But children speak【53】they learn to write. And millions of people in the world speak languages with【54】written form. Among these people oral literature abounds, and crucial knowledge【55】memorized and passed【56】generations. But human memory is short-lived, and the brain's storage capacity is finite.【57】overcame such problems and allowed communication across the miles【58】through the years and centuries. Writing permits a society【59】permanently record its poetry, its history and its technology.
It might be argued【60】today we have electronic means of recording sound and【61】to produce films and television, and thus writing is becoming obsolete.【62】writing became extinct, there would be no knowledge of electronics【63】TV technicians to study; there would be, in fact, little technology in years to【64】. There would be no film or TV scripts, no literature, no books, no mails, no newspapers, no science. There would be【65】advantages: no bad novels, junk mails, poison-pen letters, or "unreadable" income-tax forms, but the losses would outweigh the【66】.
There are almost as【67】legends and stories on the invention of writing as there are【68】the origin of language. Legend has it that Cadmus, Prince of Phoenicia and founder of the city of Thebes,【69】the alphabet and brought it with him to Greece. In one Chinese fable the four-eyed dragon-god T'sang Chien invented writing. In【70】myths, the Babylonian god Nebo and the Egyptian god Thoth gave humans writing as well as speech.
(51)
One of the great mystery of modern biology is how 【M1】______
proteins—the strings of amino acids that are the substance
of all living things—fold into precise and complex shapes
when they created inside living cells. 【M2】______
Proteins snap into their predestined shape within
microseconds, but the multistep process by which they do
so is so complicated that this would take a powerful computer【M3】______
centuries to come up a model for how it is done. 【M4】______
Recently, however, some very smart chemists at
Stanford University and the University of Illinois borrowed
an idea from the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence) project to find an alternate solution. 【M5】______
The SETl @ home project divvies out to 4 million PC
owners chunks of raw data from the giant Arecibo radio
telescope in Puerto Rico. Those PCs, in its idle moments, 【M6】______
filter this electronic noise for telltale signs of another civilization
in the cosmos, and then ship the results back to SETI. Folding
@ home, the brainchild of Stanford biophysics Professor
Vijay Pende, similar parcels out the protein folding 【M7】______
computations among 43,000 active PC-owning volunteers.
In Sunday's online version of the British journal Nature,
Pende reported success. The "distributed computing"
system has modeled how a man-made chain of 23 amino
acids called BBA5 snap into shape over the course of 6 【M8】______
microseconds matched the time it takes the protein to 【M9】______
form. and fold in the lab.
The PC network already is at work deciphering the
folding of real human proteins and may one day ravel 【M10】______
just what goes wrong in misshapen proteins believed
responsible for afflictions such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob and
Alzheimer's disease.
【M1】