2.Listening

Hoaxes in history

Fiji Mermaid: P.T. Barnum concocted this 1842 hoax, employing a phony English explorer to claim he had captured a real mermaid. In fact, the “mermaid” was a dried monkey stuffed halfway inside a large fish. Despite its rather repulsive appearance, the Fiji Mermaid was a public sensation.

Calaveras Skull: In 1866, gold miners unearthed a human skull, which eventually made its way to J.D. Whitney, the California state geologist. Whitney concluded the skull was Pliocene, evidence that humans occupied North America more than 1 million years ago. Later testing found the skull to be modern and attached sediment to be different from surrounding mine soil samples.

Piltdown Man: From 1908 to 1912, gravel-pit workers near Piltdown in southern England uncovered skull fragments and a jawbone that Charles Dawson, an amateur paleontologist, grandly declared to be the “missing link.” For more than three decades, the scientific community generally agreed. In 1953, new tests revealed Piltdown Man to be a fraud: The skull fragments were 50,000 years old; the jawbone was only decades old and from an ape.

Primitive stoneware: For a time, Shinichi Fujimura was considered Japan's greatest archaeologist, revered for his unerring ability to find ancient artifacts, including prehistoric stoneware dating Japanese culture back an astounding 40,000 years. His secret was simple: He planted the stuff himself. In 2000, a newspaper surreptitiously photographed him doing it. Fujimura admitted to a career in fakery and retired in shame.

3.Sight translation 1

Fish scales may point to armour of the future

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scales that protect a quarrelsome fish from the bites of its own fellows as well as from predators may hold the key to the armour of the future, U.S. researchers reported on Sunday. The light, multilayered design of its scales has helped Polypterus senegalus survive for 96 million years, the team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reports. Writing in the journal Nature Materials, the MIT team said they had figured out how it works. Each scale is layered so it deflects the pressure of a crunching bite, they said.

Cracks do not travel far -- the design forces cracks to run in a circle around the penetration site, rather than spreading through the entire scale and leading to catastrophic failure, they said."Many of the design principles we describe -- durable interfaces and energy-dissipating mechanisms, for instance -- may be translatable to human armour systems," MIT's Christine Ortiz, who led the study, said in a statement.With funding from the U.S. Army, Ortiz and colleagues carefully studied scales from P. senegalus, which lives at the bottom of freshwater, muddy shallows and estuaries in Africa.

It is noted for its heavy armour. "The primary predators of P. senegalus are known to be its own species or its carnivorous vertebrate relatives, and biting takes place during territorial fighting and feeding," Ortiz and colleagues wrote in their report. It evolved the armour millions of years ago, when fearsome predators lurked. "In ancient times, many large invertebrate predators existed. For example, the carnivorous eurypterid was a giant arthropod that possessed biting mouth parts, grasping jaws, claws, spines and a spiked tail," they wrote