【专题】慢速英语（英音）2017-06-19

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2017-06-19 Special English
This is Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing. Here is the news.
President Xi Jinping says expanded economic cooperation among members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization will benefit the region.
Speaking at the annual summit of the organization in Astana, Kazakhstan, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for deepening practical cooperation, as regional integration and economic globalization are the trends of the time, and it is important for them to bring benefits to all countries and peoples.
To mobilize more resources and the driving force for practical cooperation under the organization framework, China supports the establishment of a mechanism for sub-national cooperation and has vigorously promoted small and medium-sized enterprises cooperation by its initiatives of economic think-tanks alliance and e-commerce alliance of the organization.
Bilateral trade relations have grown closer between China and other member countries, as trade facilitation has improved, with China becoming the largest trading partner of Russia and Kyrgyzstan.
Meanwhile, mutual investment has grown steadily, with China's non-financial direct investment in other members as of April 2017 amounting to 74 billion U.S. dollars and investment in the opposite direction totaling 1 billion U.S. dollars.
Senior Chinese officials highlighted achievements in establishing economic and trade cooperation zones, noting that China has built a total of 21 such cooperation zones within other countries, helping to expand local employment and increase tax revenue.
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Europe has found itself at the frontline in the fight against terrorism. The sight of armed soldiers on the streets of European cities has become all too familiar.
The spotlight has swung to Britain this time, but no-one in France, a country that has experienced several attacks in the past few years, is under the illusion that their country is completely safe.
Squads of soldiers with automatic weapons at the ready are a regular sight on the streets of Paris. Despite their presence, the French were reminded of the threat when police shot a man outside Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris earlier this month.
The suspect, a 40-year-old Algerian doctoral student, attacked an officer with a hammer while shouting "This is for Syria."
One worrying trend to emerge from the British attacks is that in all three attacks, at least one of the perpetrators was known to the authorities. The three attacks included the Westminster Bridge and London Bridge killings in London and the attack in Manchester which also targeted children.
As radicalization become ever more complex and multifaceted, many now agree that it is necessary to move beyond a mere cause-effect analysis and look at the problem from different angles.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
China is making preliminary preparations for a manned lunar landing mission. That's according to Yang Liwei, deputy director general of the China Manned Space Agency.
Yang said it will not take long for the project to get official approval and funding. He made the remarks during a group conference at the Global Space Exploration Conference.
Yang is China's first astronaut. When asked whether he has any plan to step onto the Moon, he showed great excitement, saying that if he is given the opportunity, there is no problem!
A senior official from the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation also said China is working on a manned lunar landing plan.
The mission will consist of a manned spaceship, a propulsion vehicle and a lunar lander. The manned spaceship and the lunar lander will be sent into circumlunar orbit separately.
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SpaceX's uncrewed Dragon cargo ship has arrived at the International Space Station, carrying for the first time an experiment independently designed by China and also supplies for the astronauts living in the orbiting laboratory.
NASA astronauts Jack Fischer reached out with the space station's robotic arm and grappled the spacecraft, as the space station was flying over the South Atlantic Ocean, just east off the coast of Argentina.
Dragon carried almost 6,000 pounds, roughly 2,700 kilograms of cargo for its 11th commercial resupply mission for NASA, including solar panels, tools for Earth-observation and equipment to study neutron stars.
Among the cargo is a 3.5-kilogram device from the Beijing Institute of Technology that aims to investigate how the space radiation and microgravity environment affect DNA.
The deal for the delivery was reached in 2015 with NanoRacks, a Houston-based company that offers services for the commercial utilization of the space station.
U.S. legislation known as the Wolf amendment bans cooperation between NASA and Chinese government entities, but the deal is purely commercial and therefore considered legal.
Dragon, launched aboard a Falcon 9 rocket on 4th of June, was expected to remain docked with the space station until early July.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
A new undersea telecommunications cable known as MAREA that aims to improve connections between Europe and the United States is scheduled to reach the Spanish coast on July 12.
Deployment of the cable, which is being jointly laid by Spanish telecommunications giant Telefonica, along with Microsoft and Facebook, began from the east coast of the United States on May 24. It reached the French city of Calais on June 9, before continuing to a town in northern Spain.
Microsoft described MAREA as the highest-capacity subsea cable to ever cross the Atlantic. It features eight fiber pairs and an initial estimated design capacity of 160 TeraBits per Second. That rate is 16 million times faster than a standard home internet connection.
