2. Answer the questions.

1. What is a biological computer?

2. Why use the scientists leech neurons?

3. Who has created a computer made of leeches’ neurons?

4. List the features of neuron.

3. Match the following terms from Column 1 with corresponding terms from Column 2 and translate them.

Model: molecular electronics

1. gene a) electronics

2. cell b) core

3. implant c) android

4. molecule d) vacuole

5. nucleus e) chromosome

6. clone f) transplant

7. molecular g) atom

4. Find the word in the text which means the same as the following.

1. to surprise

2. way

3. to use

5. Complete the following sentences using suitable words or phrases from the box and translate them.

leeches’ neurons multiplication

neuron biological computer

silicon computer human brain

1. A team of US scientists has created a computer made of …

2. … will come to the correct answer by filling in the gaps itself.

3. … makes the connections they are told to by the programmer.

4. … has its own electrical activity and responds in its own way to an electrical stimulus.

5. The neuron computer works in a similar way to …

6. Now a team of US scientists are working on enabling their computer to do …

IV. Speaking

Describe the “leech-ulator” that has been created by a team of US scientists.

UNIT10

Mountains out of molecules

I. Vocabulary focus

1. Useful words for learning.

prophet - размер

to envisage - намечать

to chisel - обрабатывать, вырезать

to foresee - предвидеть, знать заранее

jape - шутка

to herald - объявлять, предвидеть

vessel - сосуд (биолог.)

tumour - опухоль

2. Match the words below with a similar meaning.

1. to envisage a) to know

2. to create, to make,to construct, to build b) cheap

3. to dream of c) to suggest

4. inexpensive d) to do

5. to foresee e) a small part

6. cell f) to think of

3. Here are some phrasal words. Study their meanings.

to pick up - to lift, to collect something

to make up - to invent

to inject smth into smb/smth - to put smth into smb/smth

to line up - to stand in a row or line, or to arrange things in a row

to come up - to be mentioned or suggested

4. Fill in the blanks with phrasal verbs from the list.

1. The subject didn’t______ at the meeting.

2. He ______ us ___in the corridor.

3. He ________the whole story. None of it was true.

4. The vaccine is _________your arm.

5. Don’t drop litter. Please ____it _ and put it in the bin.

II. Reading

1. Read and translate the text.

Among the wilder flights of fancy of scientist is this one: that it may be possible, in the not too distant future, to construct materials or machines at a molecular level – in other words, to build them from the ground up molecule

By molecule, or even atom by atom. The basis of this dream was the rather serendipitous discovery by scientists at IBM in the late Eighties that a newly invented type of electronic microscope (called a scanning tunneling microscope) could actually pick up elementary particles one at a time and move them around. To prove it, they took 35 atoms, be used to repair damage to internal organs without surgery, or to chisel away at cancerous tumors, or even to deliver drugs directly to specific cells.

More extravagantly, scientists have also begun to dream of creating minute computers-on-a-chip, molecular machines as powerful as any PC we have now.

Fiddled about with them, and had them line up to spell out the company name on a minuscule scale.

But for many scientists these experimental japes herald a whole new science known as nanotechnology – so-called because it operates at the level of the nanometer, or one-billionth of a meter. (This isn’t an easy scale to imagine: suffice it to say that a human hair is about 100,000 nanometers wide.) More usefully,

Engineers have now used the same miniaturization techniques to etch ever smaller circuits into chips of silicon; they’ve also managed to build tiny gears and rotors – and get them to work.

Prophets of this new science say nanotechnology will become the most important technology in the world within twenty years. Among other things, they envisage tiny, cell-sized ‘robots’ – man-made, and controlled by computer – being used in medicine. Several million of these robots could be injected into a patient’s bloodstream, then directed by the computer operator to – for instance – scrape fatty deposits off the walls of blood vessels. They could also be used to repair damage to internal organs without surgery, or to chisel away at cancerous tumours, or even to deliver drugs directly to specific cells.

More extravagantly, scientists have also begun to dream of creating minute computers-on-a-chip, molecular machines as powerful as any PC we have now. These could be “grown” by realizing the sort of self-replicating system envisaged by the Hungarian mathematician John Von Neumann in the late Forties. He foresaw what is essentially a computer connected to a robotic arm: the computer directs the arm to pick up and assemble parts into a second computer and a second arm, which directs its arm to make a third computer and a third arm… and so on.

The point is, this system could be constructed at the nano level, using a molecular computer to direct a molecular robotic arm, creating an infinitesimally small, self-replicating assembly line, building an infinite supply of atom-sized mini-computers…

Or, indeed, anything. These assembler robots would – it’s claimed – be inexpensive to create, and groups of them could be programmed to make almost any product – just as cells can be programmed by fiddling with their DNA to make trees, corn or what-have-you. Ultimately, scientists hope to build things as complex and substantial as (say) cars, houses and spacecraft using the same “bottom-up” technique, brewing them in huge vats of self-replicating robots.

It is an extraordinary vision, if only because it appears to breach the division between engineering – which we see as being about bolting solid things together – and biology – which is the science of living organisms. But everything, of course, is ultimately made up of atoms and molecules: once you can manipulate these basic building blocks of matter, you can mimic the dynamics of cell division and reproduction, and, as it were, “grow” solid objects in much the same way you would grow a plant.

There are, of course, a few minor problems with this technological wizardry. The first is that we can’t yet “see” at the level of atoms and molecules – making engineering on this scale rather like trying to assemble a radio by chucking all the parts in a bag and shaking them around in the hope that they will spontaneously join together in exactly the right way. The second is that nanotechnologists have yet to come up with one single useful device.

Still, it’s early days. And as you know giant oaks from little acorns…

Notes:

to etch – гравировать (на металле)

wizardry – колдовство

a plant – саженец (здесь)

an acorn – желудь (Giant oaks from little acorns. – Громадные дубы вырастают из маленьких желудей. (пословица))