Questões de Inglês

RADIATION AND EVOLUTION

1 THE disaster last year at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, caused by an earthquake and tsunami, scored seven on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES). No worse rating exists. Radiation is harmful to living things, yet the long-term effects of persistently high levels of background radiation on ecosystems are poorly understood. With this in mind, a team led by Timothy Mousseau of the University of South Carolina and Anders Moller of the University of Paris-Sud set out to compare bird species dwelling near the Fukushima plant with those living at the site of another nuclear incident that scored a seven on the INES: the Ukrainian town of Chernobyl, where disaster struck in 1986. Remarkably, they found that some species seem to develop a tolerance for radioactivity over time.

2 Fukushima and Chernobyl are more than 7,000km (4,350 miles) apart, but Dr Mousseau and his colleagues soon realised that the two sites had much in common. Both are in areas that have a temperate climate with species that have similar habits and needs. And both are surrounded by a mixture of farmland and forest. Upon closer examination the researchers found that 14 species of bird lived in both regions, including the barn swallow, great tit, great reed warbler, buzzard and Eurasian jay. With so many similarities between the two places, a comparison of the biological responses to radiation in each (recent in Fukushima; long-term in Chernobyl) would surely be illuminating.

3 To do this, during July 2011, the researchers counted and identified birds at 300 locations near Fukushima that had radiation levels as low as 0.5 microsieverts per hour and as high as 35 (for comparison, dental X-rays rarely expose patients to more than 0.05 microsieverts). Then they compared these results to bird data collected in areas that had the same range of radiation levels near Chernobyl between 2006 and 2009.

4 Their results show that as radiation levels in an area rose to 35 microsieverts per hour, the average number of birds dropped by almost a third compared with the areas where radiation levels were only 0.5 microsieverts per hour. This makes sense: in those areas with a high  level of radiation, living things would tend to die or sicken and fail to reproduce. However, when researchers looked at the 14 bird species that lived in both regions, they found that the same level of radiation was associated with twice as large a drop in bird numbers in Fukushima as in Chernobyl.

5 The reasons for this are not clear. It is possible that the composition of the radionuclides are proving more dangerous to the Fukushima birds than they are to the birds near Chernobyl. But Dr Mousseau suggests a more likely explanation is that evolution has already been at work near Chernobyl, killing off individual birds that cannot cope with the background radiation and allowing the genes of those that have some tolerance to be passed on. The birds at Fukushima are only beginning to face the evolutionary challenge of living in a radioactive world.

Adapted from The Economist, March 3, 2012

Cosmic Background

By Marcia Bartusiak

1 One hundred fifty years ago, in 1862, the first hint arrived that the stellar universe was far stranger than anyone imagined—or could imagine. It came with the knowledge that a faint companion slowly circles Sirius, the brightest star in the nighttime sky.

2 Astronomers at the time didn’t recognize what they had uncovered. It would take decades—until the 1910s—for them to fully realize that Sirius B, as the tiny companion came to be known, was a star like no other seen before. Once its nature was revealed, though, it didn’t take long for theorists to conceive of other bizarre creatures that might be residing in the stellar zoo.

3 The story begins, not in 1862, but two decades earlier. For a number of years, the noted German astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel, director of the Königsberg Observatory, had been going through old stellar catalogs, as well as making his own measurements, to track how the stars Sirius and Procyon were moving across the celestial sky over time. By 1844 he had enough data to announce that Sirius and Procyon weren’t traveling smoothly, as expected; instead, each star displayed a slight but distinct wobble—up and down, up and down. With great cleverness, Bessel deduced that each star’s quivering walk meant it was being pulled on by a dark, invisible companion circling it. Sirius’s companion, he estimated, completed oneorbit every fifty years.

4 Bessel was clearly excited by his find; in his communication to Great Britain’s Royal Astronomical

Society he wrote, “The subject . . . seems to me so important for the whole of practical astronomy, that I

think it worthy of having your attention directed to it.”

5 Astronomers did take notice, and some tried to discern Sirius’s companion through their telescopes. Unfortunately, at the time Bessel reported his discovery, Sirius B was at its closest to gleaming Sirius, from the point of view of an observer on Earth, and thus lost in the glare. But even years later, no one wassuccessful in spotting the companion.

