地球是我们赖以生存的家园，她为我们提供了生存所必需的物质——氧气和水。她用慈母般的温情哺育了一代又一代的人。当我们恣意地享受地球给予的一切时，是否已经了解地球了呢？地球的力量到底有多大！

Of all our planet’s forces, perhaps none has greater power over us than water. For me, water is the most magical force on earth. The presence of water shapes, renews and nourishes our planet.

Oh, my God ! You get all wet there!

It’s our planet’s lifeblood. It pumps through it continuously, delivering vital ingredients for life.

Ah,it’s glorious!

Water makes us alive. Yet, water is just one of the ways that the power of the planet has shaped our lives. The earth has immense power and yet that’s rarely mentioned in our history books. I’m here to change that. I’m exploring four great planetary forces that have influenced our history.

The power of the deep earth; the few technological innovation-wind, that has shaped the fate of entire continents; and fire, which gave us the power to conquer the planet.

But I’m going to start with water, the magic of water is that it’s constantly transforming itself, shifting between guises and from place to place, our struggle to control it has been behind the rise and fall of some of the greatest civilizations on earth.

The center of the Sahara Desert in North Africa, one of the driest places on earth.

I’m over six hours drive from civilization. Temperatures here regularly reach 100 degrees Fahrenheit, but there’s less than half an inch of rainfall each year.

Ah,the whole things are moving. It’s like walking on water.

Yet, hidden amongst these dry dunes are clues that point to the dramatic influence the planet has had on human lives.
I’ve come here because although you’ll never know it, the story of this place is all about water. The clues are etched into that rock face there. Prehistoric rock outdating about 6,000 years in the pattern of the almost unlikely characteristics you’ve ever seen.

Whoa, what is that? Is it a giraffe? It’s a giraffe. Look at that, here is a neck, here is its ear. Look at that, it’s an eye, isn’t it? That’s really natural, isn’t it? And that looks like a giraffe, dipping its head/ and drinking some water. We’ve got a herd of giraffes here.

Looks like two cats. They are fighting. That, what is that? Looks like a figure of, a figure of a man who’s wearing a burqa. And that’s clearly a crocodile which is especially odd here, that’s an aquatic animal. It doesn’t just paddle around. It needs a lot of water to live in. I find all the creatures that are depicted on these rocks are not desert animals. They need wet conditions.

In such a parched wilderness, how can this be? The only explanation is that 6,000 years ago, this place was wet. Once you know what to look for, the evidence is all around.

The Dead Sea is the lowest point on earth and runs more than 50 miles in length and stretches 11 miles across its wildest point, bordering Israel, The West Bank and Jordan. Large sections of the coast are fenced off and sign posted in Hebrew and English: Warning of sinkholes.

The sea’s dropping water levels is leading to dangerous consequences. In April, an Israeli hiker wandered into an area that had no warning signs and was critically injured when he fell into a sinkhole.

“Due to the rapid drop, the ground water are now facing with the salt rock and the salt rock is undergoing a very rapid dissolution. Cavities（空腔） are formed inside and eventually the surface collapses down to these cavities and these are therefore the sinkholes.”

Geologist Eli Raz himself became the victim of a sinkhole several years ago.

“(I) just remembered that I was busy by documenting a new sinkhole, and then suddenly I found myself covered by a pile of avalanche on the bottom of a sinkhole.”

He spent 14 hours at the bottom before his rescue, and even wrote his will, not knowing he would be saved.

“I just can tell you that it was terrible, very frightened and in the first place, in the beginning, I started to write my will without knowing that somebody will find it of course.”

Now Raz is working to save others from the similar fate, leading an effort to map the sinkholes that are spreading on the banks of the saltwater lake.

The formation of the Dead Sea sinkholes are caused by a drop in the sea’s water level due to limited rainfall, the diversion of much needed water from its upstream sources, pollution, and industrial evaporation of water by the Dead Sea mineral industry. As the sea levels drop, high levels of salt are left behind in the soil. When fresh water washes in and dissolves the salts, cavities are created, causing sinkholes.

Detecting potential sinkholes is crucial because they not only damage the environment, but pose a direct threat to the tourist industry and agriculture.

