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2017-01-31 Special English
This is Special English. I&`&m Ryan Price in Beijing. Here is the news.
China will quadruple its new energy vehicle annual output to 2 million by 2020.
A government plan released by the Industry and Information Technology noted that by 2025, at least one in every five cars sold in China will be a new energy model.
Last year, China produced 517,000 new energy vehicles. The country has been the world&`&s top seller of such environment-friendly cars since 2015. The cumulative sale has exceeded 1 million.
New energy vehicles include battery electric cars, plug-in hybrids, and fuel-cell cars.
Last year, three top Chinese electric carmakers sold their models in more than 30 countries and regions around the world.
The government will continue to improve policies, boost research and development, invest in charging infrastructure construction, and promote international cooperation to help the sector grow.
In terms of charging infrastructure, China built 100,000 public charging poles in 2016, ten times the figure in 2015. A comprehensive charging grid has taken shape in big cities including Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen.
China witnessed a boom of electric vehicle investment in the past few years, largely thanks to government&`&s incentives.
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An oil-electricity hybrid locomotive, the most powerful of its kind, has started in an experiment in extreme cold weather in northeast China.
The experiment was conducted in the northern part of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, when the local temperature was minus 40 degrees Celsius.
Despite the cold, the temperature in the cab was 25 degrees Celsius. The batteries were 12 degrees Celsius, suitable for operation.
The manufacturer says the experiment marked the end of a series of experiments for the hybrid locomotive.
In earlier experiments, the locomotive was run under a temperature of minus 30 degrees Celsius in northeast China.
Last year, it operated in high temperatures in northwest China&`&s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
Hybrid locomotives are environment friendly, energy-saving and less noisy. The successful experiments mean that the world&`&s largest-power hybrid locomotive can run in all weather conditions.
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Ryan Price in Beijing.
Facebook is launching a journalism project aimed at strengthening its ties with media organizations. The move aims to expand their audiences, come up with new products and generally promote trusted news in today&`&s "post-truth" era.
The project is in its early stages and as such, is light on its specifics. But the company envisions Facebook engineers working with news organizations to create new ways of telling stories and novel advertising or subscription models, right from the early stages of development. The company also wants to help promote "news literacy" and support local news.
Dave Merrell, lead product manager at The Washington Post, which is among the news organizations working with Facebook, said it is very early in the process but certainly something they are really excited about. He said he worked with Facebook on numerous products over the years, but often were not involved in the product development stage.
With "Instant Articles" launched in 2015, Facebook hosts and displays news items directly instead of pointing users to news websites. Such instant stories load faster on Facebook than those on outside links, and Facebook gives participating publishers a cut of the advertising revenue from Instant Articles.
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The U.S. Homeland Security Department has warned about an unusual cybersecurity flaw for one manufacturer&`&s implantable heart device where it is said it could allow hackers to remotely take control of a person&`&s defibrillator or pacemaker.
Information on the security flaw was identified by researchers at MedSec Holdings in reports months ago. It was only formally made public after the manufacturer, St. Jude Medical, made a software repair available earlier this month. MedSec is a cybersecurity research company that focuses on the health-care industry.
The government advisory said security patches will be rolled out automatically over months to patients with a device transmitter at home, as long as it is plugged in and connected to the company&`&s network. These transmitters will send heart device data back to medical professionals.
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Ryan Price in Beijing.
The first self-sufficient boat powered by only emission-free energy will start a six-year trip around the world in the spring.
Energy Observer is a former multi-hull race boat converted into a green vessel equipped with solar panels, wind turbines and a hydrogen fuel cell system. This means that it will be powered by the wind, the sun and self-generated hydrogen.
The 5 million euro boat is currently in a shipyard. It will set sail in Paris and make its first of 101 stops across 50 countries as part of a six-year circumnavigation.
French environmentalists say the boat will demonstrate that there are many solutions for energetic transition, and all solutions are within nature.
Designed in 1983, the boat enjoyed a successful career in open-sea sailing races. The Energy Observer project was conceived in 2015 by skippers, scuba divers and filmmakers.
The technology fitted to the 30-meter boat will enable the production of hydrogen through the process of electrolysis.
The boat is also equipped with a kite sail. It relies on the diversity of renewable energies. If there is no sun or wind, or at night, it has the option to draw in its hydrogen reservoirs. It will produce this hydrogen in a decarbonized manner through electrolysis of the sea water.
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Children with a genetic risk for obesity respond more strongly to fast food television advertising in a brain region associated with the reward processing. That&`&s according to a new study that may help understand why some children are more likely to over-eat unhealthy foods.
