should you overinterpret the meaning of your pet’s tail flick or unflinching gaze, well, who’s going to call you on it? “Animals can’t object if we mischaracterize them in our minds,” said Lori Gruen, an associate professor of philosophy at Wesleyan University. “There’s something very comforting about that.” Passage 3： From Single Cells, a Vast Kingdom Arose By CARL ZIMMER Published: March 14, 2011 Lurking in the blood of tropical snails is a single-celled creature called Capsaspora owczarzaki. This tentacled, amoebalike species is so obscure that no one even noticed it until 2002. And yet, in just a few years it has moved from anonymity to the scientific spotlight. It turns out to be one of the closest relatives to animals. As improbable as it might seem, our ancestors a billion years ago probably were a lot like Capsaspora. The origin of animals was one of the most astonishing and important transformations in the history of life. From single-celled ancestors, they evolved into a riot of complexity and diversity. An estimated seven million species of animals live on earth today, ranging from tubeworms at the bottom of the ocean to elephants lumbering across the African savanna. Their bodies can total trillions of cells, which can develop into muscles, bones and hundreds of other kinds of tissues and cell types. The dawn of the animal kingdom about 800 million years ago was also an ecological revolution. Animals devoured the microbial mats that had dominated the oceans for more than two billion years and created their own habitats, like coral reefs. The origin of animals is also one of the more mysterious episodes in the history of life. Changing from a single-celled organism to a trillion-cell collective demands a huge genetic overhaul. The intermediate species that might show how that transition took place have become extinct. “We’re just missing the intervening steps,” said Nicole King, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Berkeley. To understand how animals took on this peculiar way of life, scientists are gathering many lines of evidence. Some use rock hammers to push back the fossil record of animals by tens of millions of years. Others are finding chemical signatures of animals in ancient rocks. Still others are peering into the genomes of animals and their relatives like Capsaspora, to reconstruct the evolutionary tree of animals and their closest relatives. Surprisingly, they’ve found that a lot of the genetic equipment for building an animal was in place long before the animal kingdom even existed. It was only in the past few years that scientists got a firm notion of what the closest relatives to animals actually are. In 2007, the National Human Genome Research Institute started an international project to compare DNA from different species and draw a family tree. The cousins of animals turn out to be a motley crew. Along with the snail-dwelling Capsaspora, our close relatives include choanoflagellates, amoebalike creatures that dwell in fresh water, where they hunt for bacteria. Now scientists are trying to figure out how a single-celled organism like Capsaspora or choanoflagellates became a multicellular animal. Fortunately, they can get some hints from other cases in which microbes made the same transition. Plants and fungi evolved from single-celled ancestors, as well as dozens of other less familiar lineages, from brown algae seaweed to slime molds. Primitive multicellularity may have been fairly easy to evolve. “All that has to happen is that the products of cell division stick together,” said Richard E. Michod of the University of Arizona. Once single-celled organisms shifted permanently to colonies, they could start specializing on different tasks. This division of labor made the colonies more efficient. They could grow faster than less specialized colonies. Eventually, this division of labor could have led many cells in proto-animals to give up their ability to reproduce. Only a small group of cells still made the proteins required to produce offspring. The cells in the rest of the body could then focus on tasks like gathering food and fighting off disease. “It’s not a hurdle,” said Bernd Schierwater of the University of Veterinary Medicine in Hanover, Germany. “It’s a very good way to be very efficient.” Yet multicellularity also threw some new challenges at the ancestors of animals. “When cells die in a group, they can poison each other,” said Dr. Michod. In animals, cells die in an orderly fashion, so that they release relatively few poisons. Instead, the dying cells can be recycled by their living brethren. Another danger posed by multicellularity is the ability for a single cell to grow at the expense of others. Today that danger still looms large: cancer is the result of some cells refusing to play by the same rules as the other cells in our body. Even simple multicellular organisms have evolved defenses to these cheaters. A group of green algae called volvox have evolved a limit to the number of times any cell can divide. “That helps reduce the potential for cells to become renegades,” said Dr. Michod. To figure out the solutions that animals evolved, researchers are now sequencing the genomes of their single-celled relatives. They’re discovering a wealth of genes that were once thought to exist only in animals. Iñaki Ruiz-Trillo of the University of Barcelona and his colleagues searched Capsaspora’s genome for an important group of genes that encode proteins called transcription factors. Transcription factors switch other genes on and off, and some of them are vital for turning a fertilized egg into a complex animal body. In the current issue of Molecular Biology and Evolution, Dr. Ruiz-Trillo and his colleagues report that Capsaspora shares a number of transcription factors that were once thought to be unique to animals. For example, they found a gene in Capsaspora that’s nearly identical to the animal gene brachyury. In humans and many other animal