Клуб любителей изучения иностранных языков

[Void92]

Особенно пахотный

Ну это слово я не стал записывать, я даже в русском такого не знал

[Konstantin.V]

Каждый день я читаю разные статьи по ТАУ и Умным Домам, давайте тоже сюда буду кидать, ток там 90% формул, но ниче _/

90% формул в статьях про умные дома?

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In 2011 researches from a Californian company called Modern Meadow presented their piece of artificially grown beef.

Нууу кто ж так пишет. Кому там позвонили инженеры калифорнийской компании?

Though this company continues to work on meat, it moved on to growing leather.

Насколько мне казалось, moved on означает отказ от прежнего, что как-то не очень сочетается с continues to work on meat.

In less than 40 years the ever growing human population will need 70% more meat than it needs now.

Так а за счет кого оно в основном растет? Индусы мясо не едят. А негры едят, что удастся найти

[Void92]

Нууу кто ж так пишет. Кому там позвонили инженеры калифорнийской компании?

А как надо? без called?

Насколько мне казалось, moved on означает отказ от прежнего

to start doing a new activity

[Konstantin.V]

А как надо? без called?

Ага

to start doing a new activity

Ты хочешь сказать, что я не прав, и одновременный отказ от предыдущей активити никак не подразумевается?

[Hukutoss]

Konstantin.V, претензии пожалуйста направляй в BBC Не я писал этот текст

[Void92]

Ага

In 2011 researches from a Californian company Modern Meadow presented their piece of artificially grown beef.

Какое-то странное предложение получается: исследования из компании преставили свой образец

Ты хочешь сказать, что я не прав, и одновременный отказ от предыдущей активити никак не подразумевается?

Ну они их основной деятельность стало производство шкур, а над мясом работали 3 калеки в подвале, хз

[Namynnuz]

Какое-то странное предложение получается: исследования из компании преставили свой образец

А я даже не заметил пропущенной r в слове researchers...

[Konstantin.V]

Ну они их основной деятельность стало производство шкур, а над мясом работали 3 калеки в подвале, хз

Скорее всего. Но на мой вкус в идеале надо было как-то выделить этот момент. Например, как-нибудь типа:

While not giving up on meat completely, now the company has mostly moved on to growing leather.



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А я даже не заметил пропущенной r в слове researchers...

И я. Вот тебе и BBC

[Void92]

Вот тебе и BBC

Со всеми бывает человек же читает по слогам только в детстве

[Namynnuz]

человек же читает по слогам только в детстве

Интересное самоопускание :gg-wonder:

[Void92]

Namynnuz, Это очень сложное занятие — выискивание ошибок. Стараешься читать каждую букву, но взгляд всё-равно перескакивает на следующие слова ну а в английском да, как повезет — сработает ли чувство языка, и ты поймешь о чем речь идет, либо будешь сидеть и тупить, думая почему исследования представляют сами себя

[LannTheStupid]

Нууу кто ж так пишет. Кому там позвонили инженеры калифорнийской компании?

"a Californian company called Modern Meadow" means "калифорнийская компания под названием "Современный луг".

Всё же Нестеренко прав.

[Namynnuz]

Всё же Нестеренко прав.

Мды? Все дружно отрезаем себе члены?

[LannTheStupid]

Мды? Все дружно отрезаем себе члены?

Нет, тебе больше подойдёт химическая кастрация.

[Konstantin.V]

Всё же Нестеренко прав.

Кто такой и в чем прав?

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"a Californian company called Modern Meadow" means "калифорнийская компания под названием "Современный луг".

А-а, я понял. Это чтобы не сливалось вместе Californian Modern Meadow company, и тогда будет неочевидно, это калифорнийская компания называется Modern Meadow или просто кампания называется Californian Modern Meadow. Что-то я спросони не подумал, что и слова же нужно будет тогда переставить

[Hukutoss]

Good morning, club!
Day #3

Скрытый текст

How to survive the doomsday.