6 That all changed on January 31, 1862. That night in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, Alvan Clark, the best telescope manufacturer in the United States, and his younger son, Alvan Graham Clark, were testing the optics for a new refractor they had been building for the University of Mississippi. It was going to be the biggest refracting telescope in the world. Looking at notable stars to carry out a color test of their 18.5-inch lens, the son observed a faint star very close to Sirius. This was Sirius B, a type of star now known as a “whitedwarf” because of its color and size.

Adapted from Natural History, February, 2012

Timbuktu

By Blake Gopnik

1 From the moment the followers of Muhammad came roaring out of Arabia, in A.D. 633, they’ve cherished beautiful things. An exhibition that just closed at the Metropolitan Museum in New York showed how the first Muslims were inspired by glorious works from the Greek-speaking world, and their descendants never stopped being art-friendly.

2 That’s why it has been such a shock to see the artistic heritage of Timbuktu, one of the great seats of Africa’s Islamic culture, fall prey to Muslim puritans. As recently as July 10, members of a group called Ansar Dine, which has been linked to al Qaeda, stormed the 14th-century Djingareyber mosque and destroyed two ancient shrines they found there, according to Reuters and Agence France-Presse. In late March, in the chaos of Mali’s civil war, a small number of these fighters gained control of the city and have since been attacking its heritage. At the start of July, we got word of several shrines they had destroyed. They had also broken open a sealed door on the 15th-century Sidi Yahya mosque, which local tradition says ought to stay closed until Judgment Day. “Building on graves is contrary to Islam. We are destroying the mausoleums because it is ordained by our religion,” Ansar Dine has insisted, claiming that local followers of the Sufi strain of Islam are guilty of idolatry each time they visit the tombs of theirmovement’s sages.

3 But Shamil Jeppie, director of the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project at the University of Cape Town, rejects the idea that this is about the kind of consistent ideology found in other groups we call Islamist. “These guys, you can’t give them such credit,” says Jeppie. “It’s just hooliganism.” He says the locals had been resisting the fighters’ authority, and he feels that the attacks on the shrines are a form of punishment. (Jeppie also reports that, so far, Timbuktu’s great collections of Islamic manuscripts, which he studies, seem not to have been threatened.) The puritanical religious views that Ansar Dine claims to espouse, Jeppie says, derive from the relatively recent Wahhabi movement, “born in Arabia in the 18th century,” and have been taught to today’s fighters by patrons from Saudi Arabia.

4 Ansar Dine claims that its attacks on the shrines reflect the pure form of Islam practiced by Muhammad’s first followers, but Jeppie and other experts, both Western and Muslim, say that misinterprets the historical evidence. There was always debate about showy entombment in shrines and mosques, but the practice was established from early on and has never been definitively rejected in Islamic law. “All you have to do is look at the Taj Mahal,” says Sheila Canby, head of the Metropolitan’s Islamic department, to see that “the attitude toward tombs has varied.” She calls Ansar Dine’s violent rejection “a very, very extreme view.”

5 Even with the most recent destruction, however, the particular artistic culture of Mali gives a glimmer of hope. Thomas Schuler, chair of the Disaster Relief Task Force of the International Council of Museums, has been denouncing the damage. But he points out that locals have a more flexible view of their shrines’ destruction. “The people in Timbuktu say, ‘Let them destroy them. We will rebuild them.’ That’s why people don’t defend [the shrines] to the death.” Art historians have started to talk about this as a “substitution” principle, found in many cultures, whereby something new can stand in for something old that has been lost. It’s not always the physical substance of an artwork that matters, but its shape or location and the traditions those point to. (Timbuktu’s shrines are made of mud brick and so have alwaysrequired rebuilding.)

Adapted from Newsweek, July 23 & 30, 2012

Timbuktu

By Blake Gopnik

1 From the moment the followers of Muhammad came roaring out of Arabia, in A.D. 633, they’ve cherished beautiful things. An exhibition that just closed at the Metropolitan Museum in New York showed how the first Muslims were inspired by glorious works from the Greek-speaking world, and their descendants never stopped being art-friendly.