species, brachyury is essential for embryos to develop, marking a layer of cells that will become the skeleton and muscles. Passage 4: No Face, but Plants Like Life Too By CAROL KAESUK YOON Published: March 14, 2011 Several years ago, after having to drive for too long behind a truck full of stinking, squealing pigs being delivered for slaughter, I gave up eating meat. I’d been harboring a growing distaste for the ugliness that can be industrial agriculture, but the real issue was a long-suppressed sympathy for its — or really, my — victims. Even screaming, reeking pigs, or maybe especially screaming, reeking pigs, can evoke stark pity as they tumble along in a truck to their deaths. If you think about it, and it’s much simpler not to, it can be hard to justify other beings suffering pain, fear and death so that we can enjoy their flesh. In particular, given our many connections to animals, not least of all the fact that we are ourselves animals, it can give a person pause to realize that our most frequent contact with these kin might just be the devouring of them. My entry into what seemed the moral high ground, though, was surprisingly unpleasant. I felt embattled not only by a bizarrely intense lust for chicken but nightmares in which I would be eating a gorgeous, rare steak — I could distinctly taste the savory drippings — from which I awoke in a panic, until I realized that I had been carnivorous only in my imagination. Temptations and trials were everywhere. The most surprising turned out to be the realization that I couldn’t actually explain to myself or anyone else why killing an animal was any worse than killing the many plants I was now eating. Surely, I’d thought, science can defend the obvious, that slaughterhouse carnage is wrong in a way that harvesting a field of lettuces or, say, mowing the lawn is not. But instead, it began to seem that formulating a truly rational rationale for not eating animals, at least while consuming all sorts of other organisms, was difficult, maybe even impossible. Before you hit “send” on your hate mail, let me say this. Different people have different reasons for the choices they make about what to kill or have killed for them to eat. Perhaps there isn’t any choice more personal or less subject to rationality or the judgment of others. It’s just that as far as I was concerned, if eating a tofu dog was as much a crime against life as eating bratwurst, then pass the bratwurst, please. So what really are the differences between animals and plants? There are plenty. The cells of plants, and not animals, for example, harbor chloroplasts, tiny green organelles that can turn the energy of light into sugar. Almost none of these differences, however, seem to matter to any of us trying to figure out what to eat. The differences that do seem to matter are things like the fact that plants don’t have nerves or brains. They cannot, we therefore conclude, feel pain. In other words, the differences that matter are those that prove that plants do not suffer as we do. Here the lack of a face on plants becomes important, too, faces being requisite to humans as proof not only that one is dealing with an actual individual being, but that it is an individual capable of suffering. Animals, on the other hand — and not just close evolutionary relations like chimps and gorillas, but species further afield, mammals like cows and pigs — can experience what pretty much anyone would agree is pain and suffering. If attacked, these animals will look agonized, scream, struggle and run as fast as they can. Obviously, if we don’t kill any of these animals to eat them, all that suffering is avoided. Meanwhile, whether you pluck a leaf or slice a trunk, a plant neither grimaces nor cries out. Plants don’t seem to mind being killed, at least as far as we can see. But that may be exactly the difficulty. Unlike a lowing, running cow, a plant’s reactions to attack are much harder for us to detect. But just like a chicken running around without its head, the body of a corn plant torn from the soil or sliced into pieces struggles to save itself, just as vigorously and just as uselessly, if much less obviously to the human ear and eye. When a plant is wounded, its body immediately kicks into protection mode. It releases a bouquet of volatile chemicals, which in some cases have been shown to induce neighboring plants to pre-emptively step up their own chemical defenses and in other cases to lure in predators of the beasts that may be causing the damage to the plants. Inside the plant, repair systems are engaged and defenses are mounted, the molecular details of which scientists are still working out, but which involve signaling molecules coursing through the body to rally the cellular troops, even the enlisting of the genome itself, which begins churning out defense-related proteins. Plants don’t just react to attacks, though. They stand forever at the ready. Witness the endless thorns, stinging hairs and deadly poisons with which they are armed. If all this effort doesn’t look like an organism trying to survive, then I’m not sure what would. Plants are not the inert pantries of sustenance we might wish them to be. If a plant’s myriad efforts to keep from being eaten aren’t enough to stop you from heedlessly laying into that quinoa salad, then maybe knowing that plants can do any number of things that we typically think of as animal-like would. They move, for one thing, carrying out activities that could only be called behaving, if at a pace visible only via time-lapse photography. Not too long ago, scientists even reported evidence that plants could detect and grow differently depending on whether they were in the presence of close relatives, a level of behavioral sophistication most animals have not yet been found to show. To make matters more confusing, animals are not always the deep wells of sensitivity that we might imagine. Sponges are animals, but like plants they lack nerves or a