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Sample translations submitted: 3
English to Chinese: Kitty see, kitty do: cat imitates human, in first scientific demonstration of behavior General field: Science Detailed field: Zoology
Source text - English Ebisu may be the world’s first literal copycat. Researchers have shown the Japanese feline can imitate the actions of her owner under controlled scientific conditions. The ability has only been seen in a handful of creatures, and the find could suggest imitation arose relatively early in mammal evolution.
“It’s really exciting,” says Kristyn Vitale, a cat cognition researcher and animal behaviorist at Unity College. “People think of cats as solitary and antisocial,” she says. “But this study reinforces the idea that they’re watching us and learning from us.”
The find came about via a lucky happenstance. Claudia Fugazza, an ethologist at Eötvös Loránd University, had been studying dog cognition for nearly 10 years using “Do as I do” training. In this method, a researcher first trains a dog or other animal to copy a behavior it already knows—such as rolling over—by saying “Do as I do,” demonstrating the behavior, and then saying “Do it!” The dog is then rewarded for its success. Over time, the animal learns that “Do it!” means “copy me.” The approach can be used to test whether animals can truly imitate—that is, copy actions they have never done before, such as ringing a bell.
Fugazza, who is also a dog trainer, was working with Fumi Higaki, a dog trainer in Ichinomiya, Japan, when Higaki told her she had trained one of her cats with “Do as I do.” The feline, an 11-year-old female named Ebisu (after the Japanese god of prosperity) lived in Higaki’s pet store and was highly food motivated, making her easy to train. “She often snuck into my dog training classes because she knew the people there had good treats,” Higaki says.
Fugazza had wanted to study imitation in other species, and here, shockingly, was a cat that apparently already had the required training. But Ebisu was spooked by strangers. So Higaki conducted the experiments in the evenings at her pet shop, while Fugazza supervised from the far end of the room.
Higaki showed that Ebisu could copy familiar actions, like opening a plastic drawer and biting a rubber string. Then she asked the cat to imitate two new behaviors. While standing before Ebisu, who sat on a countertop next to a cardboard box, Higaki raised her right hand and touched the box. At other times, she bent down and rubbed her face against the box.
In 16 subsequent trials, Ebisu accurately copied her owner more than 81% of the time, the team reports this month in Animal Cognition (see video, above). The fact that the cat used her paw and face to touch the box when her owner used her hand and face, respectively, indicates she was able to “map” her owner’s body parts onto her own anatomy, the team says.
Fugazza says only dolphins, parrots, apes, and killer whales have so far been shown to imitate people. Cats having the same ability, she says, suggests it may be widespread in the animal kingdom, evolving early in animal evolution. And even though the study was conducted on a single cat, Fugazza thinks it’s likely that most cats can imitate people. “I don’t think Ebisu was a genius."
But Claudio Tennie, an ethologist at the University of Tübingen who has studied cognition in dogs and primates, is not impressed. He says it’s impossible to tell from the study whether cats have an innate ability to imitate humans, or whether the intensive “Do as I do” training gave them the skill. “We can train bears to ride motorcycles,” he says. “That doesn’t mean bears ride motorcycles.”
Tennie also notes that both imitations—touching a box with a paw and rubbing a face against a box—are actions a cat might do anyway. And Ebisu may have simply rubbed her face against the box to mask her owner’s scent, he says. “I’m not convinced we’re seeing true imitation.”
Vitale is more optimistic. A few years ago, one of her cats, Bo, started to press a call bell after he saw Vitale do it. “Hopefully other people will replicate this work so we know how widespread this is in cats,” she says.
Unfortunately, that won’t be possible with Ebisu. She developed kidney disease last year and died in June.
Still, co-author Adam Miklosi, a cognitive ethologist at Eötvös Loránd, says more studies on man’s most finicky friend are coming. The research with Ebisu, he says, reveals new ways to train and do cognition experiments with cats, which have been notoriously hard to study. The paper reinforces, for example, that cats—unlike dogs—are likely to show their true abilities only if their owner is present. “We could learn a lot from Ebisu.”