2 That’s why it has been such a shock to see the artistic heritage of Timbuktu, one of the great seats of Africa’s Islamic culture, fall prey to Muslim puritans. As recently as July 10, members of a group called Ansar Dine, which has been linked to al Qaeda, stormed the 14th-century Djingareyber mosque and destroyed two ancient shrines they found there, according to Reuters and Agence France-Presse. In late March, in the chaos of Mali’s civil war, a small number of these fighters gained control of the city and have since been attacking its heritage. At the start of July, we got word of several shrines they had destroyed. They had also broken open a sealed door on the 15th-century Sidi Yahya mosque, which local tradition says ought to stay closed until Judgment Day. “Building on graves is contrary to Islam. We are destroying the mausoleums because it is ordained by our religion,” Ansar Dine has insisted, claiming that local followers of the Sufi strain of Islam are guilty of idolatry each time they visit the tombs of theirmovement’s sages.

3 But Shamil Jeppie, director of the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project at the University of Cape Town, rejects the idea that this is about the kind of consistent ideology found in other groups we call Islamist. “These guys, you can’t give them such credit,” says Jeppie. “It’s just hooliganism.” He says the locals had been resisting the fighters’ authority, and he feels that the attacks on the shrines are a form of punishment. (Jeppie also reports that, so far, Timbuktu’s great collections of Islamic manuscripts, which he studies, seem not to have been threatened.) The puritanical religious views that Ansar Dine claims to espouse, Jeppie says, derive from the relatively recent Wahhabi movement, “born in Arabia in the 18th century,” and have been taught to today’s fighters by patrons from Saudi Arabia.

4 Ansar Dine claims that its attacks on the shrines reflect the pure form of Islam practiced by Muhammad’s first followers, but Jeppie and other experts, both Western and Muslim, say that misinterprets the historical evidence. There was always debate about showy entombment in shrines and mosques, but the practice was established from early on and has never been definitively rejected in Islamic law. “All you have to do is look at the Taj Mahal,” says Sheila Canby, head of the Metropolitan’s Islamic department, to see that “the attitude toward tombs has varied.” She calls Ansar Dine’s violent rejection “a very, very extreme view.”

5 Even with the most recent destruction, however, the particular artistic culture of Mali gives a glimmer of hope. Thomas Schuler, chair of the Disaster Relief Task Force of the International Council of Museums, has been denouncing the damage. But he points out that locals have a more flexible view of their shrines’ destruction. “The people in Timbuktu say, ‘Let them destroy them. We will rebuild them.’ That’s why people don’t defend [the shrines] to the death.” Art historians have started to talk about this as a “substitution” principle, found in many cultures, whereby something new can stand in for something old that has been lost. It’s not always the physical substance of an artwork that matters, but its shape or location and the traditions those point to. (Timbuktu’s shrines are made of mud brick and so have alwaysrequired rebuilding.)

Adapted from Newsweek, July 23 & 30, 2012

Timbuktu

By Blake Gopnik

1 From the moment the followers of Muhammad came roaring out of Arabia, in A.D. 633, they’ve cherished beautiful things. An exhibition that just closed at the Metropolitan Museum in New York showed how the first Muslims were inspired by glorious works from the Greek-speaking world, and their descendants never stopped being art-friendly.

2 That’s why it has been such a shock to see the artistic heritage of Timbuktu, one of the great seats of Africa’s Islamic culture, fall prey to Muslim puritans. As recently as July 10, members of a group called Ansar Dine, which has been linked to al Qaeda, stormed the 14th-century Djingareyber mosque and destroyed two ancient shrines they found there, according to Reuters and Agence France-Presse. In late March, in the chaos of Mali’s civil war, a small number of these fighters gained control of the city and have since been attacking its heritage. At the start of July, we got word of several shrines they had destroyed. They had also broken open a sealed door on the 15th-century Sidi Yahya mosque, which local tradition says ought to stay closed until Judgment Day. “Building on graves is contrary to Islam. We are destroying the mausoleums because it is ordained by our religion,” Ansar Dine has insisted, claiming that local followers of the Sufi strain of Islam are guilty of idolatry each time they visit the tombs of theirmovement’s sages.