brain. Jellyfish, meanwhile, which can be really tasty when cut into julienne and pickled, have no brains, only a simple net of nerves, arguably a less sophisticated setup than the signaling systems coordinating the lives of many plants. How do we decide how much sensitivity and what sort matters? For those hoping to escape these quandaries with an all-mushroom diet, forget it. In nearly every way that you might choose to compare, fungi are likely to be more similar to us than are plants, as fungi are our closer evolutionary relations. If you think about it, though, why would we expect any organism to lie down and die for our dinner? Organisms have evolved to do everything in their power to avoid being extinguished. How long would any lineage be likely to last if its members effectively didn’t care if you killed them? Maybe the real problem with the argument that it’s O.K. to kill plants because they don’t feel exactly as we do, though, is that it’s the same argument used to justify what we now view as unforgivable wrongs. Slavery and genocide have been justified by the assertion that some kinds of people do not feel pain, do not feel love — are not truly human — in the same way as others. The same thinking has led to other practices less drastic but still appalling. For example, physicians once withheld anesthetics from infants during surgery because it was believed that these not-quite-yet-humans did not feel pain (smiles were gas, remember). Yet even as we shake our heads over the past, we continue to fight about where to draw the line around our tribe of those deemed truly human. We argue over whether those who love others of the same gender deserve full human rights. We ask the same about fetal humans. The dinner menu pushes us further still. Do other species of animal deserve our consideration? Do plants? Fungi? Microbes? Maybe this seems all nonsense to you. Perhaps you’re having trouble equating a radish to a lamb to a person whose politics you hate to your beloved firstborn. It’s not surprising. It is reliably difficult for us to accept new members into our tribe, the more so the less like us they seem. It can be infinitely inconvenient to take the part of every individual we come across, to share with it that most precious of commodities: compassion. What should we have for dinner tonight? Who knows? Human beings survive by eating other living things. I really want not only to eat, but to survive. Yet a nakedly logical way to judge the value of one kind of organism over another — the rightness of a plant’s death versus an animal’s — seems, to me, out of reach. My efforts to forgo meat didn’t last more than a couple of years. Still, I wonder what our great-grandchildren will think of us. Will we have trouble explaining to them why we killed animals or perhaps even plants for food? And if so, what on Earth will we be eating? Passage 5: Emotional Power Broker of the Modern Family By BENEDICT CAREY Published: March 14, 2011 First, he tore up his dog toys. Then shredded the furniture, clothes, schoolbooks — and, finally, any semblance of family unity. James, a chocolate-brown pointer mix, turned from adorable pet to problem child in a matter of weeks. “The big bone of contention was that my mom and my sister thought that he was too smart to be treated like a dog; they thought he was a person and should be treated as such — well, spoiled,” said Danielle, a Florida woman who asked that her last name not be published to avoid more family pet strife. “The dog remains to this day, 10 years later, a source of contention and anger.” Psychologists long ago confirmed what most pet owners feel in their bones: that for some people bonds with animals are every bit as strong as those with other humans. And less complicated, for sure; a dog’s devotion is without detectable irony, a lap cat’s purring without artifice (if not disapproval). Yet the nature of individual human-pet relationships varies widely, and only now are scientists beginning to characterize those differences, and their impact on the family. Pets alter not only a family’s routines, after all, but also its hierarchy, its social rhythm, its web of relationships. Several new lines of research help explain why this overall effect can be so comforting in some families, and a source of tension in others. The answers have very little to do with the pet. “The word ‘pet’ does not really capture what these animals mean in a family, first of all,” said Froma Walsh, a psychologist at the University of Chicago and co-director of the Chicago Center for Family Health. The prevalent term among researchers is now “companion animal,” she said, which is closer to the childlike role they so often play. “And in the way that children get caught up in the family system as peacekeepers, as go-betweens, as sources of disagreement, the same happens with pets.” People cast these roles in part based on the sensations and memories associated with their first Princess or Scooter, psychologists say — echoing Freud’s idea of transference, in which early relationships provide a template for later ones. In many families, this means that Scruffy is the universal peacemaker, the fulcrum of shared affection. In a family interview reviewed by Dr. Walsh in a recent paper, one mother said that the best way to end an argument between siblings was to bark, “Stop fighting, you’re upsetting Barkley!” “This is always more effective than saying, ‘Stop hitting your brother,’ ” the mother said. (Barkley made no comment.) Animals often sense these expectations and act on them. In a video recording of another family discussed in the paper, the cat jumps on a woman’s lap when it senses an impending argument with her husband. “And it works,” Dr. Walsh said. “It reduces tension in both; you can see it happening.” “She’s my first child,” said Adrienne Woods, a cellist in Los Angeles, of Bella, the Husky puppy that she and her fiancé just got. “The biggest upside is this sense of inner peace. I feel like a