We have only studied a small portion of the world’s oceans – leaving us plenty of room for surprises. In one great recent surprise, researchers at Hokkaido University have proven that a species of squid can fly (published in the journal Marine Biology).
There were rumors and witnesses of these flying squid, but until now, nobody had proven how a squid can fly.
How do these squid go from swimming to flying? Four phases of flight are described in the research: launching, jetting, gliding and diving.
While swimming, the squid open up their mantle and draw in water. Then these squid launch themselves into the air with a high-powered blast of the water from their bodies. Once launched by this jet propulsion, these squid spread out both their fins and their tentacles to form wings. The squid have a membrane between their tentacles similar to the webbed toes of a frog. This helps them use their tentacles as a wing and create aerodynamic lift so they can glide – similar to a well-made paper airplane.
These squid glide at up to 11.2 meters per second. To put that into perspective, Jamaican runner Usain Bolt won the gold medal in the 2012 Summer Olympic Games at 10.31 meters per second. The squid can remain airborne for about 3 seconds and cover upwards of 30 meters (98 feet) per flight.
While in flight, these squid do not simply glide passively. They actively change their posture based on their distance from the water and phase of flight. After gliding above the water, the squid fold their fins and tentacles back in to minimize impact and dive into the ocean.
Groups of over 20 squid have been recorded flying together. It is believed that they fly to escape predators in the water – a tactic used by the flying fish. While this is great for avoiding ocean predators, this might make the squid easier prey for new predators such as sea birds. There is still plenty to learn about these fascinating creatures, but one thing is for certain: We can no longer consider squid to be just creatures of the sea, but now the air as well.
rumor - 留言，传言
launch - 发动。发射
glide - 滑翔
mantle - 外膜，斗篷
blast - 突如其来的强劲气流，爆炸
propulsion - 推进力
fin - 鱼鳍
tentacle - 触手，触角
membrane - 膜，膜组织
aerodynamic - 空气力学
perspective - 看法，观点
airborne - 空中的，空运的
passively - 被动地，消极地
posture - 姿势
tactic - 战术，策略
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
At Largest Religious Festival, Some Abandon Elderly
Every 12 years, the northern Indian city of Allahabad plays host to a vast gathering of Hindu pilgrims called the Maha Kumbh Mela. This year, Allahabad is expected to host an estimated 80 million pilgrims between January and March.
People come to Allahabad to wash away their sins in the sacred River Ganges. For many it's the realization of their life's goal, and they emerge feeling joyful and rejuvenated. But there is also a darker side to the world's largest religious gathering, as some take advantage of the swirling crowds to abandon elderly relatives.
"They wait for this Maha Kumbh because many people are there so nobody will know," said one human rights activist who has helped people in this predicament and who wished to remain anonymous. "Old people have become useless, they don't want to look after them, so they leave them and go."
Anshu Malviya, an Allahabad-based social worker, confirmed that both men and women have been abandoned during the religious event, though it has happened more often to elderly widows. Numbers are hard to come by, since many people genuinely become separated from their groups in the crowd, and those who have been abandoned may not admit it. But Malviya estimates that dozens of people are deliberately abandoned during a Maha Kumbh Mela, at a very rough guess.
To a foreigner, it seems puzzling that these people are not capable of finding their own way home. Malviya smiles. "If you were Indian," he said, "you wouldn't be puzzled. Often they have never left their homes. They are not educated, they don't work. A lot of the time they don't even know which district their village is in."
Once the crowd disperses and the volunteer-run lost-and-found camps that provide temporary respite have packed away their tents, the abandoned elderly may have the option of entering a government-run shelter. Conditions are notoriously bad in these homes, however, and many prefer to remain on the streets, begging. Some gravitate to other holy cities such as Varanasi or Vrindavan where, if they're lucky, they are taken in by temples or charity-funded shelters.
In these cities, they join a much larger population, predominantly women, whose families no longer wish to support them, and who have been brought there because, in the Hindu religion, to die in these holy cities is to achieve moksha or Nirvana. Mohini Giri, a Delhi-based campaigner for women's rights and former chair of India's National Commission for Women, estimates that there are 10,000 such women in Varanasi and 16,000 in Vrindavan.
But even these women are just the tip of the iceberg, says economist Jean Drèze of the University of Allahabad, who has campaigned on social issues in India since 1979. "For one woman who has been explicitly parked in Vrindavan or Varanasi, there are a thousand or ten thousand who are living next door to their sons and are as good as abandoned, literally kept on a starvation diet," he said.
According to the Hindu ideal, a woman should be looked after until the end of her life by her male relatives—with responsibility for her shifting from her father to her husband to her son. But Martha Chen, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard University who published a study of widows in India in 2001, found that the reality was often very different.
Chen's survey of 562 widows of different ages revealed that about half of them were supporting themselves in households that did not include an adult male—either living alone, or with young children or other single women. Many of those who did live with their families reported harassment or even violence.
According to Drèze, the situation hasn't changed since Chen's study, despite the economic growth that has taken place in India, because widows remain vulnerable due to their lack of education and employment. In 2010, the World Bank reported that only 29 percent of the Indian workforce was female. Moreover, despite changes in the law designed to protect women's rights to property, in practice sons predominantly inherit from their parents—leaving women eternally dependent on men. In a country where 37 percent of the population still lives below the poverty line, elderly dependent relatives fall low on many people's lists of priorities.
This bleak picture is all too familiar to Devshran Singh, who oversees the Durga Kund old people's home in Varanasi. People don't pay toward the upkeep of their relatives, he said, and they rarely visit. In one case, a doctor brought an old woman to Durga Kund claiming she had been abandoned. After he had gone, the woman revealed that the doctor was her son. "In modern life," said Singh, "people don't have time for their elderly."
Drèze is currently campaigning for pensions for the elderly, including widows. Giri is working to make more women aware of their rights. And most experts agree that education, which is increasingly accessible to girls in India, will help improve women's plight. "Education is a big force of social change," said Drèze. "There's no doubt about that."
pilgrim - 参拜者
sin - （宗教上的）罪，过失
River Ganges - 恒河
rejuvenate - 变年轻；使恢复活力
swirl - 卷入（漩涡）
predicament - 困境
anonymous - 匿名的
genuinely - 纯粹地
deliberately - 故意地，有计划地
disperse - 散开，消散
respite - 延缓，休息期间
shelter - 收容所，避难所
notoriously - 臭名昭著地
gravitate - 被吸引，收重力作用
predominantly - 主要，压倒性地
explicitly - 明确地
as good as - 同样，无异于
starvation - 饥饿
vulnerable - 弱势的，易受攻击的
in practice - 实际上
eternally - 永远地
priority - 优先，先
bleak - 严酷的，寒冷的
upkeep - 维持费，维持
pension - 养老金
plight - 困境，状态
People come to Allahabad to wash away their sins in the sacred River Ganges. For many it's the realization of their life's goal, and they emerge feeling joyful and rejuvenated. But there is also a darker side to the world's largest religious gathering, as some take advantage of the swirling crowds to abandon elderly relatives.