Achievements of biochemistry, in particular, genomics and genome sequencing, generate ever growing flow of data. In the 1990s it took 10 years to sequence one human genome of one person and the cost was tens of millions of dollars. All the data accumulated back then could have been stored as one Excel spreadsheet. Now this sequencing can be done in several hours and the cost is around a thousand dollars, soon it will be possible to do sequencing in a few minutes and the cost will be a hundred dollars or less. Genomes of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of people will be sequenced routinely. But that's only people. There is genome sequencing of animals, plants, bacteria and viruses. That would require storage and processing of quadrillions of petabytes of data.

The genome sequencing technology doubles its data output every six month, while it takes 18 months to double data storage capacity per one dollar of investment into data storage. Soon the flood of data generated by the sequencing will outrun the data storing capacity of computers. Where will people be able to store all that data?

Other sciences follow suit. Astronomy, astrophysics, geophysics, seismology, remote sensing of the Earth and many others - their data output is growing exponentially, though not as quickly as that of genomics. Practically any science generates more and more data per unit of time.

There are also public services, secret services and even marketing departments of big companies, which collect tiny bits of information about us, trying to find patterns in our behavior, and generate a huge flow of data, which has to be stored.

A doomsday, when we will see that there is no more room for storing new data, seems to be getting closer day by day.

Several years ago, scientists Ewan Birney and Nick Goldman went to a pub after a scientific conference. There they drank beer and discussed "the curse of data". After having a little bit too many beers they came up with an idea that it could be possible to store data about anything, including DNA, in DNA itself. That would be very attractive and provide practically unlimited data storage. One gram of DNA molecules can store as much data as three million CDs.

In fact, attempts of coding data using sequences of nucleotides are not new. Genetic scientists have been doing this for years, on a very limited scale, though. In 2011 a team of scientists implanted in a bacterium fully synthesized DNA, in which they encoded not only information necessary for the life of the bacteria, but also their own names and several famous quotations using a very simple cypher, in which each letter of the alphabet was represented by a sequence of 3 nucleotides, in the same way as other information is coded in DNA. Such sequences of 3 nucleotides are called "codons", in popular science texts they are called "genetic letters".

Birney and Goldman remembered their idea after they got sober. For implementing it they needed to solve several problems.

It is easy to code short messages, but long messages are a problem. DNA are both synthesized and read as small fragments consisting of 200 or fewer nucleotides, and a long message would look like a mess of small fragments when it is coded or read. They decided to use the same principle, which is used in data transmission – to divide a long message into small pieces before coding and tag each piece with its number in the whole message. When read, the message can be reassembled in the order of those number tags.

Another problem was repetitive sequences in data. For instance, if we code number 0 with a sequence of three adenine nucleotides (AAA), and then we need to code a file containing an uninterrupted sequence of 1000 zeroes, we will need a sequence of 3000 adenine monomers, which is difficult both to synthesize and to read. Again, scientists decided to use principles used in data transmission. In their cypher even when the same symbol is repeatedly coded, the coded sequence does not consist of repetition of the same genetic letters.

By now the scientists have made a DNA molecule, which contains the PDF version of the classic 1951 paper in which James Watson and Francis Crick described DNA’s double helix, 154 Shakespeare's sonnets as a file in ASCII text format, a 26-second MP3 audio clip of the speech "I have a dream" by Martin Luther King, and a JPEG picture, and have successfully read these files back. At the moment, reading one megabyte of data from a DNA molecule costs $220, and writing costs $12400. But that’s only the beginning.

Now imagine a global catastrophe caused by huge explosions on the Sun or huge earthquakes and tsunamis or a huge meteorite or by human stupidity manifested as a nuclear war. Out of 7 billion people there are only 1 million survivors, and you are one of them. Your task is to restart the human civilization. You have a 32 GB flash memory drive, it stores mainly rubbish, like some videos, music, funny photos, but there is something about math, physics, chemistry, biology and astronomy. But in what computer would you stick it? Some computers have magically survived too. But there is no electricity, and you have no idea how to restart a nuclear power plant or a hydroelectric turbine. Most likely you do not even know the approximate location of the nearest power plant.

If you are lucky enough and manage to find another survivor of the opposite sex, and have children, and some of them survive, and if some of the other survivors are equally lucky, you'll be able to restart human species, but not human civilization. The civilization will have to restart from scratch.

