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At the moment of conception, you spent about half an hour as a single cell.
Episode 6 - Manolo Sets Off
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Episode 6 - Manolo Sets Off
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Glossary of Manolo’s Business Trip
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Episode 6 - Manolo Sets Off
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Exercise 1 - Questions and Answers
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Exercise 2 - Listening Comprehension
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Glossary of Manolo’s Business Trip
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The only jointless bone in your body is the hyoid bone in your throat
October 12, 2011
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After the Black Death reached London in 1348, about 2,400 people were buried in East Smithfield, near the Tower of London, in a cemetery that had been prepared for the plague’s arrival. From the teeth of four of those victims, researchers have now reconstructed the full DNA of a microbe that within five years felled one-third to one-half of the population of Western Europe.
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The bacterium that causes plague, Yersinia pestis, is still highly virulent today but has different symptoms, leading some historians to doubt that it was the agent of the Black Death.
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Those doubts were laid to rest last year by detection of the bacterium’s DNA in plague victims from mass graves across Europe. With the full genome now in hand, the researchers hope to recreate the microbe itself so as to understand what made the Black Death outbreak so deadly.
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So far, the evidence points more toward the conditions of the time than to properties of the bacterium itself. The genome recovered from the East Smithfield victims is remarkably similar to that of the present-day bacterium, says the research team, led by Kirsten I. Bos of McMaster University in Ontario and Johannes Krause of the University of Tübingen in Germany.
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This is the first time the genome of an ancient pathogen has been reconstructed, opening the way to tracking other ancient epidemics and how their microbes adapted to human hosts.
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The bacterium’s genome consists of a single chromosome, about 4.6 million DNA units long, and three small rings of DNA called plasmids. In the 660 years since the Black Death struck, only 97 of these DNA units have changed and only a dozen of these changes occur in genes and therefore would affect the organism’s physical properties, the researchers report in Wednesday’s issue of the journal Nature. Dr. Krause and others reported the DNA sequence of one of the plasmids in August. The changes in the genome will be studied one by one to see how each affects the microbe’s virulence.
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The researchers hope eventually to modify a living plague bacterium so that its genome is identical to that of the agent of the Black Death. Such a microbe could be handled only in special secure facilities. But even if it did infect a person, the bacterium would be susceptible to antibiotics, like its living descendants, said Hendrik Poinar of McMaster University, a team member.
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If the microbe’s genome is so little changed, the deadliness of the Black Death may reflect the condition of its medieval victims. Harsh as the economic stresses assailing Europe today may be, they are a breeze compared with problems in the mid-14th century. The climate was cooling, heavy rains rotted out crops and caused frequent famines, and the Hundred Years’ War began in 1337. People were probably already suffering from malnutrition and other diseases when the plague arrived like the fourth horseman of the apocalypse. “People honestly thought it was the end of the world,” Ms. Bos said.
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Recovery of the medieval plague bacterium’s full genome is a technical tour de force. The DNA had been degraded into millions of small fragments that were overwhelmed in number by DNA from the human host and from the bacteria that consumed the body after death. Dr. Krause’s team fished out the plague DNA by using DNA from the modern bacterium, relying on the fact that DNA strands bind to DNA of complementary sequence.
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“This is a major technological step forward, a great advance for the entire field of DNA and pathogens,” said Mark Achtman, an expert on ancient plague at University College Cork in Ireland.
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But Dr. Achtman disagreed with one issue in Dr. Krause’s findings, that of whether Yersinia pestis also caused the outbreak in the sixth century known as the Justinian plague. When the full genome of the medieval bacterium is compared with DNA recovered from other known human outbreaks, a tree of descent can be constructed. The Black Death genome lies so close to the root of the tree that the human pathogen probably did not exist much earlier or, if it did, has vanished without any descendants, Dr. Krause’s team says. This implies that the Justinian plague was caused by some other agent.
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Dr. Achtman said this conclusion was incorrect because the Krause team had omitted DNA from several human cases that place the root of the tree much further back in time. Dr. Krause said he had left these cases out because they seemed unreliable.
