Mars rover finds nitrogen, key to life, NASA says

   Thu, Mar 26, 2015 AFP, WASHINGTON

NASA’s Curiosity rover has found nitrogen on the surface of Mars, a significant discovery that adds to evidence the Red Planet could once have sustained life, the space agency said on Tuesday.

By drilling into Martian rocks, Curiosity found evidence of nitrates, compounds containing nitrogen that can be used by living organisms.

The Curiosity team has already found evidence that other ingredients needed for life, such as liquid water and organic matter, once existed at the site known as Gale Crater.

“Finding a biochemically accessible form of nitrogen is more support for the ancient Martian environment at Gale Crater being habitable,” Jennifer Stern of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement.

‘INHOSPITABLE’

Nitrogen is essential for all known forms of life, because it is a building block of DNA and RNA.

However, “there is no evidence to suggest that the fixed nitrogen molecules found by the team were created by life,” NASA said. “The surface of Mars is inhospitable for known forms of life.”

The research team suggested that instead, the nitrates are ancient and likely came from meteorite impacts, lightning and other non-biological processes.

On Earth and Mars, nitrogen is found in the form of nitrogen dioxide gas — two atoms locked together so tightly that they do not react easily with other molecules.

The nitrogen atoms must be separated or “fixed” so they can participate in the chemical reactions needed for life.

“On Earth, certain organisms are capable of fixing atmospheric nitrogen and this process is critical for metabolic activity,” NASA said. “However, smaller amounts of nitrogen are also fixed by energetic events like lightning strikes.”

Curiosity is currently at the foot of Mount Sharp, a 5,500m mountain formed by sedimentary layers.

In December last year, the robot detected regular methane emissions near the Martian surface, but its source is unknown.

HUMAN MISSION

Scientists do not expect Curiosity to find aliens or living creatures on Mars, but they hope to use it to analyze soil and rocks for signs the key elements to life are present and may have supported life in the past.

The US$2.5 billion Curiosity rover also aims to study the Martian environment to prepare for a possible human mission there in the coming years.

US President Barack Obama has vowed to send humans to the planet by 2030.

Structure of the Lead：

WHO: NASA

WHERE: MARS

keywords:

1.nitrogen 氮氣

2.sustained 持續的,持久的

3.biochemical 生化

4.RNA 核糖核酸

5.inhospitable  不好客的

6.molecules 分子

來源:http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2015/03/26/2003614462

Hungarian lawmakers reject refugee block bid

Thu, Nov 10, 2016 NY Times News Service

Lawmakers in Hungary on Tuesday rejected a proposed national ban on refugees relocated from elsewhere in the EU, dealing a rare defeat to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Orban last month submitted a plan to ban the refugees in the form of a constitutional amendment after a similar proposal failed to pass by referendum because of insufficient voter turnout.

He has vowed to block a EU program that would resettle refugees from the Middle East and Africa who have gone to countries like Greece and Italy.

According to that program, Hungary, a nation of 10 million, would have to accept 1,294 of a total of about 160,000 refugees.

The amendment needed two-thirds of sitting members of the 199-member parliament to pass. It got 131 votes on Tuesday — two shy of the threshold. Three lawmakers voted no and the rest abstained.

The Jobbik party, which is part of the official opposition, but usually sides with Orban’s Fidesz party on migration issues, was crucial to the defeat of the amendment.

Gabor Vona, a lawmaker and the leader of Jobbik, said that his party would support only a solution that “defends Hungary and Hungarian people, not just from poor migrants, but from rich migrants; not just from poor terrorists, but from rich terrorists.”

He was referring to a rule that allows foreigners who invest at least 300,000 euros (US$332,000) in Hungarian bonds to acquire residency. The program dates to 2012.

The Fidesz party has been politically weaker since last year, when it lost its super-majority in parliament. That advantage had allowed the government to rewrite the constitution and to pass legislation to rein in the judiciary and the press, packing some of the country’s top institutions with political allies.

Analysts on Tuesday were cautious in interpreting the defeat of the amendment as a sign of the government’s declining political power.