Scientists say it's routing south of other trans-Atlantic cables means it will become "the first to connect the United States to southern Europe: from Virginia Beach, Virginia to Bilbao in Spain and then beyond to network hubs in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
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Eight computer science professors at Oregon State University have been tasked to make systems based on artificial intelligence, including autonomous vehicles and robots, more trustworthy.
Recent advances in autonomous systems that can perceive, learn, decide and act on their own stem from success of the deep neural networks branch of artificial intelligence, with deep-learning software mimicking the activity in layers of neurons in the neocortex, the part of the brain where thinking occurs.
The problem, however, is that the neural networks function as a black box. Instead of humans explicitly coding system behavior using traditional programming, in deep learning the computer program learns on its own from many examples.
Potential dangers arise from depending on a system that not even the system developers fully understand.
With a 6.5 million U.S. dollars grant over the next four years from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, under its Explainable Artificial Intelligence program, a news release from Oregon State University said its researchers will develop a paradigm to look inside that black box, by getting the program to explain to humans how decisions were reached.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing. You can access the program by logging on to crienglish.com. You can also find us on our Apple Podcast. Now the news continues.
Experts predict that the United States, China and India are considered to be the most prospective destinations for foreign direct investment. The statement was made by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in its annual report on investment.
According to the World Investment Report 2017: Investment and the Digital Economy, global foreign direct investment flows retreated marginally in 2016 by 2 percent to 1.75 trillion U.S. dollars, amid weak economic growth and significant policy risks perceived by multinational enterprises.
Flows to developing countries were especially hard hit, with a decline of 14 percent, while foreign direct investment outflows from developed countries decreased by 11 percent, mainly owing to a slump in investments from European multinational enterprises.
The United States remained the largest recipient of foreign direct investment, attracting 391 billion U.S. dollars in inflows, followed by Britain with 254 billion dollars, and China with inflows of 134 billion dollars.
According to the report, with a surge of outflows, China also became last year the second largest investing country.
In 2017, global foreign direct investment is expected to rise by 5 percent, to almost 1.8 trillion U.S. dollars.
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An international research team has evaluated 145 peer-reviewed studies and concluded that "highly protected" marine reserves can help mitigate the effects of climate change.
Jane Lubchenco is a professor in the College of Science at Oregon State University and co-author on a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She said marine reserves cannot halt or completely offset the growing impacts of climate change. But they can make marine ecosystems more resilient to changes and, in some cases, help slow down the rate of climate change.
Around the world, coastal nations have committed to protecting 10 percent of their waters by 2020, but thus far only 3.5 percent of the ocean has been set aside for protection, and 1.6 percent, or less than half of that, is strongly protected from exploitation. Some researchers have argued that as much as 30 percent of the ocean should be set aside as reserves to safeguard marine ecosystems in the long-term.
The professor says protecting a portion of our oceans and coastal wetlands will help sequester carbon, limit the consequences of poor management, protect habitats and biodiversity that are key to healthy oceans of the future, and buffer coastal populations from extreme events. She says marine reserves are climate reserves.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
Plant embryos have cells that function as a brain. That's according a study published recently by scientists at the University of Birmingham. The study has revealed that the group of brain cells can assess environmental conditions and dictate when seeds will germinate.
The researchers say that a plant's decision about when to germinate is one of the most important it will make during its life. Too soon, and the plant may be damaged by harsh winter conditions; too late, and it may be outcompeted by other more precocious plants.
The Birmingham scientists have shown that this trade-off between speed and accuracy is controlled by a small group of cells within the plant embryo that operate in similar way to the human brain.
The "decision-making center" in a plant contains two types of cell, one that promotes seed dormancy, and one that promotes germination.
The two groups of cells communicate with each other by moving hormones, an analogous mechanism to that employed by our own brains when we decide whether or not to move.
The scientists used mathematical modelling to show that communication between the separated elements controls the plant's sensitivity to its environment.
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Fossils of a complete crocodile and bones belonging to at least six different dinosaurs from the Cretaceous Period, 145 to 66 million years ago, have been excavated in northeast China's Jilin Province.
After a year of preparation, paleontologists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a local fossil center began the excavation in late May, following the discovery of dinosaur fossils in a nearby city in May 2016.
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