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CaliforniaCondor's Shocking Recovery

      California condors are North America's largest birds, with wing-length of up to 3 meters. In the 1980s, electrical lines and lead poisoning(铅中毒) nearly drove them to dying out. Now, electric shock training and medical treatment are helping to rescue these big birds.

      In the late 1980s, the last few condors were taken from the wild, and there are now more than 150 flying over California and nearby Arizona, Utah and Baja in Mexico.

Electrical lines have been killing them off. “As they go in to rest for the night, they just don't see the power lines,” says Bruce Rideout of San Diego Zoo. Their wings can bridge the gap between lines, resulting in electrocution(电死) if they touch two lines at once.

So scientists have come up with a shocking idea. Tall poles, placed in large training areas, teach the birds to stay clear of electrical lines by giving them a painful but undeadly electric shock. Before the training was introduced, 66% of set-freed condors died of electrocution. This has now dropped to 18%.

Lead poisonous has proved more difficult to deal with. When condors eat dead bodies of other animals containing lead, they absorb large quantities of lead. This affects their nervous systems and ability to produce baby birds, and can lead to kidney(肾) failures and death. So condors with high levels of lead are sent to Los Angeles Zoo, where they are treated with calcium EDTA, a chemical that removes lead from the blood over several days. This work is starting to pay off. The annual death rate for adult condors has dropped from 38% in 2000 to 5.4% in 2011.

Rideout's team thinks that the California condors' average survival time in the wild is now just under eight years. “Although these measures are not effective forever, they are vital for now,” he says. “They are truly good birds that are worth every effort we put into recovering them.”

    Michael and I did not know when the waiter put the plates on our table. At the time we were sitting in a small restaurant, hidden from the busy Third Street, in New York City. Even the smell of fresh serving blintze did not interfered our conversation. In fact, we let the blintze soaked in the sour cream. We just enjoy the conversation too much that we forgot to eat. Our conversation was so delightful though we did not speak about important things. We laughed and spoke about the film which we have just watched.

    While our fun conversation continued, my eyes went across the room and stop on the corner. A couple of old folks sat in there. The woman wearing the flower dress with faded color, the same with the pillow where she laid her pallid handbag. The man's top head shined just like the boiled egg which he ate very slowly. The woman chewed her oatmeal(燕麦片) very slowly too, seemed with very much effort.

    But what made my mind thought about them was the silence around them. Michael and I paid our food and went on. When we passed the corner where the couple sat, my wallet fell. When I stopped to get it, I saw under the table, they were tenderly holding each other's hand. They were eating in silence while holding each other's hand! I was very touched to see the simple yet the very meaningful action reflecting the close relationship of the couple.

    Their silence was the pleasant and relaxing one, it was the expression of the tender love and it did not always need the words to express it. They might spend the hours holding each other's hand like this in the morning.

    When I and Michael went out of the restaurant, I thought, maybe it was nothing bad at all if some day we have something like that. Maybe, it will become the expression of the tender and complete love.

    Self-driving vehicles have been proposed as a solution for the rapidly increasing number of fatal traffic accidents, which now cause 1.3 million deaths each year.

    While we have made great progress in advancing self-driving technology, we have yet to explore how autonomous vehicles will be programmed to deal with situations that endanger human life, according to a new study published in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.

    To understand how self-driving cars might make these judgments, the researchers looked at how humans deal with similar driving dilemmas.

    When faced with driving dilemmas, people show a high willingness to sacrifice themselves for others, make decisions based on the victim's age and turn onto sidewalks to minimize the number of lives lost. Ethical（伦理的）guidelines tend to disagree with human instincts（本能） in this case, saying that no life should be valued above another.

    “The technological advancement and adoption of autonomous vehicles are moving quickly but the social and ethical discussions about their behavior are lagging behind,” says lead author Lasse T. Bergmann from University of Osnabrück, Germany.

    Automated vehicles will eventually outperform their human counterparts, but there will still be circumstances where the cars must make an ethical decision to save or possibly risk losing a human life.

    The study is especially relevant considering earlier this year a self-driving Uber car struck and killed a passenger in Arizona, in an incident widely regarded as the first death resulting from an autonomous vehicle.

    An ethics commission launched by the German Ministry for Transportation has created a set of guidelines, representing its members' best judgement on a variety of issues concerning self-driving cars. These expert judgments may, however, not reflect human instinct.

    Bergmann and colleagues developed a virtual reality experiment to examine human instinct in a variety of possible driving situations. It was based on the well-known ethical thought experiment—the trolley problem.

    In this experiment, there is a trolley running down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up, unable to move, and the trolley is headed straight for them. A person is standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever（操作杆）.If he pulls this lever, the trolley will turn to a different set of tracks. However, there is one person tied up on the side track. Does the person choose to pull the lever and kill one person, or do nothing and let five people die?

