Silence is unnatural to man. He begins life with a cry and ends it in stillness. In between he does all he can to make a noise in the world, and he fears silence more than anything else. Even his conversation is an attempt to prevent a fearful silence. If he is introduced to another person, and a number of pauses occur in the conversation, he regards himself as a failure, a worthless person, and is full of envy of the emptiest headed chatterbox ( 喋喋不休的人). He knows that ninety nine percent of human conversation means no more than the buzzing of a fly, but he is anxious to join in the buzz and to prove that he is a man and not a waxwork figure (蜡塑人像).

The aim of conversation is not, for the most part, to communicate ideas; it is to keep up the buzzing sound. There are, it must be admitted, different qualities of buzz; there is even a buzz that is as annoying as the continuous noise made by a mosquito. But   at a   dinner party one would rather be a mosquito than a quiet person. Most buzzing, fortunately, is pleasant to the ear, and some of it is pleasant even to the mind. He would be a foolish man if he waited until he had a wise thought to take part in the buzzing with his neighbors.

Those who hate to pick up the weather as a conversational opening seem to me not   to know the reason why human beings wish to talk. Very few human beings join in a conversation in the hope of learning anything new. Some of them are content if they are merely allowed to go on making a noise into other people’s ears, though they have nothing to tell them except that they have seen two or three new plays or that they had food in a Swiss hotel. At the end of an evening, during which they have said nothing meaningful for a long time, they just prove themselves to be successful conversationalist.

Harbor seals have spotted coats in a variety of shades from silver-gray to black or dark brown. They reach five to six feet in length and weigh up to 300 pounds. 【小题1】 They are true seals: crawling (爬) and having no outer ear. True seals have small flippers (鳍) and move on land by crawling on their stomachs.

【小题2】 In the northeast Pacific, they range from Alaska to central Baja California, Mexico. They favor nearshore coastal waters and are often seen at sandy beaches, muds in bays, and offshore rocks.

Harbor seal pups (幼崽) are born in May and June and weigh about 30 pounds at birth. A pup can swim at birth and will sometimes ride on its mother’s back when tired. Pups make a noise that sounds like, “maaaa”. 【小题3】 Adult females usually give birth every year. They may live 25 to 30 years.

Harbor seals can dive to 1,500 feet for up to 40 minutes. They eat a variety of fishes. Natural enemies of the harbor seal include sharks and killer whales. The total harbor seal population in the eastern North Pacific is estimated to be 330,000.【小题4】

People often find harbor seal pups on the beach and pick them up, thinking the pups have been abandoned. Actually, they are not. The mothers are just out hunting or watching nearby. Human handling has caused many seals to be orphaned (成为孤儿).【小题5】 If you see someone bothering a seal, call the Oregon State Police.

A new color-changing ink could aid in health and environment monitoring — for example, allowing clothing that switches colors when exposed to sweat or a curtain that shifts colors if carbon monoxide (一氧化碳) enters a room. The chemicals could be printed on anything from a T-shirt to a tent.

Wearable sensing devices like smart watches use electronics to monitor heart rate, blood glucose (血糖), and more. Now researchers at Tufts University’s Silklab say their new silk-based inks can respond to the presence of chemicals on or around the body.

The researchers had created an earlier version of the material that inkjet printers could spray on fabric, turning small items, such as gloves, into sensors. For the recent study, published online in May in Advanced Materials, they thickened the ink with certain chemicals and then added various reactive substances. With the new ink, they can now “easily print a large number of reactive elements onto large surfaces,” says Fiorenzo Omenetto, a biomedical engineer at Silklab.

“In the case of a T-shirt, the wearer ‘paints’ the shirt through exercise — with colors correlating to the acidity distribution of their sweat,” Omenetto says. He envisions using the ink to help monitor such activity. It could also be adapted to track environmental changes in a room, he says — or to respond to bacteria and follow disease progression.

Mechanical engineer Tyler Ray of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, who was not involved with the study, notes that most of today’s wearable monitors are rigid, wired and relatively large and heavy. The new in k technology has “the potential to transform consumer wearables from recreational novelty devices into body-worn, clinical-grade physiological measurement tools that supply physician-actionable information,” he says. But “one of the challenges with any colorimetric (比色的) approach is the effect various environmental conditions have on accuracy, such as lighting or the camera used.” Future studies would need to address these issues.