Week 6 - The Aunt of Drowned Syrian Boy Says It Is Not Too Late To Save Other Refugees

Sept. 15, 2015

Tima Kurdi awoke on Sept. 2 at home in Vancouver to dozens of missed calls on her phone from relatives in Syria. The news was grim: Her brother Abdullah’s wife and two children had drowned crossing the Mediterranean from Turkey to Greece. And within hours, her nephew — three-year-old Aylan Kurdi — would become the world’s most famous casualty, a dead toddler in a red T-shirt and black sneakers washed ashore on a Turkish beach. “Every day kids have drowned,” Kurdi says, sitting in a Brussels hotel room on Monday. “But before Aylan died, people read it and moved on. That boy, that picture, meant something.”

Two weeks on, it has become clear how much Aylan Turki’s death meant. The image of Aylan’s body, in his neat clothes and a fresh haircut, jolted leaders into action after months of dithering over one of the biggest refugee crises in about 70 years. Within days the U.S., Germany, and France offered to settle tens of thousands of Syrian refugees, for the first time in the five-year war. On Monday and Tuesday European Union ministers met in Brussels to discuss Europe’s first unified asylum policy. Although they battled to agree on binding quotas to host those who’ve flooded across E.U. borders, refugee advocates says Aylan’s death has nonetheless marked a sharp turning point for Europe. “If Aylan had not happened I don’t think Europe would be having this existential discussion,” says Sam Barratt, campaign director for the New York-based activist organization Avaaz, which financed Tima Kurdi’s Brussels trip. “Without that photo, the E.U. would have kicked the issue into the long grass.”

For Aylan’s aunt, 44, who works as a hairdresser in Vancouver, it has been a bitter price to pay. Sunk into an armchair, Kurdi wrings her hands as she describes how the loss of Aylan, his brother Galib, 5, and their mother Rehana, has shattered her family, leaving them exhausted with grief and uncertain about their future.

Her brother, deep in mourning, returned home to the war-ravaged town of Kobani to bury his wife and children. He sits for hours in the cemetery, where he has put toys on the boys’ graves. Kurdi says that he sometimes talks to his children in their bedroom where they lived until they fled, arranging their toys as he pretends to put the boys to bed and kiss them goodnight. “I am really worried about him,” says Kurdi, who remains determined to bring Abdullah to Canada. His asylum application sits in her desk drawer in Vancouver, and she says she will submit it soon. Abdullah will yet not contemplate leaving his family’s graves. “He says to me, ‘leave me alone with my pain right now,'” she says. “I will give him the space right now. But I am sure he will come.”

Since Abdullah could not afford the $5,000 or so needed to flee Kobani, Kurdi sent him money to pay smugglers to take his family across the Mediterranean Sea to Europe. They hatched that plan after it appeared that Canada would not grant the family asylum; a previous attempt to bring her older brother Mohammed to Canada stalled because the Canadian authorities required official documents that had been impossible to obtain in Syria, she says. Mohammed is now a refugee in Heidelberg, Germany.

Kurdi says she remains overwhelmed with a sense of guilt and anguish, believing that her generosity towards Abdullah directly caused the three deaths. Kurdi says when she first reached Abdullah after the drowning, “I was screaming, ‘I am sorry, so sorry, it is my fault.’ He said, ‘don’t blame yourself. You are the best sister in the world.'” Yet those words have been little help. “If I didn’t give them money they would be alive today,” she says, choking on tears, and explaining that she had been desperate to help the family flee Syria, after her father, who lives in Damascus, described Galib suffering. “Well, he is not in pain anymore,” Kurdi says in a near whisper.

Kurdi has seen her own relatively carefree life drastically upturned since Sept. 2. She says about 3,000 emails, mostly unopened, have poured in from strangers across the world; one European woman wrote that Aylan’s photo had so shaken her, that she ran to her daughter’s day-care center to hug her.