3 But Shamil Jeppie, director of the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project at the University of Cape Town, rejects the idea that this is about the kind of consistent ideology found in other groups we call Islamist. “These guys, you can’t give them such credit,” says Jeppie. “It’s just hooliganism.” He says the locals had been resisting the fighters’ authority, and he feels that the attacks on the shrines are a form of punishment. (Jeppie also reports that, so far, Timbuktu’s great collections of Islamic manuscripts, which he studies, seem not to have been threatened.) The puritanical religious views that Ansar Dine claims to espouse, Jeppie says, derive from the relatively recent Wahhabi movement, “born in Arabia in the 18th century,” and have been taught to today’s fighters by patrons from Saudi Arabia.

4 Ansar Dine claims that its attacks on the shrines reflect the pure form of Islam practiced by Muhammad’s first followers, but Jeppie and other experts, both Western and Muslim, say that misinterprets the historical evidence. There was always debate about showy entombment in shrines and mosques, but the practice was established from early on and has never been definitively rejected in Islamic law. “All you have to do is look at the Taj Mahal,” says Sheila Canby, head of the Metropolitan’s Islamic department, to see that “the attitude toward tombs has varied.” She calls Ansar Dine’s violent rejection “a very, very extreme view.”

5 Even with the most recent destruction, however, the particular artistic culture of Mali gives a glimmer of hope. Thomas Schuler, chair of the Disaster Relief Task Force of the International Council of Museums, has been denouncing the damage. But he points out that locals have a more flexible view of their shrines’ destruction. “The people in Timbuktu say, ‘Let them destroy them. We will rebuild them.’ That’s why people don’t defend [the shrines] to the death.” Art historians have started to talk about this as a “substitution” principle, found in many cultures, whereby something new can stand in for something old that has been lost. It’s not always the physical substance of an artwork that matters, but its shape or location and the traditions those point to. (Timbuktu’s shrines are made of mud brick and so have alwaysrequired rebuilding.)

Adapted from Newsweek, July 23 & 30, 2012

NORTH KOREAN BRIDES

By Melanie Kirkpatrick

1 Steven Kim, an American businessman from Long Island, New York, may be the world’s leading expert on the market for North Korean brides. He acquired this expertise accidentally. He likes to say it was God’s plan.

2 A decade or so ago he was living in China, overseeing the manufacture of chairs he sold to retail clients in the United States, when he heard about a secret church that catered to the South Korean businessmen who worked in the Shenzhen industrial zone, not far from his apartment. It wasn’t registered with the Chinese government, as required by law, so it operated underground, billing itself as a cultural association. There was no sign on the door and no cross on the roof. The 100 or so congregants had learned about the church as Kim had, by word of mouth.

3 Kim, a practicing Christian, became a regular attendee. One Sunday he noticed two shabbily dressed men seated in a corner of the room. After worship, he went up to them, said hello, and learned to  his astonishment that they were from North Korea. They had escaped across the Tumen River to northeast China and traveled 2,000 miles south to Guangdong province, a journey that took two months. Theyhoped to find a way to slip across the border into Hong Kong. “They came to church asking for help,” he says. “But the church would only feed them, give them a few dollars, and let them go.”

4 Kim was outraged. “I asked the pastor, ‘Why do you let them go?’” “Because we’re afraid,” the pastor replied. “If we’re caught helping North Koreans, the church will be shut down.” Kim took the two men home.

5 That was the start. Kim began to assist North Korean refugees clandestinely. He provided safe houses, food, clothing, and money; eventually he organized secret passage across China to third countries. Before long, he gained a reputation along the new underground railroad as someone North Koreans could count on for assistance. Many of them turned out to be women fleeing from the Chinese men who had purchased them as brides.

6 Today he runs 318 Partners, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization dedicated to rescuing trafficked women in China.

7 Kim clearly has his hands full. The only practical escape route for fugitives from North Korea is  through China, and human-rights groups say roughly 80 percent of those thousands of refugees arewomen and girls who have become “commodities for purchase,” in Kim’s words.

Adapted from Newsweek, August 27, 2012