    Bergmann recognized that the majority of people would not approve of the proposal made by the ethics commission that a passenger in the vehicle should not be sacrificed to save more people. “We find people chose to save more lives, even if this involves turning onto the sidewalk, endangering people uninvolved in the traffic incident,” said Bergmann, “Furthermore, subjects considered the factor of age, for example, choosing to save children over the elderly.” He also realized further discussion and research were needed. “Driving requires a complex weighing of risks versus rewards, for example, speed versus the danger of a critical situation,” Bergmann explained.

    If you want to become a fluent English speaker you should take some advice. There are four skills in learning English. They are reading, listening, speaking, and writing. The most important thing you must remember is that if you want to improve your speaking and writing skills, you should first master the skills of reading and listening.

    Read as much as you can. But your reading must be active. It means that you must think about the meaning of the sentence, the meaning of the unfamiliar（不熟悉） words, etc. There is no need for you to pay much attention to grammars or try to understand all the unfamiliar words you come across, but the fact that you see them for the first time and recognize them whenever you see them, for example, in other passages or books, is enough. It would be better to prepare yourself a notebook so you can write down the important words or sentences in it.

    As for listening, there are two choices: besides reading, you can listen every day for about 30 minutes. You can only pay attention to your reading and become skillful at your reading, then you can catch up on your listening. Since you have lots of inputs in your mind, you can easily guess what the speaker is going to say. This never means that you should not practice listening.

    For listening you can listen to cartoons or some movies that are specially made for children. Their languages are easy. Or if you are good at listening you can listen to VOA or BBC programs every day. Again the thing to remember is being active in listening and preferably taking some notes.

    If you follow these pieces of advice, your speaking and writing will improve quickly, and you can be a fluent English speaker one day.

    When my sister Mertie told me she had put out tomato plants last summer, I was quite impressed.

    Since she was a garden-beginner, Mertie researched exactly how far apart to space her tomato plants; what kind of fertilizer to use; how to keep away the bugs（害虫）, etc. Once they were planted, she took care of them daily, anxiously awaiting the juicy tomatoes to appear. But, day after day, her plants were tomato-less while all of her neighbors who had also put out tomato plants were already enjoying the fruit of their labor.

    Frustrated (upset), Mertie gave in and went to the market to search fresh tomatoes. While paying, Mertie told the farmer her troubles. The farmer paused to think for a moment and then asked, "Well, what kind of tomatoes did you plant?"

    "I think they were called Big Boy," Mertie remembered.

    "Well there's your problem," the farmer explained. "Big Boy and Better Boy tomatoes have a 95-day growing period whereas regular tomato plants produce fruit in as few as 70 days…you just have to wait a little longer for the Big Boys."

    With that new knowledge, Mertie went home with excitement, knowing they would be worth the wait.

    Thinking about my sister's gardening experience, I had to smile. She just didn't know that Big Boy tomatoes took longer--neither did I--but once she discovered that information, she was no longer discouraged and upset about the lack of tomatoes on her plants. Instead, she was encouraged and excited to see them a few weeks later.

    It makes me wonder how many of us have "Big Boy" dreams in our hearts, yet we just don't realize that they are of the "Big Boy" variety so we are discouraged and worn out with the waiting process. Instead of waiting with excitement, we give up on our dreams and figure we must have done something wrong to stop them from coming to pass. Frustrated, we see other people's dreams coming true, and we wonder why ours haven't yet been achieved.

Parties and social gatherings no longer excite us the same way they once did. This is not due to a lack of desire to socialize, but the smartphone.

At parties, people focus more on their smartphones than on their drinks. According to a recent study from International Data Corporation，over half of all Americans have a smartphone and reach it the moment they wake up, keeping it in hand all day. In addition, too many people are using smartphones while driving and as a result, they get into car crashes. 34 percent of teens admit to text while driving, and they confirm that texting messages are the major interruption while driving. People's attachment (依恋) to their smartphones is unbelievably becoming more important than the lives of themselves and others.

Just as drivers dismiss the importance of focusing while on the road, many people also fail to recognize the significance of human interaction. When with their friends, some people pointlessly (无谓地) check or send messages in the presence of their friends., which means that their friends are less important. In addition, relying on our smartphones to make friends does not give us the same advantages as making new friends in the real world. Face-to-face conversations will give us the chance to improve our communication skills in the long run.

As many people risk their lives and the lives of people around them just to send a text or mindlessly check their messages, smartphones are in many ways more dangerous to people. The technology shows the achievement weaken the value of communication. Not only is the smartphone affecting our desire to interact face to face, but it is also lowering people's ability to communicate.