Translation - Chinese 标题:喵星人的“察颜观色”:史上首次科学示范猫咪模仿人类动作
但是图宾根大学(University of Tübingen)的动物行为学者Claudio Tennies对此并不以为然。他曾经对狗和其它灵长类动物的认知能力进行研究。他认为这个研究并不能说明猫咪到底是先天具有这种模仿能力,还是通过大量的“跟我做”训练习得了技能。他提到,“我们可以训练熊骑摩托车,但并不意味着熊天生就会骑摩托车。”
English to Chinese: Ethical or exploitative—should prisoners participate in COVID-19 vaccine trials? General field: Medical Detailed field: Medical (general)
Source text - English As 38 clinical trials seek tens of thousands of volunteers to receive doses of experimental vaccines, researchers are discussing how to find and recruit participants effectively and ethically. Some people who are especially vulnerable to COVID-19 have not been well represented in studies—or represented at all. Prisoners, for instance, have borne a heavy burden of COVID-19, with more than 125,000 U.S. prisoners infected, and more than 1000 dead. But prisoners have also been excluded from the trials out of concern that they might be coerced into participating or exploited if they do.
Now, some researchers argue that including prisoners in studies could offer outsize health benefits. Correctional facilities have experienced many COVID-19 outbreaks and are structurally unsuited to social distancing (among other precautions). And so, the researchers argue, like other people at high risk of catching the disease, prisoners should be allowed to participate in clinical trials.
ScienceInsider spoke with George Annas, a lawyer and bioethicist at Boston University, whose research addresses ethics and human rights in clinical trials, and Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, a sociologist and epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who studies management of infectious disease and substance abuse in incarcerated people. Both have published about health and ethics in holding facilities during the pandemic: In July, Annas wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine about inhumane medical practices in immigrant detention centers and, and in August, Brinkley-Rubinstein and colleagues argued in JAMA that prisoners should be included in vaccine trials.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: What clinical research has been done historically in correctional facilities? Has it been done well?
George Annas: The history is pretty dark. It’s a history of research done without consent, without oversight, and without consequences. It starts in some respects with the Nazis, since Holocaust research—or pretend research, really—was done in prisoners to get scientific information for the German state. Another famous experience was John Charles Cutler’s 1940s experiments in Guatemalan prisons. In those experiments, prisoners were deliberately infected with gonorrhea, syphilis, and chancroid.
Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein: There are lots of instances of prisoners being intentionally infected with diseases in order to develop new drugs, including malaria and hepatitis C. Horrible things happened at San Quentin [State Prison], including giving prisoners experimental testicular transplants. I think dark is the right word.
Q: Is any COVID-19 vaccine research taking place in correctional facilities? Has anyone put forward serious proposals to do such research?
L.B.R.: There was some conversation at the federal level at the initiation of large vaccine trials to include people involved in some way with the criminal justice system. My colleagues and I had a couple of phone calls with people involved in running those trials to see if it was something they’d entertain. There was some openness to it. But ultimately, including incarcerated populations felt too cumbersome. Between the ethical risks and the operational obstacles to actually get the sites up and running, it would have required a lot of extra effort.
G.A.: Up until recently, there’s really been no excuse to do research in these settings. But it’s a strange and perhaps intriguing group to study, because they’re almost definitely going to be exposed to the virus. So, it could give you answers you may not get if you trial the general population—who may not ever be exposed. That’s why we’re looking again. I’m not a big fan of prison research, but I am a big fan of science, so I think we should look at all these things again.
L.B.R.: Still, I think part of this conversation should be focused on people on probation or parole—the high-risk population that is criminal justice involved, but not presently incarcerated.
G.A.: Yeah. I’d be much more amenable to efforts to bring people on probation or parole into trials. They would be unshackled, literally, from some of the risks of exploitation we think about for prisoners who receive perks for “good” behavior and punishment for “bad” behavior.
Q: Could this kind of research actually benefit incarcerated people if they participate?
L.B.R.: It definitely could, assuming the vaccine works. Incarcerated people do have different risks, in terms of the barriers they face to getting certain elements of routine health care along with their potential to be exploited. But they also potentially would gain more from vaccination, given these settings are extreme amplifiers of infection.