These underground pits can now be better detected by a new monitoring system. The Geophysical Institute（地球物理研究所） of Israel, along with the Geological Survey of Israel, has been trying to locate sinkholes when they are being created and to follow them. The monitoring can help reveal dangerous sinkhole zones in their early stages.

“We developed a methodology of combining geophysical prediction of sinkholes appearing at the Dead Sea costal plane. What we have (as) a problem now is we need to create at least (a) few geophysical teams with the aim of the constant geophysical monitoring of the dangerous area.”

When a sinkhole is deemed dangerous, reportedly, crews can fill it in with cement or initiate its collapse before it would happen naturally.

In the 80 years that records have been kept, the water level in the Dead Sea has dropped by over 65 feet. The sea has shrunk by more than a third. And in the absence of any expensive water replenishment（补充，补给） plan, the sea is expected to shrink to about two thirds of its current size over roughly the next century.

Only one westerner has ever been allowed to become part of this closed way of life. It is now, more than 20 years since Liza Dalby, a US citizen, lived in Japan as a geisha.

A blue-eyed girl playing the shamisen / samisen, singing songs. It was the first time in geisha history. She got better at walking, sitting on her knees and wearing the kimono. She gradually became the part.

Liza had immaculate qualifications to become a geisha. She spent her teenage years in Japan, learning the language and the shamisen, the traditional geisha instrument. She then went on to make the first ever study of geisha for her doctorate before becoming a geisha herself.

I didn’t really stand out, then I would come, I sit next to someone and often he would start talking and then suddenly he’d kind of look at me, you know, noticed that my eyes were not deep brown and said, wait a minute, you are not Japanese, what’s going on here? And all the geisha would wait for that moment. I mean, sometimes they did this on purpose. They wouldn’t tell the customers that the foreign geisha was here, and then someone would notice, they would just break out, blether that was so funny.

Of course walking is something you have to give up the way that you walk when you’re wearing western clothes, because of the kimono, you know, in cases your legs are rather tightly, so you, you have to take smaller steps. And I would always forget to do this especially, if I was in a rush. And then my feet would start flapping, and one of the older geisha would scold me, you know, not to walk that way. But as if like, it’s like learning a whole new body language.

“When a woman enters the geisha community, when she decides that she’s going to make this for life, she makes a very conscious choice that she’s not going to marry, she’s not going to be a housewife, so the roads really diverge there. Geisha don’t marry, they don’t follow the, the middle-class way. They, you know, they deal them in the world of presenting themselves as works of art.

They are works of art, but they are also rented by the hour to entertain men.

Even though a prostitute’s livelihood is sex and a geisha’s livelihood isn’t exactly sex, the fact is that a prostitute can’t really determine who she is gonna spend the next hour with, and, and neither can a geisha.

Artist by day, companions by night, the image of the geisha has always been clouded by prostitution. From lowly beginnings, geisha slowly rose in stature until in time, they would reach the forefront of Japanese society. Once sweethearts of Samurai, in the Second World War they waved goodbye to their kamikaze heroes. How has a fragile world of the geisha retained its status through 400 years of turbulent history, and what became of those geisha who believed they could escape their traditions and find true love in the west?

To understand the geisha, you have to know their past. Their story begins 4 centuries ago in the days of the Shogun. Geisha first appeared in the early 1600s. After centuries of infighting among rival warrior lords, Japan became a united country under a military dictator or shogun. The government was set up in Edo, site of present day Tokyo. Under Shogun rule, Japan isolated itself entirely from the rest of the world for hundreds of years. The Shogun’s power was absolute.

One of the things this government, which was very impressive, did, was to stamp out, for example, Christianity and another was to take all of the prostitution in that kind of serve and put it into restricted licensed quarters to control it.

The pleasure quarters became places of sexual freedom. Exclusive prostitutes or courtesans would entertain Samurai warriors and merchants at lavish banquets. It was here that the first geisha appeared. Surprisingly, they were men. They assumed the role of court gesture.

These were entertainers who came into the parties that the courtesans had when they were entertaining customers at banquets, playing music, dancing, you know, telling jokes, this kind of thing, and these were originally men.