"They wait for this Maha Kumbh because many people are there so nobody will know," said one human rights activist who has helped people in this predicament and who wished to remain anonymous. "Old people have become useless, they don't want to look after them, so they leave them and go."
Anshu Malviya, an Allahabad-based social worker, confirmed that both men and women have been abandoned during the religious event, though it has happened more often to elderly widows. Numbers are hard to come by, since many people genuinely become separated from their groups in the crowd, and those who have been abandoned may not admit it. But Malviya estimates that dozens of people are deliberately abandoned during a Maha Kumbh Mela, at a very rough guess.
To a foreigner, it seems puzzling that these people are not capable of finding their own way home. Malviya smiles. "If you were Indian," he said, "you wouldn't be puzzled. Often they have never left their homes. They are not educated, they don't work. A lot of the time they don't even know which district their village is in."
Once the crowd disperses and the volunteer-run lost-and-found camps that provide temporary respite have packed away their tents, the abandoned elderly may have the option of entering a government-run shelter. Conditions are notoriously bad in these homes, however, and many prefer to remain on the streets, begging. Some gravitate to other holy cities such as Varanasi or Vrindavan where, if they're lucky, they are taken in by temples or charity-funded shelters.
In these cities, they join a much larger population, predominantly women, whose families no longer wish to support them, and who have been brought there because, in the Hindu religion, to die in these holy cities is to achieve moksha or Nirvana. Mohini Giri, a Delhi-based campaigner for women's rights and former chair of India's National Commission for Women, estimates that there are 10,000 such women in Varanasi and 16,000 in Vrindavan.
But even these women are just the tip of the iceberg, says economist Jean Drèze of the University of Allahabad, who has campaigned on social issues in India since 1979. "For one woman who has been explicitly parked in Vrindavan or Varanasi, there are a thousand or ten thousand who are living next door to their sons and are as good as abandoned, literally kept on a starvation diet," he said.
According to the Hindu ideal, a woman should be looked after until the end of her life by her male relatives—with responsibility for her shifting from her father to her husband to her son. But Martha Chen, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard University who published a study of widows in India in 2001, found that the reality was often very different.
Chen's survey of 562 widows of different ages revealed that about half of them were supporting themselves in households that did not include an adult male—either living alone, or with young children or other single women. Many of those who did live with their families reported harassment or even violence.
According to Drèze, the situation hasn't changed since Chen's study, despite the economic growth that has taken place in India, because widows remain vulnerable due to their lack of education and employment. In 2010, the World Bank reported that only 29 percent of the Indian workforce was female. Moreover, despite changes in the law designed to protect women's rights to property, in practice sons predominantly inherit from their parents—leaving women eternally dependent on men. In a country where 37 percent of the population still lives below the poverty line, elderly dependent relatives fall low on many people's lists of priorities.
This bleak picture is all too familiar to Devshran Singh, who oversees the Durga Kund old people's home in Varanasi. People don't pay toward the upkeep of their relatives, he said, and they rarely visit. In one case, a doctor brought an old woman to Durga Kund claiming she had been abandoned. After he had gone, the woman revealed that the doctor was her son. "In modern life," said Singh, "people don't have time for their elderly."
Drèze is currently campaigning for pensions for the elderly, including widows. Giri is working to make more women aware of their rights. And most experts agree that education, which is increasingly accessible to girls in India, will help improve women's plight. "Education is a big force of social change," said Drèze. "There's no doubt about that."
pilgrim - 参拜者
sin - （宗教上的）罪，过失
River Ganges - 恒河
rejuvenate - 变年轻；使恢复活力
swirl - 卷入（漩涡）
predicament - 困境
anonymous - 匿名的
genuinely - 纯粹地
deliberately - 故意地，有计划地
disperse - 散开，消散
respite - 延缓，休息期间
shelter - 收容所，避难所
notoriously - 臭名昭著地
gravitate - 被吸引，收重力作用
predominantly - 主要，压倒性地
explicitly - 明确地
as good as - 同样，无异于
starvation - 饥饿
vulnerable - 弱势的，易受攻击的
in practice - 实际上
eternally - 永远地
priority - 优先，先
bleak - 严酷的，寒冷的
upkeep - 维持费，维持
pension - 养老金
plight - 困境，状态
Monday, February 25, 2013
Oldest Known Wild Bird Hatches Chick at 62
Wisdom, the oldest known wild bird, has yet another feather in her cap—a new chick.
The Laysan albatross (Phoebastria immutabilis)—62 years old at least—recently hatched a healthy baby in the U.S. Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, her sixth in a row and possibly the 35th of her lifetime, according to the U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS) North American Bird Banding Program.
But Wisdom's longevity would be unknown if it weren't for a longtime bird-banding project founded by USGS research wildlife biologist Chandler Robbins.
Now 94, Robbins was the first scientist to band Wisdom in 1956, who at the time was "just another nesting bird," he said. Over the next ten years, Robbins banded tens of thousands of black-footed albatrosses (Phoebastria nigripes) and Laysan albatrosses as part of a project to study the behavior of the large seabirds, which at the time were colliding with U.S. Navy aircraft.
Robbins didn't return to the tiny Pacific island—now part of the U.S. Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument—until 2002, when he "recaptured as many birds as I could in hopes that some of them would be the old-timers."
Indeed, Robbins did recapture Wisdom—but he didn't know it until he got back to his office at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, Maryland, and checked her band number in the database.
"That was real exciting, because we didn't think the chances of finding one that old would be that good," Robbins said Wednesday in an interview from his office at the Patuxent center, where he still works.
Albatrosses No Bird Brains
Bigger birds such as the albatross generally live longer than smaller ones: The oldest bird in the Guinness Book of Animal Records, a Siberian white crane (Leucogeranus leucogeranus), lived an unconfirmed 82 years. Captive parrots are known to live into their 80s.