grandma, like I have a companion I’ve been wanting for 30 years.” Yet pets can also raise tension, as millions of couples learn the hard way. The Animal Planet show “It’s Me or the Dog” is built on such cases. And Cesar Millan, a dog behavior specialist, has become a celebrity by helping people gain control over unruly hounds, bringing order into households with uncertain lines of authority. Perhaps more often, pets become a psychological wedge not from lack of boundaries but because family members have diverging views of what a pet should be. And those views are shaped by cultural inheritance, more so than people may realize. In a study of dog ownership, Elizabeth Terrien, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, conducted 90 in-depth interviews with families in Los Angeles, including Ms. Woods. One clear trend that has emerged is that people from rural backgrounds tend to see their dogs as guardians to be kept outside, whereas middle-class couples typically treat their hounds as children, often having them sleep in the master bedroom, or a special bed. When asked to describe their pets without using the word “dog,” people in more affluent neighborhoods “came up with things like child, companion, little friend, teenage son, brother, or partner in crime,” Dr. Terrien said. In neighborhoods with a larger Latino immigrant population, owners were more likely to say “protector,” or even “toy for the children,” she found. “In those neighborhoods you’ll sometimes see kids yanking around a dog on the leash, pushing and playing, the sort of behavior that some middle-class owners would think of as abuse,” she said. Such differences often emerge only after a family has adopted a pet, and they can exacerbate the more mundane disagreements about pet care, like how much to spend on vet bills, how often to walk the dog, how the animal should interact with young children. The fallout from such conflicts isn’t hard to find: Most everyone knows of couples who have quarreled over pets, or even divorced, because her spaniel nipped at his Rottweiler. And there are countless single people out there all but married to some hairy Frida or Diego — banishing any potential partner who doesn’t fall quickly, and equally, in love. The reason these feelings run so deep is that they are ideologies, as well as cultural and psychological dispositions. In the summer of 2007, David Blouin, a sociologist at Indiana University, South Bend, conducted extensive interviews with 35 dog owners around the state, chosen to represent a diverse mix of city, country and suburban dwellers. He found that, as a rule, people fall into one of three broad categories of beliefs concerning pets. Members of one group, which he labels “dominionists,” see pets as an appendage to the family, a useful helper ranking below humans that is beloved but, ultimately, replaceable. Many people from rural areas — like the immigrants Dr. Terrien interviewed — qualified. Another group of owners, labeled by Dr. Blouin as “humanists,” are the type who cherish their dog as a favored child or primary companion, to be pampered, allowed into bed, and mourned like a dying child at the end. These include the people who cook special meals for a pet, take it to exercise classes, to therapy — or leave it stock options in their will. The third, called “protectionists,” strive to be the animal’s advocate. These owners have strong views about animal welfare, but their views on how a pet should be treated — whether it sleeps inside or outside, when it should be put down — vary depending on what they think is “best” for the animal. Its members include people who will “save” a dog tied to tree outside a store, usually delivering it home with a lecture about how to care for an animal. “These are ideologies, and so protectionists are very critical of humanists, who are very critical of dominionists, and so on,” Dr. Blouin said. “You can see where this can create problems if people in a family have different orientations. Every little decision about the pet is loaded.” Up until, and including, the end: Couples may not only disagree over when to put an animal down but also have vastly different emotional reactions to the loss. “For someone who’s been treating the pet like a child, it can feel like the loss of a child — and of course children are not supposed to die before their parents,” Dr. Terrien said. It’s an end-of-life crisis, which often begins a lengthy period of grieving. Whereas for the partner who sees the pet differently, the death may bring relief. None of which is to say that a resourceful pet — using the combined power of cuteness, doleful stares and episodes of getting stuck in boxes or eating crayons — cannot bridge such opposing religions. But family therapists say that, usually, four-legged diplomats need some help from the two-legged kind to succeed. “Families either figure it out and manage these differences,” Dr. Terrien said, “or they give up the pet — which happens far more often than people think.” Passage 6: Drip-feeding Ecology raids the techniques of chemistry Mar 10th 2011 | from the print edition BIOLOGISTS are sometimes accused of physics envy—and there is truth in this accusation. The essential fuzziness of biological systems can never be captured by the precise, mathematically based experiments of something like the Large Hadron Collider. Between physics and biology on the spectrum of fuzziness, though, lies chemistry. And a group of researchers led by Carolyn Nersesian of the University of Sydney has just borrowed one of chemistry’s most elegant techniques, titration, to answer a pressing ecological question: how do animals choose where to feed? Titration, to remind those who dozed through their chemistry lessons, is a way of working out the concentration of a substance in a solution. A reagent of known concentration is dripped (or titrated, to use the term of art) into the unknown solution in the presence of an appropriate indicator molecule (for