宇宙大爆炸是由宇宙中红移现象而推论得出的，宇宙在加速膨胀是有事实依据的，因此得出宇宙是由大爆炸中产生的结论，这些数据会激发人们无数的遐想，不可否认，人类已经开始了探索宇宙的新的旅程，这个过程肯定是刺激的。或许有一天人们发现红移现象是由另外原因产生的，那么大爆炸说就瞬间瓦解了。

[flash url=”http://down02.putclub.com/newupdate/vaonline/Discovery/eMule/earthmade/putclub.com_BigBang1.flv”]

Billions and billions of galaxies, the universe is so vast. We can’t even imagine what those numbers mean. But 14 billion years ago, none of these existed until the Big Bang.

-The Big Bang is the origin of space and the origin of time itself.

We take a journey through space and time, from the beginning to the end of the universe itself.

This is our world – cities, forests, oceans, people. Everything in the universe is made from matter created in the first seconds of the Big Bang. Every star, every planet, every atom, every glade of grass, every drop of water.

-Water is ancient. The hydrogen atoms in here were born moments after the Big Bang, then came everything else.

The Big Bang is the defining event of our universe and everything in it. The secrets of our past, our present and our future are locked inside this one moment in time. To unlock the secrets of the Big Bang, we have to travel outside of our own solar system, and journey beyond even our own galaxy. As we travel into deep space, we are actually seeing into the past and getting closer to being able to witness the dawn of time itself, passing the first infant galaxies and the first stars.

[flash url=”http://down02.putclub.com/newupdate/vaonline/Discovery/eMule/earthmade/putclub.com_BigBang2.flv”]

We arrive back at the moments the universe began, and face the biggest questions in all of science.

-This is the Holy Grail of Physics. We want to know why it banged. We want to know what banged. We want to know what was there before the bang.

To get the answers, we’ve built machines the size of cities to simulate conditions when the universe was created, and space telescopes to peer deep into our past.

-We’re getting close to answering the age old questions – why are we here, where did we come from, does the universe, in fact, has a beginning or an end, and the soul, what are they like. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason. We would know the mind of God.

The origin of the Big Bang is the greatest mystery of all time. And the more we learn, the deeper the mystery becomes.

-We like to think that our universe is unique. However, now we are not so sure. Perhaps, there is a multi-verse of universes. Another possibility is that our Big Bang is just one of many Big Bangs. But it may be one of just an infinite number/ of universes and there may be other regions and that infinite number of universes where Big Bang is just happening today.

But there is only one universe we are sure of, and understanding this one is hard enough. Since the late 1920s, everything we know about how our universe works has been turned upside down.

-It’s important to realize how much our picture of the universe is changing in the last century. At the beginning of the 20th century, the conventional wisdom in science was that the universe was static and eternal.

In 1929, that all changed. At the Mount Wilson Observatory above L.A., astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered galaxies aren’t stuck…

Day breaks in Sanaa, Yemen as the call to prayer rouses the inhabitants of this ancient city as it has for hundreds of years. This capital city, nestled at an elevation of over 7,000 feet in the Yemeni highland, is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world.

In the Medieval areas, towering mud-brick houses with white plaster highlights are oddly reminiscent of the spectacular gingerbread city. While in the Labyrinth souks, Yemenis haggle for spice, jewelry and other goods just as they have for centuries.

A walk through these narrow passageways quickly reveals one striking piece of merchandise, an accessory the Yemeni gentleman can’t be without–the Jambiya. These ornate burly knives are worn prominently, tucked into thick embroidered belts. And while they may seem fearsome to western sensibilities, the Jambiya is almost never used as a weapon, instead it serves as a sign of Yemeni manhood.

In the cramped quarters of the souk, blacksmiths intendedly work metal into the unmistakable hook-shaped blades. Rows of gleaming daggers are proudly displayed in market stalls. Their prices range from a few dollars to a staggering one million dollars for a Jambiya with impeccable craftsmanship and illustrious history, but the prestige of these items can come at a high price other than money.

The worth of these daggers is often defined by the handle, traditionally made from rhinoceros horn, price for the unique patina it exhibits. Jambiyas have often been cited as a major underlying cause for rhino poaching. Despite bans by the Yemeni government and international community on the trade of horns, they continue to be used by some knife makers. Conservationists and government officials have tried to stamp out the use by encouraging alternative materials, like water buffalo horn or camel hoofs, but in this country where change creeps slowly and tradition remains strong, a rhino horn Jambiya may be a steady symbol for some time to come.