The Laysan albatross spends most of the year at sea, nesting on the Midway Atoll in the colder months. Birds start nesting around five years of age, which is how scientists knew that Wisdom was at least five years old in 1956.
Because albatrosses defend their nests, banding them doesn't require a net or a trap as in the case of other bird species, Robbins said—but they're far from tame.
"They've got a long, sharp bill and long, sharp claws—they could do a job on you if you're not careful how to handle them," said Robbins, who estimates he's banded a hundred thousand birds.
For instance, "when you're not looking, the black-footed albatross will sneak up from behind and bite you in the seat of the pants."
But Robbins has a fondness for albatrosses, and Wisdom in particular, especially considering the new dangers that these birds face.
Navy planes are no longer a problem—albatross nesting dunes were moved farther from the runway—but the birds can ingest floating bits of plastic that now inundate parts of the Pacific, get hooked in longlines meant for fish, and be poisoned by lead paint that's still on some of Midway Atoll's buildings.
That Wisdom survived so many years avoiding all those hazards and is still raising young is quite extraordinary, Robbins said.
"Those birds have a tremendous amount of knowledge in their little skulls."
"Simply Incredible"
Wisdom's accomplishments have caught the attention of other scientists, in particular Sylvia Earle, an oceanographer and National Geographic Explorer in Residence, who said by email that Wisdom is a "symbol of hope for the ocean."
Earle visited Wisdom at her nest in January 2012, where she "appeared serenely indifferent to our presence," Earle wrote in the fall 2012 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review.
"I marveled at the perils she had survived during six decades, including the first ten or so years before she found a lifetime mate. She learned to fly and navigate over thousands of miles to secure enough small fish and squid to sustain herself, and every other year or so, find her way back to the tiny island and small patch of grass where a voraciously hungry chick waited for special delivery meals."
Indeed, Wisdom has logged an estimated two to three million miles since 1956—or four to six trips from Earth to the moon and back, according to the USGS.
Bruce Peterjohn, chief of the North American Bird Banding Program, called Wisdom's story "simply incredible."
"If she were human, she would be eligible for Medicare in a couple years—yet she is still regularly raising young and annually circumnavigating the Pacific Ocean," he said in a statement.
Bird's-Eye View
As for Robbins, he said he'd "love to get out to Midway again." But in the meantime, he's busy going through thousands of bird records in an effort to trace their life histories.
There's much more to learn: For instance, no one has ever succeeded in putting a radio transmitter on an albatross to follow it throughout its entire life-span, Robbins noted.
"It would be [an] exciting project for someone to undertake, but I'm 94 years old," he said, chuckling. "It wouldn't do much for me to start a project at my age."
chick - 幼鸟，孩子
albatross - 信天翁
band - 在鸟类脚上系标识
collide - 冲突，不一致
crane - 鹤
captive - 驯养的，被束缚的
tame - 温顺的
bill - 嘴
claw - 爪
sneak - 偷偷溜走
seat-of-the-pants - 凭经验的
dune - 沙丘
ingest - 摄取（食物）
bit - 小片，少
inundate - 泛滥，充满
hook - 钩住
hazard - 危险
tremendous - 巨大的
skull - 头骨，头脑
serenely - 安稳地
indifferent - 平凡，冷淡，不重要
marvel - 惊讶
peril - 危险，危难
patch - 小块土地
voraciously - 贪婪地
eligible - 合格的
Medicare - 医保制度
transmitter - 发信机
undertake - 负责，着手
chuckle - 咯咯笑
The Laysan albatross (Phoebastria immutabilis)—62 years old at least—recently hatched a healthy baby in the U.S. Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, her sixth in a row and possibly the 35th of her lifetime, according to the U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS) North American Bird Banding Program.
But Wisdom's longevity would be unknown if it weren't for a longtime bird-banding project founded by USGS research wildlife biologist Chandler Robbins.
Now 94, Robbins was the first scientist to band Wisdom in 1956, who at the time was "just another nesting bird," he said. Over the next ten years, Robbins banded tens of thousands of black-footed albatrosses (Phoebastria nigripes) and Laysan albatrosses as part of a project to study the behavior of the large seabirds, which at the time were colliding with U.S. Navy aircraft.
Robbins didn't return to the tiny Pacific island—now part of the U.S. Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument—until 2002, when he "recaptured as many birds as I could in hopes that some of them would be the old-timers."
Indeed, Robbins did recapture Wisdom—but he didn't know it until he got back to his office at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, Maryland, and checked her band number in the database.
"That was real exciting, because we didn't think the chances of finding one that old would be that good," Robbins said Wednesday in an interview from his office at the Patuxent center, where he still works.
Albatrosses No Bird Brains
Bigger birds such as the albatross generally live longer than smaller ones: The oldest bird in the Guinness Book of Animal Records, a Siberian white crane (Leucogeranus leucogeranus), lived an unconfirmed 82 years. Captive parrots are known to live into their 80s.
The Laysan albatross spends most of the year at sea, nesting on the Midway Atoll in the colder months. Birds start nesting around five years of age, which is how scientists knew that Wisdom was at least five years old in 1956.
Because albatrosses defend their nests, banding them doesn't require a net or a trap as in the case of other bird species, Robbins said—but they're far from tame.
"They've got a long, sharp bill and long, sharp claws—they could do a job on you if you're not careful how to handle them," said Robbins, who estimates he's banded a hundred thousand birds.
For instance, "when you're not looking, the black-footed albatross will sneak up from behind and bite you in the seat of the pants."
But Robbins has a fondness for albatrosses, and Wisdom in particular, especially considering the new dangers that these birds face.
Navy planes are no longer a problem—albatross nesting dunes were moved farther from the runway—but the birds can ingest floating bits of plastic that now inundate parts of the Pacific, get hooked in longlines meant for fish, and be poisoned by lead paint that's still on some of Midway Atoll's buildings.
That Wisdom survived so many years avoiding all those hazards and is still raising young is quite extraordinary, Robbins said.
"Those birds have a tremendous amount of knowledge in their little skulls."
"Simply Incredible"
Wisdom's accomplishments have caught the attention of other scientists, in particular Sylvia Earle, an oceanographer and National Geographic Explorer in Residence, who said by email that Wisdom is a "symbol of hope for the ocean."
Earle visited Wisdom at her nest in January 2012, where she "appeared serenely indifferent to our presence," Earle wrote in the fall 2012 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review.