“I wouldn’t say that this is a huge failure for Orban — it’s a failure, but a minor one,” said Csaba Toth, the director of strategy for the Republikon Institute, a research and advocacy group that has been critical of Orban’s government. “This is the second time the government can’t have their own way, which is important for a group whose main governing strategy is power.”

keywords:

1.constitutional 憲法

2.amendment 修改 訂正

3.turnout 到場人數

4.parliament 議會 國會

5.interpreting 理解 解釋

來源:http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2016/11/10/2003658975

Terrorist attacks cast Paris into ‘an impossible nightmare’

Terrorist attacks cast Paris into ‘an impossible nightmare’

Mon, Nov 16, 2015
By Andrew Hussey  /  The Observer

At about 3am or 4am, I finally turned off the television set. By now, like most of the rest of France, I had had Wthan enough of the endless scenes of cruelty and death. All of this taking place no more than 3km from where I live in central Paris.

By now I had also watched French President Francois Hollande declare in a shaky voice that what was happening was “an act of war.” The French news also said that France was now in “a state of emergency” — borders were being closed, public buildings were shut down. People were told to close their shutters and not to go outside.

Before I went to bed, I looked out into the normally quiet and dark residential street where I live. Lights were still blazing. Nobody was going to sleep much tonight — how could they?

The terror began about 9:30pm, as much of Paris [as I did] settled down after dinner to watch a soccer match between France and Germany. First came the noise of the bombs at the Stade de France and the dazed, frightened expressions of the crowd. Then came the news of shootings across the city.

Within 30 minutes, the news took you with a violent lurch even deeper into an impossible nightmare. This was the massacre at the Bataclan. I have not been to the place since the 1980s and remember it as a dusty, run-down place. However, it is still a totemic site in the imagination of French rock fans. Somewhere, I have a bootleg tape of a Velvet Underground reunion gig there in 1973. How could it be that an audience of innocents was slaughtered in this way and at this place?

However, that was the whole point of the attack.

The massacres all took place in the Right Bank area in the east of the city.

Structure of the Lead：

WHO-Terrorist

WHERE-Paris

Keywords：

1.shaky 顫抖的

2.border 國境

3.residential 居民區的

4.blazing 耀眼的

5.massacre  大屠殺

來源:http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2015/11/16/2003632560

  

Refugee girls in camps need education: Malala

Thu, Sep 15, 2016

By Thomson Reuters Foundation, LONDON

Nobel laureate Malala Yousufzai(馬拉拉·優素福扎伊) on Tuesday called on world leaders to provide education to girls in refugee camps to avoid them being forced into early marriage or child labor.

Her statement came a week before US President Barack Obama hosts the first UN summit on refugees in New York, where he is expected to urge leaders to do more to help refugees in countries like Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan and Kenya.

“Why do world leaders waste our time with this pageant of sympathy while they are unwilling to do the one thing that will change the future for millions of children?” Malala said in a statement ahead of the summit on Tuesday next week.

Refugee girls were wondering how long they can stay out of school before they are forced into early marriages or work, she said.

“They’re hoping for more than survival, and they have the potential to help rebuild safe, peaceful, prosperous countries, but they can’t do this without education,” she said.

Fighting in Syria, Afghanistan, Burundi and South Sudan has contributed to a record number of people who were uprooted last year, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which estimates there are 21.3 million refugees worldwide, half of them children.

Almost 80 percent of all refugee adolescents are out of school, with girls making up the majority of those excluded from education, according to a report issued by the Malala Fund, which campaigns and raises funds for educational causes.

It also blamed donor countries for failing to provide adequate funding for secondary education, and failing to deliver on funding pledges made earlier this year.

The report also criticized wealthy donor countries for diverting resources away from host countries in developing regions, such as Turkey and Lebanon, to meet their own domestic refugee costs.

The report concluded by urging donors to commit to providing US$2.9 billion by September 2019 to the Education Cannot Wait Fund.

 Structure of the Lead：

   WHO-Malala Yousufzai

   WHERE-USA

Keywords：
1.uprooted :使離開家園（或熟環悉的境）；使遷移他處
2.commissioner:專員 長官
3.prosperous :富裕的
4.adolescents:青少年
5.adequate:足夠的 合格的


連結http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2016/09/15/2003655204