New Words and Phrases

day break 黎明
rouse 唤醒, 鼓舞, 激起
inhabitants 居民
nestle 依偎, （舒适地）安顿
elevation 提拔, 海拔, 提高
Yemeni 也门的，也门人
highland 高地, 山地
inhabit 居住于, 占据, 栖息
Medieval 中世纪的
plaster 石膏, 灰泥, 膏药
reminiscent 回忆的, 怀旧的, 耽于回想的；回忆者, 回忆录作者
spectacular 壮观的, 令人惊叹的
gingerbread 姜饼, 华而不实的装饰

Why is this diver burrowing into the bottom of this mini lake.She is literally disappearing into the sand and gravel of the water’s floor.Only debris and the occasional bubbles from her breathing tank are visible. She is part of a project, largely funded by National Geographic, to dive into the sacred pools of the ancient Maya.

“Our exploration team discovered this upwelling, it’s an underwater spring upwelling, and it provides this magical experience because it’s located at the bottom of a very large crater, and you can come down, down, down, down into this large crater, and in the bottom is this boiling mass of sediment that’s actually being rolled and boiled, it’s almost like a natural lava lamp, went in over the lip of the crater, descended down into the bottom, and I didn’t want to have any interference with the water that was already in the pool, and so it required a little bit of digging,and frankly it was extremely low visibility down there but below the actual base of sediment, there’s about one and a half meters more space. The water coming out of the bottom of this spring,coming into the pool,is chemically quite distinct from the water in the pool.”

But this is just the beginning. The dives also revealed clues to past life here, and the first for the country of Belize. Scientists discovered several fossil beds around 60-90 feet below the surface, including femur bones the size of a bowling ball. They also found tusks and \ bones. These are the first recorded fossils ever found in Belize.

“And we left those in place. We have only removed a few small fossils so we can actually determine, are they fossilized, or bone, and they are definitely fossilized, so we know they have to be of a certain age. but were they here , were these megafuta present during occupation by humans about 20,000 years ago , 15,000 years ago, or are they much older?”

The dives were made in several pools in central Belize earlier this year in an area known as Cara Blanca, The researchers found evidence that the eight pools of the 25 they studied are likely connected through underground passages.Principal Investigator Lisa Lucero says the major goal is to look for archaeological remains underwater.

“Because the Maya considered openings in the earth caves, water bodies , as porters to the underworld of \. And because the thousands of caves that have been found have offerings, ancient Maya offerings , we just knew there be offerings at the bottom of the pool, so we came with the goal of trying to dive to look for these offerings.”

Though they didn’t find offerings on the first dives, they did find surrounding sherds in a pool near remains of Maya buildings, constructed around 1,100 to 1,300 years ago.Lucero says there is no indication this area had many residences, but rather was likely a pilgrimage site, with Maya traveling here from hundreds of miles away,because at least one of the pools was found to be around 200 feet deep, and littered with trees and silt, more sophisticated diving equipment is needed for future dives. And Lucero believes there are more significant Maya offerings at these depths.

The research is being conducted under the auspices of the Belize Institute of Archaeology, and the scientists plan to return for more exploration.

New Words and Phrases

diver 跳水者,潜水员
burrow 挖掘(洞穴), 钻进
literally 逐字地,按照字面上地,不夸张地
gravel 碎石
debris 碎片,残骸

Ever since man first began setting out for new lands by small boats heading over unknown horizons, he’s been searching for among other things, paradise. And paradise in the Tuamotus, a small archipelago in the Pacific about 200 miles northeast of Tahiti, means coconuts, digging clams, spear fishing and camping on the beach with the surf lulling to sleep.

But paradise today is not without its concerns. The biggest worry here is global warming. The 78 atolls that make up the two Tuamotus are just thin coral reefs, at their highest they are 10 feet above sea level.

As the average temperature of the oceans climb, estimates are that many of these living, breathing, still growing reefs and the lagoons they protect will very likely disappear in the next 50 to 100 years as the seas rise.

Frank Murphy is a University of California of Berkeley-trained marine biologist.

“It struck me the other day when my children arrived at Tahiti and saw that for the first time, that actually in their life time, this could disappear, and it’s pretty amazing.”