"I marveled at the perils she had survived during six decades, including the first ten or so years before she found a lifetime mate. She learned to fly and navigate over thousands of miles to secure enough small fish and squid to sustain herself, and every other year or so, find her way back to the tiny island and small patch of grass where a voraciously hungry chick waited for special delivery meals."
Indeed, Wisdom has logged an estimated two to three million miles since 1956—or four to six trips from Earth to the moon and back, according to the USGS.
Bruce Peterjohn, chief of the North American Bird Banding Program, called Wisdom's story "simply incredible."
"If she were human, she would be eligible for Medicare in a couple years—yet she is still regularly raising young and annually circumnavigating the Pacific Ocean," he said in a statement.
Bird's-Eye View
As for Robbins, he said he'd "love to get out to Midway again." But in the meantime, he's busy going through thousands of bird records in an effort to trace their life histories.
There's much more to learn: For instance, no one has ever succeeded in putting a radio transmitter on an albatross to follow it throughout its entire life-span, Robbins noted.
"It would be [an] exciting project for someone to undertake, but I'm 94 years old," he said, chuckling. "It wouldn't do much for me to start a project at my age."
chick - 幼鸟，孩子
albatross - 信天翁
band - 在鸟类脚上系标识
collide - 冲突，不一致
crane - 鹤
captive - 驯养的，被束缚的
tame - 温顺的
bill - 嘴
claw - 爪
sneak - 偷偷溜走
seat-of-the-pants - 凭经验的
dune - 沙丘
ingest - 摄取（食物）
bit - 小片，少
inundate - 泛滥，充满
hook - 钩住
hazard - 危险
tremendous - 巨大的
skull - 头骨，头脑
serenely - 安稳地
indifferent - 平凡，冷淡，不重要
marvel - 惊讶
peril - 危险，危难
patch - 小块土地
voraciously - 贪婪地
eligible - 合格的
Medicare - 医保制度
transmitter - 发信机
undertake - 负责，着手
chuckle - 咯咯笑
Sunday, February 24, 2013
Severe Weather More Likely Thanks to Climate Change
BOSTON—Wildfires. Droughts. Super storms.
As opposed to representing the unfortunate severe weather headlines of the last year, scientists said Friday that climate change has increased the likelihood of such events moving forward.
And though the misery is shared from one U.S. coast to another, scientists speaking at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston said, the type of extreme event may vary significantly from region to region.
Heat waves have become more frequent across the United States, with western regions setting records for the number of such events in the 2000s, said Donald Wuebbles, a geoscientist with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
But the Midwest and Northeast have experienced a 45 percent and 74 percent increase, respectively, in the heaviest rainfalls those regions have seen since 1950.
The extreme drought that plagued Texas in 2011 has spread to New Mexico, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and northern Mexico, said John Nielsen-Gammon, Texas State's climatologist at Texas A&M University in College Station.
"The science is clear and convincing that climate change is happening and it's happening rapidly. There's no debate within the science community ... about the changes occurring in the Earth's climate and the fact that these changes are occurring in response to human activities," said Wuebbles.
In 2011 and 2012, major droughts, heat waves, severe storms, tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, and wildfires caused about $60 billion in damages each year, for a total of about $120 billion.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Climactic Data Center, these were some of the costliest weather events in the country's history, said Wuebbles.
President Obama argued in his State of the Union address this week that the time is ripe to address climate change, saying he would skirt Congress to make such changes, if necessary.
His proposals included a system similar to the proposal killed in Congress during his first term, new regulations for coal-burning power plants, and a promise to promote energy efficiency and R&D efforts into cleaner technologies.
The researchers said they are glad to see that addressing climate change is on the President's agenda. But they stressed that they wanted the public to have access to accurate, scientifically sound information, not just simplified talking points.
wildfire - 野火
severe - 苛酷的
likelihood - 可能性
misery - 悲惨，苦痛
respectively - [置尾]分别，各个
plague - 使受灾，使烦恼
costly - 损失重大的
address - 演说；呼吁，进言
regulation - 法规，规制，调节
promote - 奖励，促进，晋升
efficiency - 效率
agenda - 议事日程，预定表
accurate - 正确的
Thursday, February 21, 2013
Mystery Solved: Salmon Navigate Using Magnetic Field
Whoever said you can’t go home again has never met a sockeye salmon, which navigates more than 2,485 miles (4,000 kilometers) to spawn in the same stream in which it hatched.
Now, scientists have finally solved how the species accomplishes its navigational feat—the fish uses Earth’s magnetic field to steer itself home.
“To find their way back home across thousands of kilometers of ocean, salmon imprint on the magnetic field that exists where they first enter the sea as juveniles,” study leader Nathan Putman, of Oregon State University, said in a statement.
“Upon reaching maturity, they seek the coastal location with the same magnetic field.”
Like several other species of salmon, sockeye hatch in many of the streams and tributaries of the U.S. Pacific Northwest.
After hatching, they live and mature in the gravel beds of these freshwater streams for one to three years. Then, the salmon make their way from their freshwater nurseries to the open waters of the Pacific Ocean, where they spend another several years feeding. Eventually the fish make their way back to the streams in which they were born to spawn and begin the cycle anew.
Navigating Salmon a Mystery
What scientists didn’t know was how the salmon managed to do this. Navigating in the open ocean is a difficult task even with a GPS, yet even with such tiny brains, salmon can identify one stream out of several thousand options.
So Putman and colleagues hypothesized that salmon were using variations in the Earth’s magnetic field to figure out where “home” was. If this was true, then the researchers could see if a salmon’s ability to navigate changed over time with small, naturally occurring variations in the global magnetic field.
Putman and colleagues used 56 years of fisheries data to study a group of sockeye salmon that spawned in the Fraser River in British Columbia and spent much of their adult lives in and around Alaska‘s Aleutian Islands. The researchers studied the likely routes the salmon took in transit between these two locations and compared it to data on the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field at the time.
The key to this study was a major navigational obstacle the fish had to traverse. Vancouver Island blocks the entrance to the Fraser River, forcing the salmon to swim around either the northern or southern end of the island to get to the spawning grounds. If the fish really did use the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate, then their choice of routes around Vancouver Island would vary depending on the current strength of the magnetic field at the time.
No Place Like Home
Putman’s hunch was correct: The navigational choice depended largely on which route most closely matched the magnetic signature of the Fraser River when the salmon first left the area for the saltier waters of the Pacific.