The study is the first-of-its kind to examine how a key obesity gene influences brain response to food advertisements and other cues to eat. The gene is known as the fat-mass and obesity-associated, FTO, gene.
The research was carried out by a team at the Dartmouth College, and the findings were published in the U.S. journal Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences.
In the study, 78 children, aged 9 to 12, watched a children&`&s television show in an magnetic resonance imaging scanner.
To simulate the experience of watching television from home, the show included 12 minutes of commercial breaks, half were advertisements for fast food and the other half for non-food items.
Children were also evaluated on their genetic risk for obesity based on the FTO gene, which strongly predicts obesity across the lifespan.
The study found that the part of the brain which is commonly associated with reward craving is physically larger in children with the obesity-risk FTO genotype, compared to genetically low-risk children. In addition, this part of the brain also showed a stronger craving response to the food commercials in these children.
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Ryan Price in Beijing. You can access the program by logging on to newsplusradio.cn. You can also find us on our Apple Podcast. If you have any comments or suggestions, please let us know by e-mailing us at mansuyingyu@cri.com.cn. That&`&s mansuyingyu@cri.com.cn. Now the news continues.
Lethal overdoses on prescription painkillers in Australia have almost doubled in ten years.
A new study published by Melbourne&`&s Penington Institute revealed that opioid-based painkillers were responsible for 71 per cent of all drug-related deaths in Australia in 2014.
It also found that the use of opioid-based painkillers in Australia quadrupled between 2004 and 2014.
The study shows that Australians aged 30-59 represented 78 per cent of all painkiller overdose deaths in the country.
These figures have challenged the conventional wisdom that it is young urban people who are most at risk of dying of overdose in Australia.
The study says it is now time for significant investments to be made to reduce the human toll from accidental overdose.
Researchers said comprehensive investments have been made to reduce the road toll, and there should be similar level of investment being made into overdose prevention and awareness.
Painkiller-related deaths were particularly prominent in rural areas, with 5 deaths per 100,000 people being attributed to painkiller overdoses in 2014. The figure marked an 83 per cent increase from the 3 deaths per 100,000 people recorded in 2004.
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A new study has found that urban sprawl is kicking one group of songbirds, called "avoiders", out of their territory, forcing divorce and stunting their ability to find new mates.
The findings were the results of a 10 year research by John Marzluff, a professor of wildlife science in the University of Washington.
Marzluff and his team monitored hundreds of individually marked songbirds from six common species found in suburbs of Seattle.
The researchers tracked bird activity in different types of landscapes. Bands were placed around the birds&`& legs, and sightings of mated pairs and nest locations were mapped.
The researchers were able to tell when a bird relocated, broke up from its mate or stayed put year to year.
Avoider birds are species that are known to decline in response to urbanization, when forested areas are removed for developments.
Monogamous birds will "divorce" their mate and move to a new territory if they have a reason to.
When forced to move, the avoiders largely failed to reproduce again for at least one year after relocating. The whole transition to a new home and often a new partner might cause a bird to lose half of its breeding years.
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Ryan Price in Beijing.
Northwest China&`&s tourist city Xi&`&an is to appoint "toilet chiefs" this year, in an effort to improve services.
The tourism bureau said the move aims to make all public toilets and those in restaurants and entertainment venues meet national standards, in terms of space and sanitation. All public toilets will also be free of charge.
Xi&`&an is one the most popular tourist destinations in China. The city is planning to have private enterprises and individuals to run the toilets, which are currently under municipal administration.
Toilet management will become part of the assessment for any tourist attractions and restaurants.
China is in the middle of a three-year "toilet revolution", which includes building 35,000 new toilets across the country and renovating another 25,000 by the end of the year.
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China has a total of 700 million 4G mobile users, and the Ministry of Science and Technology says 5G commercial operations will be launched in 2020.
The Ministry of Science and Technology said the 4G industrial chain has taken shape in China, with strengthened research and development capabilities.
Wen said the ministry will promote the formation of a global unified 5G standard and push forward the use and innovation of 5G-based mobile Internet and the Internet of Things to lay a foundation for 5G commercial operations in 2020.
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More than 72,000 companies were offering language and translation services across China at the end of 2015.
Among them, around 7,400 specialized in the field.
According to a report on the development of China&`&s language service industry, the sector generated an output worth 280 billion yuan, roughly 41 billion U.S. dollars, in 2015.
Experts say the development of information technology has presented brand new and huge opportunities for growth of language services.
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