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The modern plague bacterium changes its DNA units slowly, but it does quite often rearrange the order of its genes. Some experts believe gene order can affect pathogenicity. Dr. Krause had available only tiny fragments of DNA, so although he was able to reconstruct all the medieval bacterium’s genes he could not establish the exact order in which the genes were arranged, leaving open the possibility that the bacterium was inherently more pathogenic because its genome was differently organized.
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Paul Keim, an expert on infectious bacteria at Northern Arizona University, said that work by Dr. Achtman and Dr. Krause had shown that the Black Death “was really a series of epidemics coming out of China and sweeping across the susceptible ecological situation” created by the culture of medieval Europe. The plague in each outbreak probably did not persist very long and was repeatedly re-established by new infections from East Asia, where the bacterium is still endemic in small rodents like marmots.
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“We don’t have a human ecological situation comparable today, plus it is really easy to break the transmission cycle with antibiotics and public health,” Dr. Keim said. There are still small outbreaks, like one in Madagascar in the 1990s, but “a multiyear large human outbreak is inconceivable in this day,” he said.
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Besides the Justinian plague and the Black Death, a third great wave of plague swept out of China in 1894, causing an epidemic in San Francisco in 1900 and killing millions of people in India.
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All the teeth used in the study will be returned to the skulls from which they were taken, now in a London museum whose archaeologists excavated the East Smithfield cemetery in the 1980s.
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The following stories were created by students in 2011.
A Summer Cultural Tour
-Four Friends, Three Children, a Castle and a Possible Ghost-
On our visit to the Escorial Monastery and Royal Palace, we found a ripped picture in Felipe II’ s bedroom. In the library we also found many old books lying on the floor next to a suit of armor. The most famous book of the Library “Felipe II’s Memories” had disappeared! The rest of the tourists accused us of stealing it. It was very important for us to find out what had happened before the police came.
After finding a few clues and making our little grey cells work (as Poirot in Agatha Chistie’s books says), we discovered that somebody was trying to steal an expensive old book from the library palace. The thief pretended to make noise and scare the rest of the tourists by pretending to be a ghost. The supposed thief wanted to create a confusing situation in order to steal the book.
But what is the moral of this short history? What you first see is not what lies beneath.
The Algarve
This year for my summer holiday I went to the Algarve, situated on Portugal’s southern coast. I went to the city of Lagos, near the end of the Algarve, for one week.
Lagos has beautiful beaches but my favourite is “Do Camilo Beach” because the water is very clean, transparent and very blue. However the water is a little cold.
The weather in Lagos is special, because the mornings are hot but the nights are very cold! It is the second time that I have traveled to the Algarve and I’m sure that I’ll go back.
A Special Holiday
This year I had a very special holiday. I began my holiday in Calahonda. It’s a city in Granada where I spend all my holidays with my family and my friends. I also visited other beaches in Granada. For example, Nerja where you can eat a delicious paella, and Playa Granada, a very small, curious and fun beach.
The last week of my holiday, I went to the Algarve. It’s a port in the south of Portugal. The Algarve coast is very different than Granada’s coast. In Portugal you can find beaches with cold water, fine sand and international tourists. You can find people from other countries, English people above all. In Granada the water is calm, there are black rocks and the tourists are local.
Summer Fun at the Beach
My vacation was excellent! I enjoyed the beach with my family in the place of my infancy. I spent all my time with my family. For me it was very important.
Our friends were there too with their daughter. Everybody went out a lot. The summer was very fun. The beach was ideal for swimming in the morning and in the evening.
Namibia Safari
This summer I went to Namibia for my holiday. Namibia is a country in South Africa. It was a German colony until 1990. It doesn’t have a very large population, only about 4 million. Half of the population is white and the other half is black.
We went on a safari in ”Moremi Park”. We saw a lion’s prints. The driver explained that it was a female lion and her cub. The driver said, “We are going to follow that print to find this animal”…and there they were!!!…but where?… They were near the tree in front of the car! They were laying face down. They had eaten a lot and they were sleeping!!