“These results are consistent with the idea that juvenile salmon imprint on the magnetic signature of their home river, and then seek that same magnetic signature during their spawning migration,” Putman said in a statement from the National Science Foundation, which helped fund the research.
“As the salmon travel that route, ocean currents and other forces might blow them off course. So they would probably need to check their magnetic position several times during this migration to stay on track. Once they get close to the coastline, they would need to hone in on their target, and so would presumably check in more continuously during this stage of their migration.”
This study, published February 7 in Current Biology, is the first to document an animal’s ability to learn to navigate via the magnetic field. The other animals scientists have studied, like lobsters and birds, either have this knowledge imprinted in them from birth or remember the magnetic signature of home, rather than actually learning to navigate.
These results help explain why salmon raised in hatcheries so frequently become lost in the ocean. Since many fisheries are crisscrossed with electric wires, magnets, and metallic objects—all of which alter perception of magnetism—the fish never learn the magnetic “feeling” of home.
Putman said the results could also be used to forecast where salmon will be in future seasons by studying how the magnetic field changes over time.
sockeye - 红鲑
feat - 本领，伟业
steer - 掌舵，驾驶，行进
imprint - 使铭记，刻上（记号）
juvenile - 少年；少年的
maturity - 成熟
tributary - 支流
gravel - 沙石
nursery - 养鱼场，托儿所，温床
anew - 重新
fishery - 渔业，养鱼场 fisheries - 水产学
obstacle - 障碍
traverse - 通过
hunch - 直觉
hone in - 锁定（信号）
presumably - 可能
via - [前置]通过，凭借
lobster - 龙虾
hatchery - 孵化场
metallic - 金属的
perception - 知觉，认识
magnetism - 磁性，磁学，吸引力
Now, scientists have finally solved how the species accomplishes its navigational feat—the fish uses Earth’s magnetic field to steer itself home.
“To find their way back home across thousands of kilometers of ocean, salmon imprint on the magnetic field that exists where they first enter the sea as juveniles,” study leader Nathan Putman, of Oregon State University, said in a statement.
“Upon reaching maturity, they seek the coastal location with the same magnetic field.”
Like several other species of salmon, sockeye hatch in many of the streams and tributaries of the U.S. Pacific Northwest.
After hatching, they live and mature in the gravel beds of these freshwater streams for one to three years. Then, the salmon make their way from their freshwater nurseries to the open waters of the Pacific Ocean, where they spend another several years feeding. Eventually the fish make their way back to the streams in which they were born to spawn and begin the cycle anew.
Navigating Salmon a Mystery
What scientists didn’t know was how the salmon managed to do this. Navigating in the open ocean is a difficult task even with a GPS, yet even with such tiny brains, salmon can identify one stream out of several thousand options.
So Putman and colleagues hypothesized that salmon were using variations in the Earth’s magnetic field to figure out where “home” was. If this was true, then the researchers could see if a salmon’s ability to navigate changed over time with small, naturally occurring variations in the global magnetic field.
Putman and colleagues used 56 years of fisheries data to study a group of sockeye salmon that spawned in the Fraser River in British Columbia and spent much of their adult lives in and around Alaska‘s Aleutian Islands. The researchers studied the likely routes the salmon took in transit between these two locations and compared it to data on the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field at the time.
The key to this study was a major navigational obstacle the fish had to traverse. Vancouver Island blocks the entrance to the Fraser River, forcing the salmon to swim around either the northern or southern end of the island to get to the spawning grounds. If the fish really did use the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate, then their choice of routes around Vancouver Island would vary depending on the current strength of the magnetic field at the time.
No Place Like Home
Putman’s hunch was correct: The navigational choice depended largely on which route most closely matched the magnetic signature of the Fraser River when the salmon first left the area for the saltier waters of the Pacific.
“These results are consistent with the idea that juvenile salmon imprint on the magnetic signature of their home river, and then seek that same magnetic signature during their spawning migration,” Putman said in a statement from the National Science Foundation, which helped fund the research.
“As the salmon travel that route, ocean currents and other forces might blow them off course. So they would probably need to check their magnetic position several times during this migration to stay on track. Once they get close to the coastline, they would need to hone in on their target, and so would presumably check in more continuously during this stage of their migration.”
This study, published February 7 in Current Biology, is the first to document an animal’s ability to learn to navigate via the magnetic field. The other animals scientists have studied, like lobsters and birds, either have this knowledge imprinted in them from birth or remember the magnetic signature of home, rather than actually learning to navigate.
These results help explain why salmon raised in hatcheries so frequently become lost in the ocean. Since many fisheries are crisscrossed with electric wires, magnets, and metallic objects—all of which alter perception of magnetism—the fish never learn the magnetic “feeling” of home.
Putman said the results could also be used to forecast where salmon will be in future seasons by studying how the magnetic field changes over time.
sockeye - 红鲑
feat - 本领，伟业
steer - 掌舵，驾驶，行进
imprint - 使铭记，刻上（记号）
juvenile - 少年；少年的
maturity - 成熟
tributary - 支流
gravel - 沙石
nursery - 养鱼场，托儿所，温床
anew - 重新
fishery - 渔业，养鱼场 fisheries - 水产学
obstacle - 障碍
traverse - 通过
hunch - 直觉
hone in - 锁定（信号）
presumably - 可能
via - [前置]通过，凭借
lobster - 龙虾
hatchery - 孵化场
metallic - 金属的
perception - 知觉，认识
magnetism - 磁性，磁学，吸引力
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
Electronic Oasis
Water is gold in the Afar Triangle of Ethiopia. No surprise. It’s in one of the hottest deserts in the world. Walking for three days recently near the western scarp of the Rift Valley, Ahmed Alema Hessan and I found one smear of muddy rainwater to ease our camels’ thirst. But we stumbled across a new type of waterhole a day later—a coveted oasis of electrons.
Mulukan Ayalu, 23, an Ethiopian government technician maintains the tiny power plant at Dalifagi. As well master of the electronic oasis, he recharges nomad cell phones for a few cents. On Mondays—market day—trail-worn Afar pastoralists line up at his office door with the folds of their sarong-like shirts laden with dead cell phones of faraway neighbors.
Customers who drop off their phones for recharging are given a handmade token. The numbers now rise into the hundreds. Some purveyors of scarce electrons on Africa’s information frontier get even more creative. In the nearby Afar town of Asaita, one local entrepreneur has jigsawed together a Frankensteinish apparatus that quick-charges clients’ phones in minutes.