Fishing is a primary source of both food and cash. Doriat will take a dozen big My-Mys from his plywood boat which will sail on the island of Fakarava. Gathering and drying the white meat of coconut known as copra is the chain’s biggest business. A 100-pound sack sells for 38 dollars. A hard working family will produce 100 sacks a month.

In the past 20 years, a new economy has boomed in Tuamotus – black pearls. Pamala and Valda are 22 and have their own pearl growing business on a tiny spit of sand in the middle of a lagoon at Tuwao. They have thousands of oysters drowned just below the surface. Valda takes daily care of the boxes of the oysters, making sure they are close tightly to protect them from their natural predators. Pamala works 8 hours a day, seeding as many as 400 oysters a day. Once planted below the surface, each oyster will nurture a pearl for a year and a half.

Outsiders come looking for paradise and leave with many questions.

Is it ideal here?

Certainly.

Is it paradise?

As close as you can come, a tropical dream comes true.

Yet it is clear these tiny spits of land at the midst of a giant sea of blue paradise are at some risk. These westerners are happy to have seen a glimpse of paradise since it may soon change forever.

New Words and Phrases

horizon
the line or circle that forms the apparent boundary between earth and sky.

Tuamotus

archipelago
a large group or chain of islands,a large group or chain of islands

Tahiti
the principal island of the Society Islands, in the S Pacific

spear-fishing
to fish underwater using a spearlike implement used manually or propelled mechanically

lull
to put to sleep or rest by soothing means,to give or lead to feel a false sense of safety; cause to be less alert, aware, or watchful.

The United States has started the largest infrastructure project in human history, a complete top-to-bottom overhaul of our entire electrical supply grid, which is getting new intelligent devices at every step from the power company’s generators to the devices in our homes and making sure every component is secure from attack, while also elegant control of water, gas and sewage systems. And this total make-over must happen while the whole system is operating online at peak capacity, while it’s growing in fact. In short, we’ve begun building a smarter power grid, one that works pretty much like the internet. You could call it, the InterGrid.

Our aging power grid system is starting to fail. We’ve seen more blackouts and brownouts, and it runs inefficiently, wasting carbon into the air. New clean sources like wind and solar which make power only part of the time need intelligent pathways to get the consumers, and the Americans prefer the power they use to have been produced by Americans. Right now, our fragile, less-than-smart power grid, interconnect nearly 10,000 utility plants, that’s well over a million mega watts of generating capacity. About half it comes from burning coal. At least one third of the United States carbon output, maybe more, comes from power generation. Almost one fifth of our power steams onto the grid from the boiling water, heated by the nation’s 104 nuclear reactors. Nearly six percent of the electricity used in the US comes from flowing or falling water, hydroelectric power generated at river dams.

But the same six percent of all the electric power that’s produced gets lost before it gets where it’s supposed to go. It either melts away as heat as it travels long more than a quarter million miles of metallic wire, or it simply shorts to grid, undetected somewhere within the constant maintenance headache of the decaying patchwork of cable towers and poles.

Reclaiming just that six percent would be the equivalent of taking 55 million cars off the world in terms of the petroleum saved and green house gases prevented. For the past quarter century, the peak demand for power has been outpacing investment in new transmission line and power regulation systems that can only react when something goes wrong. They are not good at spotting problems before they happen. The old grid flies perilously close to the breaking point, every hot day in sunlight cities.

According the Department of Energy, US businesses use over a hundred billion dollars a year to blackouts and brownouts. The power that does arrive has to be used as soon as it gets there. But up till now, there hasn’t been a good way for consumers to tell the power company how much power they might want to purchase. To keep our electric grid from grinding to a halt, the new InterGrid will work on a principle known as prices to devices.

If you knew the electric rates were going to spike very high this afternoon, you might decide to leave your home air conditioner off while you are out of the house. Well, suppose your air conditioner, in fact your entire home, knew it before you. What if those device, your thermostats, washers, driers, refrigerators, Jacuzzis could make decisions about how much energy to purchase according to your preset preference and tell the utility company what you are willing to pay. And that’s truly speaking truth to power.

To see exactly how the InterGrid will listen to your demands and how it will keep us healthy and secure, please play Part Two of the electric InterGrid.