G.A.: But the risk if an experimental vaccine doesn’t work is that these individuals won’t only be disappointed, but they’ll feel they were lied to or exploited.
L.B.R.: Another big part about why understanding these contexts is important is that we do eventually want vaccines to be made available to these populations. But there are lots of implementation issues that are very particular to jails and prisons. How do we store the vaccines under potentially very specific conditions? How do we monitor patients for side effects after injections? How we manage any needed follow-up, like a booster shot? We need to get expertise to optimize these programs when vaccines are eventually deployed. I don’t think that alone is justification to do a trial, but it is such a big part of vaccines being effective once they are approved. It’s something we’ll have to figure out.
Q: Could there be broader public health advantages for doing COVID-19 vaccine research in correctional facilities? Would experimental use of vaccines in correctional facilities benefit staff, neighboring communities, and more distant ones?
L.B.R.: If the experimental vaccines work, then the public health benefit of focusing vaccine resources—even during trials—on correctional facilities cannot be overemphasized. We’ve already seen that jail churn plays a tremendous role in community transmission.
G.A.: To me, it’s a different experiment. You can’t use community results to justify research on individuals. The risk-benefit analysis needs to come out right for the individual before they can consent to being in the trial.
Q: If such research is undertaken, how will we know whether ethical safeguards did enough to protect participants’ rights?
G.A.: There probably is no replacement for asking the participants themselves. Did they feel exploited? Did they feel used? Did they feel fulfilled? Did they feel part of something bigger?
L.B.R.: This is really at the crux of the issue. We’d have to ask, but also to appoint oversight boards that have prisoner representation. And we’d have to adopt other safeguards to ensure we are doing things ethically.
Q: Would giving prisoners the option to participate in a vaccine trial set a precedent for future research? What about continuing to withhold access?
G.A.: I think the question of “if not now, when?” is a very good one. We have a worldwide pandemic with a giant prisoner population that’s very susceptible to the disease and is dying from it. If we’re not going to permit research in that circumstance, we’re never going to permit it.
L.B.R.: Also, if we can figure out how to do this right—given the stakes right now—that could give back some element of power or respect that is otherwise not present in these places.
G.A.: It’s a question of whether we treat prisoners as human beings with agency, who are allowed to participate in something for the public good.
L.B.R.: Our approach to experimentation in prisons has been very binary: a history of serious abuses of power when we have run trials, versus the decision to completely avoid including prisoners in trials. We have to ask ourselves whether there’s a middle path.
G.A.: And considering a middle path, but then deciding it’s too much work—that would be an extreme position, too.
Q: As the prospect of an approved vaccine nears, fierce debate surrounds who should receive it first. According to current Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance, prisoners are not considered separate from the general population, putting them last in line. In contrast, a draft proposal released this month by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine said prisoners should get vaccinated after health care workers, but before the general population. Where do you think incarcerated people belong on the priority list?
L.B.R.: Based on the evidence have about outbreaks, incarcerated people should be at the top tier. There’s a clear connection between what happens in these institutions and what happens in the community. When we have infections that spread in jails or prisons like wildfire, and staff going in and out and in and out, we’re making COVID infection more likely everywhere. If the only thing you cared about was your own health, you would still make the decision to prioritize them.
G.A.: People at the highest risk should receive the treatment first. That includes prisoners. It’s that simple, really.
针对这个议题,《科学·知情人》(ScienceInsider)采访了两位学者,与他们进行了探讨。他们分别是来自波士顿大学的律师及生物伦理学家George Annas,致力于研究临床试验所涉及的伦理与人权问题;北卡罗莱纳大学教堂山分校的社会学与流行病学家Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein,其研究方向是传染病管理与服刑人员的药物滥用现象。这两位学者都曾发表过关于在新冠疫情期间如何保障监狱等矫正机关的健康卫生与伦理的文章。7月,Annas在《新英格兰医学杂志》(The New England Journal of Medicine)中发表了一篇文章,讨论在移民拘留中心的不人道医疗实践 。8月,Brinkley-Rubinstein和他的同事在《美国医学会杂志》(JAMA)中提出服刑人员应该被纳入到疫苗试验之中。
为内容简洁、清晰,一下采访对话经过编辑。
问:历史上有过哪些临床研究是在监狱进行的?它们的结果如何?