At night, when the power is on, the residents of Dalifagi engage in a new cultural practice that didn’t diffuse from Manhattan—the power dinner, with cell phones clamped to ears. When two Afars meet in the desert, they often conduct a dagu, a formal exchange of news with a lengthy call-and-response greeting. “Now we dagu, dagu, dagu all the time on the phone,” says camel guide Ahmed Alema Hessan.
Dial “N” for nomad. Survival tools, old and new, hang from Afar youths’ belts near the Awash River in desolate and sometimes hostile badlands of northeastern Ethiopia: a jile, or traditional dagger, a Kalashnikov rifle to fend off livestock raids, a mobile phone. The immense saltscapes that straddle the borders of Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Eritrea weren’t even mapped until the 1920s. For centuries, the martial Afar pastoralists who ruled the area resisted all incursions by the outside world. Today, though, they embrace the information revolution with a vengeance. “It has given them power,” says Mulukan Ayalu. “They can call different goat traders. They can choose their selling prices.”
Afar Triangle - 阿法尔三角
scarp - 陡坡
Rift Valley - 裂谷
smear - 污点
stumble - 偶遇，蹒跚
covet - 渴望
oasis - (pl.) oases
verse - 诗歌
caravan - 沙漠商队
headlong - 头向前的，疾速的
sprint - 冲刺
leap - 飞奔，跳过，剧变
analog - 类似的，（电脑）模拟的
explode - 爆发，激发
aspiration - 强烈的愿望
subscriber - （电话）加入者，（报纸）订阅者
nomad - 游牧民；游牧民的
pastoralist - 畜牧家
fold - 衣服褶子
sarong - 纱笼
lade - 装货
token - 证据，印记，（地铁用的）代币
purveyor - 承办商
frontier - 边境
entrepreneur - 中介，企业家
jigsaw - 使相互交错
apparatus - 器具，装置
client - 顾客
engage - 从事
diffuse - 普及，扩散
clamp - 夹紧，固定
lengthy - 长时间的，（演讲）冗长的
desolate - 土地荒芜的
hostile - 敌国的
dagger - 短剑，短刀
rifle - 来复枪
fend off - 挡开，避开
raid - 奇袭，空袭 air raid
immense - 巨大的
straddle - 跨坐，叉开腿
martial - 好战的
resist - 抵抗
incursion - （突然）侵犯，袭击
vengeance - 复仇，报复
As oases go, it would never draw adventure tourists, much less inspire the verse of caravan poets, but the electronic waterhole at Dalifagi is the real story in sub-Saharan Africa. Nine hundred million people. A headlong sprint into the digital age that leaps over a century of analog technology. Exploding aspirations. Consequences unknown. In Ethiopia, the government is aggressively expanding its state-run mobile network. Last year, cell use ballooned by an astonishing 30 percent, to more than 17 million subscribers.
Mulukan Ayalu, 23, an Ethiopian government technician maintains the tiny power plant at Dalifagi. As well master of the electronic oasis, he recharges nomad cell phones for a few cents. On Mondays—market day—trail-worn Afar pastoralists line up at his office door with the folds of their sarong-like shirts laden with dead cell phones of faraway neighbors.
Customers who drop off their phones for recharging are given a handmade token. The numbers now rise into the hundreds. Some purveyors of scarce electrons on Africa’s information frontier get even more creative. In the nearby Afar town of Asaita, one local entrepreneur has jigsawed together a Frankensteinish apparatus that quick-charges clients’ phones in minutes.
At night, when the power is on, the residents of Dalifagi engage in a new cultural practice that didn’t diffuse from Manhattan—the power dinner, with cell phones clamped to ears. When two Afars meet in the desert, they often conduct a dagu, a formal exchange of news with a lengthy call-and-response greeting. “Now we dagu, dagu, dagu all the time on the phone,” says camel guide Ahmed Alema Hessan.
Dial “N” for nomad. Survival tools, old and new, hang from Afar youths’ belts near the Awash River in desolate and sometimes hostile badlands of northeastern Ethiopia: a jile, or traditional dagger, a Kalashnikov rifle to fend off livestock raids, a mobile phone. The immense saltscapes that straddle the borders of Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Eritrea weren’t even mapped until the 1920s. For centuries, the martial Afar pastoralists who ruled the area resisted all incursions by the outside world. Today, though, they embrace the information revolution with a vengeance. “It has given them power,” says Mulukan Ayalu. “They can call different goat traders. They can choose their selling prices.”
Afar Triangle - 阿法尔三角
scarp - 陡坡
Rift Valley - 裂谷
smear - 污点
stumble - 偶遇，蹒跚
covet - 渴望
oasis - (pl.) oases
verse - 诗歌
caravan - 沙漠商队
headlong - 头向前的，疾速的
sprint - 冲刺
leap - 飞奔，跳过，剧变
analog - 类似的，（电脑）模拟的
explode - 爆发，激发
aspiration - 强烈的愿望
subscriber - （电话）加入者，（报纸）订阅者
nomad - 游牧民；游牧民的
pastoralist - 畜牧家
fold - 衣服褶子
sarong - 纱笼
lade - 装货
token - 证据，印记，（地铁用的）代币
purveyor - 承办商
frontier - 边境
entrepreneur - 中介，企业家
jigsaw - 使相互交错
apparatus - 器具，装置
client - 顾客
engage - 从事
diffuse - 普及，扩散
clamp - 夹紧，固定
lengthy - 长时间的，（演讲）冗长的
desolate - 土地荒芜的
hostile - 敌国的
dagger - 短剑，短刀
rifle - 来复枪
fend off - 挡开，避开
raid - 奇袭，空袭 air raid
immense - 巨大的
straddle - 跨坐，叉开腿
martial - 好战的
resist - 抵抗
incursion - （突然）侵犯，袭击
vengeance - 复仇，报复
Monday, February 18, 2013
Valentine's Day: Why Do We Celebrate It? (2)
Valentine's Day Cards
cash cow - 财源
confectioner - 甜品店
romance - 罗曼史
virile - 有男子气概的
harem - 女眷，后宫
iconic - 符号的，图标的
chalky - 苍白的，粉质的
emblazon - 装饰，颂扬
stretch - 伸展
infatuation - 热恋，迷恋
anthropologist - 人类学家
obsession - 执着
attachment - 爱情，附件
calmness - 冷静
crave - 渴望
tolerate - 忍耐
encompass - 包括
Greeting cards, as usual, will be the most common Valentine's Day gifts. Fifty-two percent of U.S. consumers plan to send at least one, according to the National Retail Federation survey.