example litmus, in the case of a reaction between an acid and an alkali). When the tipping point comes, and all of the unknown reagent has reacted, the solution changes colour. The unknown concentration can then be calculated from the amount of known reagent used. In Dr Nersesian’s titration the litmus was a species called the brushtail possum. The two reagents were predators and poisons. In the wild, possums feed mainly on eucalyptus trees. Feeding in trees this way also keeps them safe from ground-based predators, such as foxes. They frequently have to shift from tree to tree in search of non-poisonous leaves, though, because a tree that is being browsed starts manufacturing toxins. Dr Nersesian reasoned that there is probably a measurable point at which a plant becomes so toxic that possums prefer to take their chances with the predators on the ground—and she realised this was a perfect opportunity to do an ecological titration. As she reports in the Journal of Animal Ecology, she attempted to imitate the distinction between trees and ground by giving eight possums the opportunity to feed in either of two enclosures. In one, cover was created with eucalyptus branches and light levels were kept low, mimicking an arboreal habitat. Here, the food was sometimes spiked with cineole—a poison often found in eucalyptus leaves. In the other enclosure, the food was always untarnished. However, no cover was provided and fox scent, in the form of faeces and urine, was scattered liberally around, mimicking conditions on the ground. To start with, when the level of cineole was low, possums preferred the first enclosure. But as the drip of the titration went up, from 0% to 1% to 2% to 5% and ultimately to 10% of the food being cineole, their behaviour changed. It was not quite the sudden shift from litmus red to blue of an acid being neutralised by an alkali, but it was not far off. When the food was toxin-free, the possums spent an average of 40 minutes of every hour eating safely under treelike cover and only 20 minutes in the risky, ground-like enclosure, and that scarcely changed for 1% and 2% cineole. The switch began at 5%, and by the time the cineole level had reached 10% the ratio of time the animals spent in the two enclosures had reversed itself—presumably reflecting, though this remains to be tested, the point at which they change trees in the wild. Though foxes are of recent introduction in Australia (having been brought for sport by British settlers), many marsupial predators, now extinct, were present before the arrival of man in both his Aboriginal and his European forms, so the ecological system of plants, herbivores and carnivores in the eucalyptus forests would probably not have been that different in the evolutionary past. A neat illustration, then, of co-evolution between three different parts of an ecosystem—and of the value, even in biology, of precise measurement. Passage 7： Medical imaging If the RatCAP fits... Mar 14th 2011, 18:15 by The Economist online ONE of the biggest advances in medical imaging made in recent decades is positron emission tomography (PET). This technique looks beyond mere anatomy and produces a three-dimensional picture of the body’s biochemical processes. It has become particularly popular in neuroscience. Using PET scanners to study what is going on in the brains of animals other than humans, though, has proved difficult. Whereas people can be told to relax as they are passed through a large doughnut-shaped scanner, animals have to be immobilised—and this is typically done by administering a general anaesthetic. The problem is that anaesthesia disrupts brain function, so researchers may not see a true picture. Now a PET scanner has been developed that is small and light enough to be worn on the head of a laboratory rat, allowing its brain to be studied as it moves around. The device, created by Paul Vaska of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, and his colleagues, and described in Nature Methods, is called the RatCAP (Rat Conscious Animal PET). Although some smallish PET scanners have been produced in the past, nothing as diminutive as the RatCAP has been made before. The doughnut has an outer diameter of 80mm and an inner one of 38mm. That is possible because the device uses miniaturised electronics, including tiny gamma-ray detectors, developed especially for it. Though it weighs 250 grams, which would be too heavy for a rat to support unaided, part of that weight is carried by a mechanism made of springs and bearings which is suspended from the roof of the experimental chamber and attached to the RatCAP by cables. Within the confines of this chamber, then, the rat can move freely around. As with bigger PET scanners, the RatCAP works in conjunction with radioactive biochemicals called radiotracers that are injected into the body. Each molecule of a PET radiotracer includes an atom of a radioactive isotope such as fluorine-18 or oxygen-15 that decays to release a positron, the antimatter equivalent of an electron. When the isotope in the tracer decays, the emitted positron quickly encounters an electron and the two annihilate each other in a burst of gamma rays. These are picked up by the gamma-ray detectors, allowing the location and concentration of the tracer to be identified and displayed as a three-dimensional image—for different types of radiotracer accumulate in different parts of the body. To test the system, Dr Vaska and his colleagues used a radiotracer that binds to receptors for dopamine, a brain chemical involved in movement, reward and memory.  In the case of Dr Vaska’s dopamine analogue, a stronger signal is usually interpreted as meaning that less natural dopamine is present in that part of the brain (because the tracer binds to unoccupied receptors, of which fewer are available when a lot of dopamine is around). What the researchers found, though, surprised them. They expected active animals to have high dopamine levels. They discovered the inverse: the more active an animal is, the lower its level of dopamine, as indicated by the tracer signals.  