Kurdi’s sudden, unwitting celebrity is a highly unlikely twist of fate. She moved to Vancouver 22 years ago to marry her first husband. There she raised her son Alan, little Aylan’s anglicized namesake, who traveled to Brussels with her this week. She says that until the Syrian war erupted in 2011 she thought about her homeland only “now and then,” traveling to Damascus every two years or so, for summer visits.

Now Kurdi is a voice in the fraught political debate about refugees, and one of the few recognizable Syrians is speaking on the issue. She became a public figure just for hours after her nephews and sister-in-law had died, when she gave a tearful press conference in Vancouver.

On Tuesday, Kurdi addressed E.U. politicians in the union’s Brussels headquarters, pleading with them to take in Syrian refugees. And on Monday she met the U.N.’s refugee chief António Guterres and Jean Asselborn, Foreign Minister of Luxembourg, which currently holds the E.U. rotating presicency. For Kurdi, it is one way to find something positive from her family’s huge loss. “I’m doing this to honor them,” Kurdi says. “It is too late to save Aylan, Galib and Rehana. But it is not too late for millions of other refugees to be saved.”

http://time.com/4034620/aylan-kurdi-tima-kurdi/

Structure of the Lead

Who- Tima Kurdi, Aylan Kurdi, Galib

When- Sept. 2 .2015

What- Two children had drowned.

Where- Mediterranean from Turkey to Greece

How- The news has impacted all people around the world.

Keywords:

1.      casualty (n.)傷亡

2.      toddler (n.)孩子;嬰兒

3.      unified asylum policy (n.)統一庇護政策

4.      quotas (n.)配額

5.      advocate  (v.)主張;提倡

6.      existential (a.)存在的

7.      armchair (n.)扶手椅

8.      shatter (v.)粉碎

9.      anguish (n.)痛苦

10. fraught (a.)誤人子弟的

Week 5 - Curiosity Rover Finds Evidence of Liquid Water On Mars

29th, September, 2015

Where there is water, there is life. This is a statement that has been reaffirmed over and over again. Whether it is in the acidic waters surrounding volcanoes or in the dark and frozen wastes of the icy Antarctic, wherever we find liquid water, we find life. That’s what makes the most recent find by NASA’s Curiosity rover so amazing—Evidence of liquid water on Mars.

In 2002, we discovered that there was ice on the Red Planet. More recently, we found that Mars has more than just a little ice. It has glaciers. Ultimately, this frozen ice contains enough water to cover the entire planet in a meter of water. But liquid water is an entirely different ball game.

The major question that is now being asked is, how can a planet with an average temperature of -55°C (-67°F) have liquid water?

In work that was recently published in the journal Nature Geoscience, the scientists behind the discovery detail their ideas about the Martian water cycle. The team, led by planetary scientist Javier Martín-Torres, who hails from the Luleå University of Technology in Sweden,  asserts that salt is likely responsible for the pockets of water. Much like life is able to subsist in the near-frozen water of the Antarctic because of salt, the scientists state that salt could be present at such quantities that it alters the freezing point of the water, lowering the temperature at which the water freezes so that, in order to solidify, the water has to get a lot colder than it does on Earth.

Previously, we have detected evidence of salts on Mars, and it is this previous evidence that forms the basis of the team’s conclusion.

Ultimately, it is believed that the water cycle starts when vapor from the thin Martian atmosphere cools and gets absorbed by salt on the surface of the planet. Then, during the evening, when temperatures go well below zero, the salts become so saturated by water vapor that they form “liquid brines in the uppermost 5 cm [2 inches] of the subsurface”. These small liquid pools stick around until the daytime temperatures turn the pools back into vapor. As the day progresses, and things start to cool, the liquid water again appears.

Sadly, Curiosity hasn’t been able to capture any images of liquid water on Mars because, well, the technology hasn’t been invented yet. Yes, of course we do have cameras on Mars (as our many pictures attest); however, the cameras don’t work in the subzero temperatures where the liquid water exists on the Red Planet.