The Shoe Store
It was a wonderful summer day, very hot, more than 40 degrees and we decided to go shopping. It was like walking across the desert. Nobody was in the street. We were suffering and we needed to go into a cold place. My friend told me that she wanted to buy new shoes so I brought her to a famous shop in Granada close to the Cathedral that it is known all over the world. We entered the shop. There were only four people. One of them looked very strange, she seemed to be homeless. I was wondering why she was there…It is a very expensive shop. While my friend was looking for her new shoes she left her bag on a chair. When she went to pay, she couldn’t believe that her bag wasn’t there. She had no money, no credit cards, no passport. She had to return to her country and her flight was leaving in two days. The homeless old lady wasn’t there. We asked the owner and she couldn’t tell us anything except that she saw her leaving the shop in a strange way… and there was another woman waiting for her outside.
We called the police but nobody arrived so we decided to go to the police station and fill out a complaint form. They suggested we never leave our bags or anything alone. Later, my friend also canceled all her credit cards. This experience made her realize that we have to take care to watch our bags.
Beware wherever you are of everyone, no matter where they are from…
Lost in Wutach
It was a nice morning in the Dark Forest. My friends, my girlfriend and I were excited about the trekking we were going to do that day. We had a delicious and powerful breakfast. We were worried about our allergies in the forest, but the high humidity level calmed us. Later we started to walk. We were very happy, joking and singing, not very well, but our audience was not very strict, you know, the plants and stones. The sun was shining through the trees and the river looked like silver.
The trail had several paths and we weren’t sure about the right choice. We took the one in the middle and for the next kilometers we were nervous. We confirmed that we were on the right path. Soon we had the lucky opportunity to see a local music band playing in a kind of summer camp. It was raining. It was wonderful. We returned to the trail with improved energy. It was becoming late but everything was ok.
That is, everything was ok until we felt that something was wrong. We were lost and we didn’t know where the last right checkpoint was. We focused on finding the right way. We didn’t fight, we just talked about several choices such as the right path and what we would do if become dark such as where to sleep, food and what to do about the cold.
As the sun set, we found a bridge that we had being looking for some hours. We laughed excitedly and happily. We spent the last part of the trail talking about our adventure. We felt very proud of ourselves, knowing the next problems of the trip would seem as little games.
We learned about how to handle problems, the real problems and the lesser ones.
The Mountain House
A group of mountain climbers went one clear day to the top of the Sierra Nevada. In a mountain refuge, they stopped to eat something and to drink isotonic water. As they were preparing to take a new route, the owner of the refuge asked, where they were going. They answered, “To the top of the mountain on a new route”. The refuge owner recommended that they continue on the usual route, because the weather conditions could change quickly. They didn’t believe the old owner, because the big sun was high in the sky.
The mountain refuge owner insisted and because they didn’t want to hear more they started walking on the usual path. However in the middle of the road, they changed and took the new route. They didn’t know, but it was a really big mistake!!! Four hours later, the weather conditions changed and it started to snow. Nobody could see anything, and they couldn’t walk because the freezing wind turned their hands violet and made it difficult to walk.
While they were waiting for their death, they could see the rescue group looking for them on the usual route, the path that the refuge owner had recommended and insisted that they must take. While they died, the thought to themselves, “Why didn’t we follow his advice?”
The Fast Worker
It was a warm morning at the end of spring. I was sleeping and dreaming happily, like everyday, when suddenly I was woken by a frightened shout.
I’m pregnant! my girlfriend shouted sadly at me.
I felt like the roof of the house was falling over my head. I’m not ready I thought. I need to do a lot of things to be prepared to have a baby! I was the happiest man on Earth when I heard the news. However I knew I had to work very hard before the baby was born. I didn’t know anything about babies and I didn’t have the house ready for a new guest.
I spent all my holiday working on the baby’s room and reading books about parenting. There were many problems to be solved: where to move my office, how to correct the problems with humidity that appeared in the walls last winter, when would we buy and mount the furniture and with what money… in only fifteen days.
I wanted to do everything at the same time and obviously this was impossible. The first task I worked on was repairing the roof and fixing the humidity problem. I used latex paint and waterproof concrete in order to prevent rain from passing through the wall and affecting the room’s plaster. Next I removed the damaged plaster and put up new plaster.