That was a counterintuitive result, according to Dr Vaska’s colleague Daniela Schulz, who led the dopamine study, and more work will be needed to explain it. Nevertheless, the RatCAP project has demonstrated that is possible to use PET to measure neural function and behaviour in a conscious, freely moving animal. And that could turn up many new insights into how the brain works. Passage 8： The Difference Engine: Send in the clones Mar 11th 2011, 10:15 by N.V. | LOS ANGELES SINCE the second iteration of Apple’s svelte iPad tablet computer was unveiled to the public a little over a week ago, the blogosphere has been abuzz with predictions about the demise of the PC. With more than 100 tablet devices from over 60 different manufacturers now scrambling for a piece of the market that the original iPad staked out a year ago, pundits have been writing epitaphs for makers of laptops and other personal computers. No question that Apple—having sold an estimated 17m iPads over the past 12 months—has put a serious dent in laptop sales, its own as much as any other maker’s. Following the iPad 2’s announcement on March 2nd (it goes on sale today, March 11th), Gartner, a technology research company based in Stamford, Connecticut, promptly slashed its forecast for this year’s growth in worldwide laptop sales from 25% to less than 15%. Analysts expect some 50m tablet computers of various shapes and sizes will be shipped in 2011. But your correspondent thinks talk of a “post-PC era” is rubbish. The phrase, uttered most famously by an ailing Steve Jobs during his brief appearance at the launch of the iPad 2, is typical of the caustic hyperbole computerdom has come to expect from Apple’s iconoclastic leader. The surge in tablet sales signifies not the end of an era, but the emergence of yet another form-factor for personal computing—as happens every decade or so. First there were just desktop computers. Then luggable laptops were added, followed by slimmer notebooks and, more recently, lightweight netbooks joined the fray. Along the way, various attempts have been made to get users to embrace tablet and palmtop computers as well. Overall, however, the PC has continued to follow its evolutionary trajectory from a 50lb (23kg) lump that dominated the desktop to a 1.5lb device that can be cradled in one arm or curled up with in bed. Why now, when all previous attempts to introduce tablet or palmtop computers have fallen flat on their touch-screen faces? Your correspondent has toted both at one time or another, and admits they were hobbled by their clunky touch-screens, flaky operating systems and inability to cram enough computational horsepower within their diminutive form-factors while maintaining a useful enough battery life. Since then, however, smartphones—the natural inheritors of the palmtop mantle—have licked all those problems and more. Take the latest generation of low-power gigahertz processors based on designs licensed from ARM Holdings of Cambridge, Britain, and used in mobile phones everywhere—and now in iPads and over half of all the other tablet computers on the market or about to be launched. The ARM processor is an advanced “reduced instruction-set computer” (RISC) that can trace its origins back to the MOS 6502 chip used by Acorn, a British computer maker, back in the early 1980s. ARM (short for Advanced RISC Machines) was spun out of Acorn in 1990, to create RISC processors that consumed little power for Apple and other customers. To date, over 15 billion ARM-based processors have been shipped by the company’s 200 or so licensees. ARM’s attraction is that it owes no allegiance whatsoever to Intel’s x86 architecture. As such, ARM processors incur no royalty fees to Intel. Nor do they need to be backwardly compatible with the x86 instruction set used by Intel processors and workalike chips from AMD and others. That is the key to the design’s low power consumption. Because modern x86 processors use far more efficient instruction sets than their ancestors, Intel chips nowadays include additional circuitry to translate their new instructions so that they can interpret legacy software. This extra circuitry means more transistors generating yet more heat. Not only do the chips themselves gobble power as a result, but they also need special cooling fans to keep their temperatures within their operating range, consuming yet more energy in the process. The result is that portable devices using them either require bigger batteries or suffer from a shorter life between charges. By comparison, ARM processors are smaller and run at temperatures low enough not to need forced cooling. That makes them ideal for the cramped innards of smartphones and other handheld gizmos. Devices that use them get longer battery life. The processor in the iPad 2 has a pair of ARM cores working in tandem that deliver 10 hours of continuous use between charges. According to management consultants PRTM, three out of five tablets about to hit the market will use similar ARM-based processors. But processors are not the only thing tablet computers have borrowed freely from smartphones. Thanks to innovations made by suppliers, touch-screens capable of displaying high-definition video have come down in price dramatically. Nowadays, ten-inch displays (like those used in the iPad and Motorola’s Xoom) cost around $65 apiece; seven-inch versions can be had for less than $50. In a similar vein, practically all tablet computers announced so far use operating systems developed originally for smartphones. The iPad's is based on iOS, the iPhone’s operating system. Meanwhile, more than half of the other tablets being rushed to market have adopted the latest version (Honeycomb) of Google’s free Android operating system. A quarter have licensed the Windows Phone 7 operating system from Microsoft. As for applications, the vast majority