So on to the main event: Do these pools contain life? Well, we don’t know for sure. However, we do know a few things that allow us to make guesstimates. First, since the temperatures are so low, we know that life as we know it cannot exist. Second, since the pools appear to dry during the day, it is unlikely that any life at all could survive. But despite the fact that it is rather unlikely, it is certainly not impossible. And, well, that’s something.

http://futurism.com/curiosity-rover-finds-evidence-of-liquid-water-on-mars/

Structure of the Lead

Who-NASA’s Curiosity

When-28th, September, 2015

What- Curiosity found liquid water in the Mars.

Why-People want to know whether there is any live in the Mars.

Where-Mars

How-They has sent Curiosity to the Mars and observed it for many years.

Keywords：

1.reaffirm (v.)重申

2.acidic (adj.)酸性的

3.ultimately (adv.)最終地

4.hail (n.)冰雹

5.subsist (v.)生存

6.vapor (n.)蒸氣

7.saturated (adj.)飽和的

8.brines (n.)鹵水

9.uppermost (adj./adv.)最上方

10.guesstimate (n.)猜測

Week 4 - NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth

July 23, 2015

NASA's Kepler mission has confirmed the first near-Earth-size planet in the “habitable zone” around a sun-like star. This discovery and the introduction of 11 other new small habitable zone candidate planets mark another milestone in the journey to finding another “Earth.” 

The newly discovered Kepler-452b is the smallest planet to date discovered orbiting in the habitable zone -- the area around a star where liquid water could pool on the surface of an orbiting planet -- of a G2-type star, like our sun. The confirmation of Kepler-452b brings the total number of confirmed planets to 1,030.

"On the 20th anniversary year of the discovery that proved other suns host planets, the Kepler exoplanet explorer has discovered a planet and star which most closely resemble the Earth and our Sun," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. “This exciting result brings us one step closer to finding an Earth 2.0."Kepler-452b is 60 percent larger in diameter than Earth and is considered a super-Earth-size planet. While its mass and composition are not yet determined, previous research suggests that planets the size of Kepler-452b have a good chance of being rocky.

While Kepler-452b is larger than Earth, its 385-day orbit is only 5 percent longer. The planet is 5 percent farther from its parent star Kepler-452 than Earth is from the Sun. Kepler-452 is 6 billion years old, 1.5 billion years older than our sun, has the same temperature, and is 20 percent brighter and has a diameter 10 percent larger.

“We can think of Kepler-452b as an older, bigger cousin to Earth, providing an opportunity to understand and reflect upon Earth’s evolving environment," said Jon Jenkins, Kepler data analysis lead at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, who led the team that discovered Kepler-452b. "It’s awe-inspiring to consider that this planet has spent 6 billion years in the habitable zone of its star; longer than Earth. That’s substantial opportunity for life to arise, should all the necessary ingredients and conditions for life exist on this planet.”

To help confirm the finding and better determine the properties of the Kepler-452 system, the team conducted ground-based observations at the University of Texas at Austin's McDonald Observatory, the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory on Mt. Hopkins, Arizona, and the W. M. Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. These measurements were key for the researchers to confirm the planetary nature of Kepler-452b, to refine the size and brightness of its host star and to better pin down the size of the planet and its orbit.

The Kepler-452 system is located 1,400 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. The research paper reporting this finding has been accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal.

 https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-kepler-mission-discovers-bigger-older-cousin-to-earth

Structure of the Lead

       Who- NASA’s, Kepler-452b(Earth 2.0)

       When- July 23, 2015

       What- NASA found a planet which looks like our Earth..

       Why- To find earth-like planets..

       Where- Solar system

       How- By sending Kepler to out space.

Keywords：

1. habitable (a.)適合居住的

2. orbit (v.)環軌道運行 (n.)軌道;(人生)旅程

3. exoplanet (n.)外星球

4. administrator (n.)管理者

5. headquarter (v.)設總部於…

6. diameter (n.)直徑;放大率

7. composition (n.)組成;成分

8. substantial (a.)大量的;牢固的

9. planetary (n.)行星

10. constellation (n.)星座