The end of my holiday was approaching and the room was still not painted. I wanted to accelerate the process and this is when I made a big mistake. I painted the room on top of the very fresh plaster, which caused the paint to dry and fall onto the floor. I didn’t accelerate the process! Instead I lost two days and money and my holiday was almost about to finish. I had the same problem: an empty room with a bad paint job.
I finished the paint job after my holiday ended, learning a difficult lesson. My grandfather taught me when I was young: “Don’t ever rush during the threshing because the wheat might break”.
Poquiperri
My husband and I were on our property in Conil when suddenly a dog appeared and began running around the house. He was in the rubbish, biting and breaking the bag and taking out everything that was in the cube. I called my brother-in-law because he had let the dog in. I was angry at the dog and my brother-in-law. I tried to get rid of this dog. Everything I did was unproductive; the dog always came back. My husband said, “Look at this dog, he doesn’t look like a dog. I will call him: Poquiperri”.
I started to call the dog “Poquiperri” and he seemed happy with his new name. The first night Poqui slept on my flowers and when I woke up in the morning I saw they were all flat!! I said to Poqui, “This isn’t right, you shouldn’t do that!” But Poqui only wagged his tail and jumped all over me looking at my hands for me to pet him.
One night my husband and I went to my parent’s house and when we returned Poqui had eaten my shoes. What a mess! My husband hated this dog. But Poqui continued jumping all over me and wagging his tail and I was beginning to love him.
Now, Poqui is one more in our family (almost) and I don’t scold him when he brings a chicken he has killed to my house and makes my property smell really, really bad (like death).
When you are persistent, like Poqui, giving love, and being nice to others, you can obtain anything that you want. Even if you are only a poqui of something, I suppose.
Who Let the Dogs Out!
Friday night I was alone at my mother’s house. My girlfriend was visiting her sister, my mother was working at the hospital and my sister was on a night out with friends.
However I was missing somebody: Otto, my sister’s little Schnauzer dog. She doesn’t usually take him out on Friday night. I called her to check if she knew where the dog was. She got very nervous and asked me to find him. Otto must have been very afraid due to the recent town fair fireworks.
I looked all around my Mom’s house shouting his name. I even looked in the front garden. It wasn’t until I entered the backyard that I could hear a dog whimpering. The sound wasn’t coming from my mother’s backyard but from the neighbor’s and it seemed that nobody was at home. I called my sister again and she told me that sometimes Otto hides at the neighbor’s house. She insisted that I go to the other house to bring Otto back.
I crossed the dividing wall by pushing a broken door and I entered into a very dark backyard. I could barely see anything that wasn’t closer than one meter away. Crossing to the other side, I could hear more clearly the sounds of a nervous dog. When I was less than a meter from the corner end, I was able to distinguish a shadowy figure that was far taller than Otto. I did not know this dog.
Was I afraid, you might ask. Not at all. You fear the unknown and although this dog was a complete stranger to me I could understand the situation. This dog (like many others) was terrified by the fireworks (they don’t know what fireworks are), also by an approaching stranger (me) who was not afraid (dogs smell fear). I turned around and went back to my Mom’s house to avoid scaring him more.
If you were wondering what happened to Otto, my sister found him a few hours later after returning from her night out. He had hidden in the doorway of a nearby house.
Robbery in Creamfields
My friend Alvaro and I were in Jerez this summer for the Creamfields Electronic Music Festival. On the first day, in the middle of the night, somebody stole our cooler and a chair. We realized this in the morning and started to search for them. We looked around the campground and finally we found where they were. The guy who stole our equipment had a tent near us. We went to him and asked for our stuff, but he told us we had to pay if we wanted them back. We didn’t have any money, so we couldn’t pay him.
We were starving. We had no money and we couldn’t go to the city to buy food. So, we decided to wait until after midnight to steal our stuff back. It was 1 am when we saw the guy leave the campground. At that moment, we ran to his tent and opened it to look for our stuff.
We discovered that this guy had stolen many things from other people, so we decided to take all of it and give it back to their owners. Everyone thanked us for recovering their stuff. In the meantime, the guy came back and saw us giving back things to the people. He became furious. He started to yell at us, but the crowd protected us from him. Finally, this guy ran away because he was frightened by the people whom he’d stolen from.
The moral is: Don’t steal from too many people because they might steal even more from you or worse.
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