of tablet computers run software likewise written originally for smartphones. Apple's suppliers have already adapted some 60,000 programs (out of 350,000 iPhone programs offered by its App Store) for the iPad’s much larger screen. After a slow start, Android apps for tablet-sized screens are now multiplying fast. All this means that, compared with laptops, the price of entry to the tablet market is extraordinary low. As a consequence, nimble newcomers could well gobble up the business before established brands can get their acts together. The new entrants are going to have a significant impact on how established brands like Asus, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Fujitsu, Toshiba and Samsung have traditionally marked up their digital goods—with retail prices typically set at three times the cost of manufacture. Needing next to no research and development, and with all the software free, back-street manufacturers around the globe will be able to enter the tablet business with only modest up-front costs. So, expect a bloodbath in pricing as dozens of low-cost Chinese assemblers crank out knockoffs galore for western retailers. Your correspondent believes the tablet computer is on the verge of becoming the fastest product in the history of consumer electronics to be commoditised. It took little more than a year for e-readers to go from being premium products costing well over $300 to selling for $100 or less. Sharing many of the same components, but with vastly more suppliers bidding for a piece of the action, tablets will suffer even greater price attrition. Despite its special charms and famously loyal customers, even Apple will feel the pinch. At least, the iPad maker has room to accommodate lower prices. A loaded iPad selling for $729 costs roughly $245 to produce, according to market researcher iSuppli. The same goes for Motorola's $799 Xoom, which is reckoned to cost the maker $278. But both contain high-end features that mainstream users will happily forgo in favour of rock-bottom pricing. As such, they are destined to become niche products for a minority willing to pay top dollar for bragging rights and other cravings. Last weekend, your correspondent saw a harbinger of things to come—a perfectly competent Android tablet with a seven-inch screen selling at a local electronics chain for $139. He was almost tempted to buy one. The only thing preventing him from making an impulse purchase was the certainty that many more models would shortly be available at even lower prices. His silent prayer to the Chinese: send in the iPad clones! Passage 9： When the earth wobbled Mar 11th 2011, 14:32 by K.N.C. and H.T. | TOKYO BENEATH the Japanese archipelago lies a mythical catfish, brutish and capricious. For most of the time, its head is pinned down by a granite keystone, held in place by the Shinto god of the earth. But occasionally, the god drops his guard. Then the fish thrashes, convulsing the earth. In mid-afternoon on March 11th a massive earthquake erupted, 24 kilometres (15 miles) down, off the north-east coast of Japan’s main island. A tsunami followed. Cars, ships and buildings were swept away. People in Tokyo 370 kilometres away poured out of buildings as high-rises swayed. An anxious roar went up in the shopping district of Omote-Sando as the first of the aftershocks struck. After wreaking damage along low-lying parts of the coast, the tsunami rolled across the Pacific, testing the Pacific-wide early-warning system set up after the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004. Shares and the yen both fell. This 8.9-magnitude quake has been described as the biggest on record in tremor-prone Japan. NHK, the national broadcaster, has uncertain reports on the number of dead and missing, but the combined totals are believed to be in the hundreds. The broadcaster says whole villages in parts of Japan's north-eastern Pacific coast were swept away by a tsunami reaching seven metres high. Images showed waves churning through hamlets in the flat farming communities near the sea, carrying ships, buses and houses far inland. In Ishinomaki, Miyagi prefecture, a ship with 100 people abroad was washed away. Their whereabouts are unknown. One giant wave washed through an airport in Sendai, the capital of Miyagi, leaving 1,300 people stranded on upper floors within. Japanese are drilled from childhood to deal with quakes. Coping with the chaos of the real thing is another matter. Bullet-train services were immediately halted. A huge fire blazed at an oil refinery on Tokyo’s outskirts and at least 50 fires have been reported elsewhere, including at factories belonging to Nissan and Sumitomo Metal. In Japan the fires caused by earthquakes, rather than the quakes themselves, are usually the main killers. But modern industries bring other earthquake-related concerns. At about 10pm local time, Yukio Edano, the chief cabinet secretary, issued a nuclear emergency warning for the Fukushima First Nuclear Power Plant in Fukushima prefecture. He said people within a 3km radius were being ordered to evacuate, while those living between 3km and 10km away were instructed to stay in their houses. He denied, though, that there was radioactive leakage. The opposition Liberal Democratic Party, which has been doing its level best in recent weeks to topple the government of Naoto Kan, the prime minister, now says it will co-operate fully, including supporting special spending measures. Tsunami warnings continue to be broadcast repeatedly on the television. Across Japan, millions braced for a miserable night of uncertainty. Electricity firms reported that in northern Japan, many homes were without power or phone lines; in the same area, snow is falling, and TV images showed people in evacuation shelters huddling in blankets. Tokyo got off relatively lightly, though most public transport ground to a halt, forcing commuters to walk often huge distances home. Shelves in the capital’s convenience stores were