The Greeting Card Association, an industry trade group, says about 190 million Valentine's Day cards are sent each year. And that figure does not include the hundreds of millions of cards schoolchildren exchange.
"Giving your sweetheart or someone [else] a Valentine's Day card is a deep-seated cultural tradition in the United States," said association spokesperson Barbara Miller. "We don't see that changing."
The first Valentine's Day card was sent in 1415 from France's Duke of Orléans to his wife when he was a prisoner in the Tower of London following the Battle of Agincourt, according to the association.
During the Revolutionary War, Valentine's Day cards—mostly handwritten notes—gained popularity in the U.S. Mass production started in the early 1900s.
Hallmark got in the game in 1913, according to spokesperson Sarah Kolell. Since then—perhaps not coincidentally—the market for Valentine's Day cards has blossomed beyond lovers to include parents, children, siblings, and friends.
Valentine's Day Candy: Cash Cow
An estimated 50.5 percent of U.S. consumers will exchange Valentine's Day candy in 2012, according to the retail federation survey—adding up to about a sweet billion dollars in sales, the National Confectioners Association says.
About 75 percent of that billion is from sales of chocolate, which has been associated with romance at least since Mexico's 15th- and 16th-century Aztec Empire, according to Susan Fussell, a spokesperson with the association.
Fifteenth-century Aztec emperor Moctezuma I believed "eating chocolate on a regular basis made him more virile and better able to serve his harem," she said.
But there's nothing chocolaty about Valentine's Day's most iconic candy: those demanding, chalky little hearts emblazoned "BE MINE," "KISS ME," "CALL ME."
About eight billion candy hearts were made in 2009, the association says—enough to stretch from Rome, Italy, to Valentine (map), Arizona, and back again 20 times.
What Is Love? Evolution and Infatuation
Valentine's Day is all about love. But what, exactly, is that?
Helen Fisher is an anthropologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey and author of several books on love, including Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love.
Fisher breaks love into three distinct brain systems that enable mating and reproduction:
- Sex drive
- Romantic love (obsession, passion, infatuation)
- Attachment (calmness and security with a long-term partner)
These are brain systems, Fisher said, and all three play a role in love. They can operate independently, but people crave all three for an ideal relationship.
"I think the sex drive evolved to get you out there looking for a range of partners," she said.
"I think romantic love evolved to enable you to focus your mating energy on just one at a time, and attachment evolved to tolerate that person at least long enough to raise a child together as a team."
Valentine's Day, Fisher added, used to encompass only two of these three brain systems: sex drive and romantic love.
But "once you start giving the dog a valentine, you are talking about a real expression of attachment as well as romantic love."
cash cow - 财源
confectioner - 甜品店
romance - 罗曼史
virile - 有男子气概的
harem - 女眷，后宫
iconic - 符号的，图标的
chalky - 苍白的，粉质的
emblazon - 装饰，颂扬
stretch - 伸展
infatuation - 热恋，迷恋
anthropologist - 人类学家
obsession - 执着
attachment - 爱情，附件
calmness - 冷静
crave - 渴望
tolerate - 忍耐
encompass - 包括
Saturday, February 16, 2013
Valentine's Day: Why Do We Celebrate It? (1)
Valentine's Day History: Roman Roots
pagan - 异教徒的；非基督教徒
raucous - 刺耳的，沙哑的
grab - 抓住
whip - 鞭子；鞭打
spank - 打屁股
maiden - 少女；未婚的
legalize - 在法律上承认，使合法化
peg - 挂钩，使关联
legend - 传说
bolster - 支撑
forbid-forbade-forbidden
flout - 无视
ban - 禁令；禁止
defiance - 公然反抗
tame - 平淡
retail - 零售
discretionary - 任意的
indication - 征兆
perspective - 想法
uptick - 上升
premature - 过早的，早产的
compensate - 补偿
correlate - 相互关联
expenditure - 消费，支出
splurge - 挥霍
routine - 日常工作
confine - 限制
spouse - 配偶者
invest - 花费，投资
mentality - 心理，思想
normative - 规范的，确立标准的
rational - 理性的，合理的
More than a Hallmark holiday, Valentine's Day, like Halloween, is rooted in pagan partying.
The lovers' holiday traces its roots to raucous annual Roman festivals where men stripped naked, grabbed goat- or dog-skin whips, and spanked young maidens in hopes of increasing their fertility, said classics professor Noel Lenski of the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The annual pagan celebration, called Lupercalia, was held every year on February 15 and remained wildly popular well into the fifth century A.D.—at least 150 years after Constantine legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire.
Lupercalia was "clearly a very popular thing, even in an environment where the [ancient] Christians are trying to close it down," Lenski said. "So there's reason to think that the Christians might instead have said, OK, we'll just call this a Christian festival."
The church pegged the festival to the legend of St. Valentine.
According to the story, in the third century A.D., Roman Emperor Claudius II, seeking to bolster his army, forbade young men to marry. Valentine, it is said, flouted the ban, performing marriages in secret.
For his defiance, Valentine was executed in A.D. 270—on February 14, the story goes.
While it's not known whether the legend is true, Lenski said, "it may be a convenient explanation for a Christian version of what happened at Lupercalia."
Valentine's Day 2012: A Strengthening Economy?
Today's relatively tame Valentine's Day celebration is big business—the 2012 holiday is expected to generate $17.6 billion in retail sales in the United States. That's up from last year's $15.7 billion, according to an annual survey by the U.S.National Retail Federation (NRF).
The level of "discretionary spending" exhibited by survey results is "a strong indication our economy continues to move in the right direction," federation president Matthew Shay said in a statement.
That is, from the retailers' perspective, the fact that Americans are going shopping for candy, flowers, and jewels is a good sign for the economy.
But behavioral economics professor Dan Ariely said that suggesting that an uptick in Valentine's day spending is a sign of widespread recovery, "is premature, I think."
"There's a question of whether people are compensating," said Ariely of Duke University. "You could say that Valentine's Day is perfectly correlated with other expenditures in life, or you could say that Valentine's Day is compensating for other things."
Ariely, whose books include the bestseller Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions, said there's good reason to splurge on Valentine's Day, even in a tough economy.