In Part I of the Electric InterGrid , we saw how consumers and utility companies could both save money and liberate much less carbon into the Atmosphere, if our power network became intelligent and self-aware.

But for this idea to work, every team that makes electricity and most things that use it, must interact with one another. Like the Internet, devices on the InterGrid must be plugged in play, so that any device can hear or speak to any other. And like the Internet, the InterGrid will grow a little with each clever new gadget.

Now, the downside of the power grid that works just like a web, is that it takes close to hacker attacks, launched by pranksters, but also from organized and well-funded terrorists. Soon, every smart meter in every home and business will be something akin to computer virus protection.

The InterGrid must also defend against assaults from Planet Earth itself. Let’s say one day, maybe 10 years from now, a monster hurricane comes ashore, knocking off power. The intelligent InterGrid instantly begins matching energy sources to critical needs, places like hospitals and fire stations must be back online first.

But this InterGrid isn’t depending only on utility power from power plants far away. After all, lines may be down over a large area. It’s also intelligently hunting a whole local energy sources. The solar panels are on your neighbor’s roof, lock logging a hybrid car in your drive lane. Refuels in your daughter’s school – every little bit helps.

Smartly switching power to vital local services like a phone system or a police station is called Ilingding. And it can keep whole communities afloat in times of trouble.

To keep powers flowing, operators must know what the grid is doing, at every level from local streets to international transition lines, to keep small failures from cascading out of control. This is a prototype for a systme to do just that. It’s called VERDY – Visual Energy resources Dynamically on Earth. It overlays different kinds of realtime information on googleearth, bringing weather data, showing which specific power lines are out, and who owns what wires, and how much of the population is affected. It can even pull up web cans of trafic, and evacuation routes.

Believing where everything is completely normal, utility managers still want to know as much as they possibly can, because, frankly, they prefer to produce only as much power as customers are willing to pay for.

Electricity moves essentially at the speed of light. If it is not used, as soon as it’s generated, it goes to waste. But the alternative of black-out is obviously quite inevitable. So, the current grid, depends on what the utility companies call “Peaker Plants.” Nobody likes them. Peakers cost money to build and maintain. They run on fuel that isn’t bought at the best market prices. So “Peak Power” becomes expensive power. Yet “Peaker Plants” sit idle most of the time.

This new intelligent InterGrid could eliminate most “Peakers” by anticipating consumers’ demands through interactive price signals. As engineers say, “If you can measure it, you can manage it.” But ultimately the InterGrid will be judged on how well it does 4 things:

Keeping money in consumer’s pockets;
Making communities safer, more secure and icreasingly self-reliant;
Supporting stable power utilities running on sustainable domestic resources;
Protecting and improving earth environment.

So, what will it cost to do all this? Estimate for the total investment needed here in the United States at about 1.5 trillion dollars over 20 years beginning 2010. What amazingly, that’s just about the amount of money needed anyway, just to keep the lights on, whether we make the grid smarter, cleaner and safer, or just simply keep it working alone.

Nature’s latest report from the world of paleontology challenges the assumptions made by everyone until now about when animals first walked the earth.

This is footprint of early tetrapods. We have here, for example, digits, impressions, and something like their pads. This is important.

I’ve been working personally in this field since the mid 1990s. I’ve had over 20 publications in ‘Nature’, and this is the most important paper that I have ever worked on.

Footprints in a Polish quarry tell the tetrapods which walked the earth 20 million years before we thought any animal had left the sea.

This is your little friend, isn’t it? Oh my word. Oh, wonderful. Look at that!

Until only a few months ago, this was an accurate model of a kind of animal paleontologists believed existed in the Middle Devonian Period, with fins but no proper feet. The new model is quite different.

Legs stick out and thighs can flex forwards. Then, it had to be an animal like this, a primitive land vertebrate, not a fish.

And if you are not sure you believe it, the Nature paper and the full film offer the proof.

New Words and Phrases

paleontology n. 古生物学
footprint n. 脚印，足迹
tetrapods 四足动物
Polish adj. 波兰的，波兰人的，波兰语的 n. 波兰语
quarry n. 采石场，猎获物，出处，被追逐的目标 v. 挖出，苦心找出
Middle Devonian Period 中泥盆纪