almost bare, with long lines of people attempting to buy snacks and drinks. But it is worth bearing in mind that this is not the huge earthquake that seismologists say is long overdue in Tokyo. That is expected to ripple up from Shizuoka in the south. Tokyo sits above two faultlines and near another. Just south-west of the city, the Philippine Sea plate dives down under the Eurasian continental plate; right under the city, the Pacific plate dives under that. Early estimates of damage from this earthquake are necessarily crude. The 6.8-magnitude Hanshin earthquake that struck Kobe in 1995 killed 6,400. The cost was put at Y10 trillion ($100 billion). Industrial production dipped only briefly. The stockmarket fell by 8% in the week following the quake, but rose later. Tohoku, the north-east region of Honshu island where today's quake struck hardest, accounts for 8% of the country’s GDP. The area is less densely populated than around Kobe, and less industrial. The quake, though very much larger, may prove less damaging, though horrific enough for all that. Passage 10: Carbon-fibre composites A high-fibre diet Mar 7th 2011, 16:16 by The Economist online THE new McLaren sports car is a remarkable vehicle. It is the result of a decision by what had previously been a specialist Formula 1 team to compete with the likes of Ferrari off the track as well as on it. The MP4-12C, as the new car is known, is as rapid (zero to 100kph in 3.3 seconds) as it is expensive ($275,000). But it also has extraordinary handling characteristics, especially round tight corners. These are the result of several novel features, including an active-suspension system that, instead of employing mechanical anti-roll bars, uses sensors to monitor the movement of the body and wheels, and stiffens the ride when needed using hydraulic dampers. Yet the car’s agility is also a consequence of its lightness—and that, in turn, is the result of an innovative way of using carbon-fibre composites.  Carbon fibre and McLaren go back a long way. Thirty years ago, the firm was the first to introduce a Formula 1 car that had a carbon monocoque (a body structure that also works as a chassis). John Watson used the result to win the 1981 British Grand Prix at Silverstone. Later that year he also illustrated, in dramatic fashion, its ability to withstand crashes when he walked unharmed from a spectacular pile-up at Monza. Within a few years every Formula 1 team was racing with carbon-based cars. But even today it can take 3,000 man-hours to make a carbon monocoque for an F1 car.  The reason is that it is a bespoke process. Each monocoque is made by impregnating carbon-fibre cloth with a thermosetting plastic such as expoxy resin, pressing the cloth into shape in a mould and then cooking the whole thing, mould and all, in an autoclave. The cloth, in turn, is made by weaving yarn that has itself been spun from fibres of pure carbon that are made by baking strands of a polymer such as polyacrylonitrile.  The reason for this rigmarol is that carbon-fibre body parts are stronger than steel but weigh half as much. The strength comes from the powerful chemical bonds that form between carbon atoms (think diamond). For high-performance parts needed in small numbers, such as aircraft wings and Formula 1 racing cars, the price of such lightness has been worth paying. Mass production, however, has proved elusive. That looks as if it is changing. It takes just four hours to make the MonoCell (see right), as McLaren calls the carbon-fibre chassis it uses in the MP4-12C. That is possible because of a production process it has pioneered jointly with Carbo Tech, an Austrian firm which specialises in composites.  The new process differs from the old in two important ways. First, the carbon cloth goes into the mould dry, rather than pre-impregnated with resin. Layers of cloth are placed into a large steel tool, which provides the shape to be moulded. The tool presses the sheets together and only then injects epoxy resin into them under pressure. That is a lot less messy than handling sticky cloth. Moreover, the tool then applies the curing heat directly, rather than using an autoclave. Once hardened, the MonoCell is transferred to another device, where it is machined to provide the fixing points for the car’s other components. The process is precise, consistent and some of it is automated.  The second difference, which does not speed the process up but does make for a better product, is the use of what McLaren calls unidirectional cloth. Actually, this is not really cloth at all, since it is not woven. Instead, it is a layer of fibres all pointing in the same direction. That eliminates the strains found in woven cloth at every point where two fibres cross. It also means, according to Claudio Santoni, who is in charge of body structures at the firm, that stronger and more precise structures can be built up, layer by layer, with the exact alignment of each layer being appropriate to the strains and stresses that the body-part in question is likely to experience.  Mr Santoni reckons McLaren could make around 5,000 cars a year this way—a number that, for supercars, almost constitutes mass production. Moreover, given time, he thinks the process could be used for truly mass-produced vehicles, too. It should be possible to automate the laying of the carbon sheets. It may also be possible to use thermoplastics (which melt when heated), instead of thermosetting plastics (which do not). Not only are these easier to handle, they are also easier to recycle—which would be a consideration in a vehicle that was truly being mass produced. McLaren is not alone in working on resin-transfer and other ways of making carbon-composite components in large quantities. BMW is planning to use carbon in a new range of electric cars for city use, and Volkswagen has just bought a stake in BMW’s partner, SGL, a German carbon-specialist. The steel age, then, may be almost over. All hail King Carbon. 35