Annas:这种研究有着非常残忍的历史。它们没有监管与许可,不计后果。纳粹一开始将大屠杀佯装成科研,借口为国家获取科学的信息,对囚犯进行实验研究。1940年,John Charles Cutler在危地马拉监狱进行了另外一系列臭名昭著的人体试验,他们有计划地让犯人们感染淋病、梅毒、软下疳。
English to Chinese: To survive frigid nights, hummingbirds cool themselves to record-low temperatures General field: Science Detailed field: Zoology
Source text - English High in the Andes, thousands of meters above sea level, speedy hummingbirds defy near-freezing temperatures. These tiny flyers endure the cold with a counterintuitive trick: They lower their body temperature—sometimes as much as 33°C—for hours at a time, new research suggests.
“It’s a capacity that’s just incredible,” says Anusha Shankar, a physiological ecologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, who was not involved with the study.
Among vertebrates, hummingbirds have the highest metabolism for their size. With a metabolic rate roughly 77 times that of an average human, they need to feed nearly continuously. But when it gets too cold or dark to forage, maintaining a normal body temperature is energetically draining. Instead, the small animals can cool their internal temperature by 10°C to 30°C. This slows their metabolism by as much as 95% and protects them from starvation, says Blair Wolf, a physiological ecologist at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.
In this state, called torpor, a bird is motionless and unresponsive. “You wouldn’t even know it was alive if you picked it up,” Wolf says. But when the morning comes and it’s time to feed, he says, the birds quickly warm themselves back up again. “It’s like hibernation but regulated on an even tighter schedule.”
Wolf and his colleagues wanted to compare how different hummingbird species utilized torpor at higher elevations. So in March 2015, they traveled 3800 meters above sea level to the Peruvian Andes, where nightly temperatures dip near freezing. They captured 26 hummingbirds from six different species, including the 12-centimeter-long black metaltail (Metallura phoebe) and the giant hummingbird (Patagona gigas), which is nearly twice the size of the metaltail and is the largest member of the hummingbird family.
The team placed each bird in a small roosting enclosure near the campsite and inserted a tiny wire into their cloaca, an all-purpose hole that birds use to excrete waste, mate, and—in females—lay eggs. This wire tracked the birds’ body temperatures overnight, letting the scientists know when the animals cooled down and warmed back up.
Not only did every species of hummingbird go into torpor, but several reached surprisingly chilly temperatures. One black metaltail hummingbird’s body temperature dipped to 3.3°C, the lowest ever recorded in birds or nonhibernating mammals, the researchers report today in Biology Letters. (The Arctic ground squirrel, which hibernates for weeks at a time, can lower its body temperature below freezing.)
On average, hummingbirds in torpor reached body temperatures of 5°C to 10°C, 26°C or more lower than when they are active. In humans, when body temperature drops by just 2°C, we become hypothermic.
The closer a hummingbird’s internal temperature is to the outdoor air, the less energy they need to spend on any metabolic process, such as keeping warm and maintaining a normal heart rate, Shankar explains. Although hummingbird hearts can beat by 1000 to 1200 beats per minute in flight, this can slow to as low as 50 beats per minute in torpor, Wolf says.
Cooling down has a trade-off, though, as motionless birds make easy prey. Although this would be a big risk at lower altitudes, Wolf says, the high Andes are relatively predator free for these tiny birds. "They aren’t worth much as far as a meal goes.”
Wolf next wants to explore how the birds’ bodies adapt to such cool temperatures. In humans, doctors can artificially cool the body for a few hours, placing it in metabolic slow motion during cardiac surgery, but “hummingbirds are doing this naturally,” he says. “To do that every night is a pretty incredible feat.”
Translation - Chinese 标题:挑战鸟类最低体温,蜂鸟如何“速冻”自己至3.3 ℃