"If you treat yourself to something on next Thursday, just a random day of the year, there's an issue of whether it becomes a routine," he explained. "But if you splurge only at Valentine's Day, now your spending is more confined."
And spend Valentine's Day celebrants will, according to the retail federation survey. The average U.S. consumer is expected to shell out $126.03 on Valentine's Day gifts, meals, and entertainment—about $10 more per person than in 2011.
Spouses and significant others plan to invest $74.12 on Valentine's Day gifts for their significant other—up from last year's $68.98 average. Pets, however, are getting a little less retail love this year, with average planned spending on animal gifts down 52 cents to $4.52.
Why we go shopping at all on Valentine's Day, Duke's Ariely said, has a lot to do with herd mentality.
"Herds give us a sense of what is normative behavior—not normative in terms of rational but normative in terms of this is how people behave," he said.
On Valentine's Day, the normative behavior is to go out and spend money on things such as chocolate and flowers as an expression of love. So, when we ask ourselves what to do, "the answer is very simple," Ariely said.
pagan - 异教徒的；非基督教徒
raucous - 刺耳的，沙哑的
grab - 抓住
whip - 鞭子；鞭打
spank - 打屁股
maiden - 少女；未婚的
legalize - 在法律上承认，使合法化
peg - 挂钩，使关联
legend - 传说
bolster - 支撑
forbid-forbade-forbidden
flout - 无视
ban - 禁令；禁止
defiance - 公然反抗
tame - 平淡
retail - 零售
discretionary - 任意的
indication - 征兆
perspective - 想法
uptick - 上升
premature - 过早的，早产的
compensate - 补偿
correlate - 相互关联
expenditure - 消费，支出
splurge - 挥霍
routine - 日常工作
confine - 限制
spouse - 配偶者
invest - 花费，投资
mentality - 心理，思想
normative - 规范的，确立标准的
rational - 理性的，合理的
Thursday, February 14, 2013
King Richard III Bones Found, Scientists Say
The search for the long-vilified English King Richard III, who died in battle in 1485 and whose image as a nasty tyrant was immortalized by William Shakespeare, appears to have ended.
vilify - 中伤
nasty - 卑劣的
tyrant - 暴君
immortalize - 使不朽
friary - 修道院
genealogical - 家系的，宗谱的 genealogist - 谱系学者
geneticist - 遗传学者
turn up - 发现
pore - 仔细研究，熟读
descendant - 子孙
anonymous - 匿名的
obtain - 得到
sustain - 受到（损失等），维持
osteologist - 骨学者
gruesome - 可怕的
inflict - 给与（打击），强加给
assailant - 攻击者
halberd - 戟
medieval - 中世纪的
consist of - 由。。组成
axe - 斧子
blade - 刀片
spike - 长钉
humiliation - 羞辱
strip - 剥光
corpse - 尸体
idiopathic - 突发性疾病
adolescent - 青春期的；年轻人
scolosis - 脊柱侧弯
spine - 脊柱
despot - 暴君，独裁者
glower - 怒视
repugnant - 令人厌恶的
halt - 阻止
hunchbacked - 驼背的
claw - 用爪抓
methodically - 有条不紊地
In a dramatic Monday morning press conference, researchers from England's University of Leicester announced they had identified "beyond all reasonable doubt" Richard III's skeletal remains. The remains had been unearthed last August by an archaeological team from beneath a parking lot where the friary that reportedly held Richard III's body once stood.
For nearly 40 minutes on Monday, a team of scientists and historians reported the results of detailed medical, historical, genealogical, and genetic studies conducted after archaeologists discovered a skeleton that they believed to be Richard III.
Turi King, a geneticist at the University of Leicester, and Kevin Schürer, a genealogist at the school, turned up the most compelling evidence. By poring over historical records and documents, Schürer conclusively identified two of Richard III's living descendants: Michael Ibsen, a furniture maker in London, England, and a second individual who now wishes to remain anonymous.
King took DNA samples from the two descendants and compared them to a sample of ancient DNA obtained from the skeleton from the friary. "There is a DNA match," King told reporters, "so the DNA evidence points to these being the remains of Richard III."
Richard III died at age 32 of injuries he sustained at the Battle of Bosworth in August 1485, and the new evidence fits closely with these records.
University of Leicester osteologist Jo Appleby showed two gruesome head injuries that Richard received in his last moments—one likely inflicted from behind by an assailant bearing a halberd, a medieval weapon consisting of an axe blade topped with a spike. In addition, Appleby found several other wounds that she described as "humiliation injuries," likely inflicted on Richard's dead body.
Historical accounts suggest that Richard's enemies stripped his body after the battle and threw his corpse over a horse "and this," says Appeleby, "would have left his body exposed to [humiliation] injuries."
The osteologist's studies also revealed that Richard was a man of slight build who suffered from a medical condition known as idiopathic adolescent scoliosis, a curvature of the spine that developed after ten years of age and that may have brought back pain to the future king.
This emerging scientific picture of Richard fits with a description of the king written by John Rous, a medieval English historian, in the late 15th century. According to Rous, Richard III "was slight in body and weak in strength."
The King's enduring image as a cruel despot was cemented by Shakespeare, who portrayed him as a glowering monster so repugnant "that dogs bark at me as I halt by them."
In Shakespeare's famous play, the hunchbacked king claws his way to the throne and methodically murders most of his immediate family—his wife, older brother, and two young nephews—until he suffers defeat and death on the battlefield at the hands of a young Tudor hero, Henry VII.
vilify - 中伤
nasty - 卑劣的
tyrant - 暴君
immortalize - 使不朽
friary - 修道院
genealogical - 家系的，宗谱的 genealogist - 谱系学者
geneticist - 遗传学者
turn up - 发现
pore - 仔细研究，熟读
descendant - 子孙
anonymous - 匿名的
obtain - 得到
sustain - 受到（损失等），维持
osteologist - 骨学者
gruesome - 可怕的
inflict - 给与（打击），强加给
assailant - 攻击者
halberd - 戟
medieval - 中世纪的
consist of - 由。。组成
axe - 斧子
blade - 刀片
spike - 长钉
humiliation - 羞辱
strip - 剥光
corpse - 尸体
idiopathic - 突发性疾病
adolescent - 青春期的；年轻人
scolosis - 脊柱侧弯
spine - 脊柱
despot - 暴君，独裁者
glower - 怒视
repugnant - 令人厌恶的
halt - 阻止
hunchbacked - 驼背的
claw - 用爪抓
methodically - 有条不紊地
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