But with this DNA data storage technology we could code all data we have about our civilization and deposit it in many copies around the world in protected places, like specially built caves, under the ground or in high mountains, and in satellites high above the Earth. Some of these places may survive the catastrophe. You, as a survival, may tell your children that there are such caves, and they will pass this legend over generations, and in due time, when the restarted civilization is ready, those storages will be found, and your remote ancestors will learn about us, those who lived before the catastrophe.

DNA is a very stable molecule. Its half-life is over 500 years in rather harsh conditions. Of data storage media invented by people so far only clay tablets and carved stones can last much longer. But in proper conditions DNA may last thousands of years. Besides, when several copies of the same molecule are available, the decay is not the same in each of them, and it is possible to combine pieces of many molecules into a single complete sequence and to recover the stored message after tens of thousands of years of storage.

Scientists Birney and Goldman say that right now storing all the knowledge of our civilization would be too expensive, but not impossible. As the techniques used in genetic engineering and genomics will become cheaper, the idea of creating the sacred grails holding all our knowledge may become economically feasible.

This text is based on the information presented in the BBC radio popular science programmes.

[свернуть]

[Konstantin.V]

follow suit

Воид, записывай в словарь. Распространенная штука

[LannTheStupid]

Hukutoss, too long; did not read.

[Hukutoss]

Hukutoss, too long; did not read.

Этот текст был разделён на 2 части. Но я решил всё соединить вместе.

[Konstantin.V]

Good morning, club!
Day #2

Скрытый текст

In 1936 Winston Churchill said: "We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium".

On August 5, 2013 a beef burger, meat for which was grown in a laboratory rather than within a cow, was publicly cooked and tasted by several people. The piece of meat for this burger was provided by a group of researchers from Maastricht University, the Netherlands, and the cost of this piece of beef was almost 250,000 euros. It was grown out of stem cells turned into muscle cells and provided with necessary conditions for growth. Those few lucky (or maybe, brave enough) people who tasted small pieces of the burger, admitted that its texture was good (resembling real meat), but it was rather tasteless (or its taste resembled something else, like baked dough).

This was not the first presentation of artificially grown meat. In 2011 researches from a Californian company called Modern Meadow presented their piece of artificially grown beef. The presentation was exciting, but the taste did not excite anyone.

Though this company continues to work on meat, it moved on to growing leather. Leather can be easier accepted by public, no one has to taste or digest it. It can be used for manufacturing handbags and other leather products. It does not have to overcome many hurdles imposed on the way of food products from producers to consumers. It is much easier to make this product accepted by the public than meat. And probably, when people get used to leather produced by a factory rather than by a farm, they will be ready to accept meat produced in the same way.

The ideologist of the company strongly objects to calling these products "artificial leather" or "artificial meat". They are cultured, and eventually they will become just leather and meat, he believes. The process of manufacturing meat and leather resembles 3D printing, he says, only it is 3D bio-printing. Of course, it is far from being perfect right now, but it develops in the right direction.

Farming meat and leather may seem a very natural process, but its byproducts are comparable with chemical factories. Farming of meat is already responsible for more than 14% of greenhouse gases emission, not only carbon dioxide, but also gases with much stronger greenhouse effect, like methane, hydrogen sulfide and ammonia. Take into account large parts of arable land, water and energy resources needed for growing meat, take into account that the average distance of transportation of meat from a farm to your fridge is about 1600 km (1000 miles), and you'll see how inefficient farming of meat is. In less than 40 years the ever growing human population will need 70% more meat than it needs now. We have to look for other sources of animal proteins now in order not to starve later.

There is one more alternative source of proteins – using insects as food. Which would you prefer: to eat fried cockroaches and grasshoppers or to eat "3D printed" beef? By the year 2050, or even earlier, people may face this choice. Meat produced in “traditional way” will be in short supply and very expensive.

This text is based on the information presented in the BBC radio popular science programmes.

[свернуть]

У меня есть для них пожелание: пускай научатся выращивать прозрачное мясо, чтобы без переворачивания было видно, когда оно начинает подгорать, и его пора переворачивать