互联大事

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  What are the two different ways in which snake poison acts?

  How it came about that snakes manufactured poison is a mystery. Over the periods their saliva, a mild, digestive juice like our own, was converted into a poison that defies analysis even today. It was not forced upon them by the survival competition; they could have caught and lived on prey wit ...

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  How much of each year do spiders spend killing insects?

  Why, you may wonder, should spiders be our friends? Because they destroy so many insects, and insects include some of the greatest enemies of the human race. Insects would make it impossible for us to live in the world; they would devour all our crops and kill our flocks and herds, if it were n ...

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  What is going on when a person experiences rapid eye-movements during sleep?

  It is fairly clear that sleeping period must have some function, and because there is so much of it the function would seem to e important. Speculations about is nature have been going on for literally thousands of years, and one odd finding that makes the problem puzzling is that it looks very ...

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  What would you say is the main characteristic of porpoises?

  There has long been a superstition among mariners that porpoises will save drowning men by pushing them to the surface, or protect them from sharks by surrounding them in defensive formation. Marine Studio biologists have pointed out that, however intelligent they may be, it is probably a mista ...

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  What factor helped to spread the disease of myxomatosis?

  In the early days of the settlement of Australia, enterprising settlers unwisely introduced the European rabbit. This rabbit had no natural enemies in the Antipodes, so that it multiplied with that promiscuous abandon characteristic of rabbits. It overran a whole continent. It caused devastatio ...

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  What is the author’s main argument about the modern city?

  In the organization of industrial life the influence of the factory upon the physiological and mental state of the workers has been completely neglected. Modern industry is based on the conception of the maximum production at lowest cost, in order that an individual or a group of individuals ma ...

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  Why is secrecy particularly important in the chemical industries?

  Two factors weigh heavily against the effectiveness of scientific research in industry. One is the general atmosphere of secrecy in which it is carried out, the other the lack of freedom of the individual research worker. In so far as any inquiry is a secret one, it naturally limits all those e ...

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  Why do small errors make it impossible to predict the weather system with a high degree of accuracy?

  Beyond two or three days, the world’s best weather forecasts are speculative, and beyond six or seven they are worthless. The Butterfly Effect is the reason. For small pieces of weather — and to a global forecaster, small can mean thunderstorms and blizzards — any predictio ...

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  What do oilmen want to achieve as soon as they strike oil?

  The deepest holes of all made for oil, and they go down to as much as 25,0000 feet. But we not need to send men down to get the oil our, as we must with other mineral deposits. The holes are only borings, less than a foot in diameter. My particular experience is largely in oil, and the search f ...

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  Why is there no risk to the customer when a bank prints the customer’s name on his cheques?

  When anyone opens a current account at a bank, he is lending the bank money, repayment of which he may demand at any time, either in cash or by drawing a cheque in favour of another person. Primarily, the banker-customer relationship is that of debtor and creditor — who is which depending ...

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  What, according to the author, is the best way to overcome the fear of death as you get older?

  Some old people are oppressed by the fear of death. In the young there is a justification for this feeling. Young men who have reason to fear that they will be killed in battle may justifiably feel bitter in the thought that they have cheated of the best things that life has to offer. But in an ...

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  What does the computer industry thrive on apart from anarchy?

  Technology trends may push Silicon Valley back to the future. Carver Mead, a pioneer in integrated circuits and a professor of computer science at the California Institute of Technology, notes there are now work-stations that enable engineers to design, test and produce chips right on their des ...

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