READING PASSAGE 2

Read the text and answer questions 14-26.

NATURE’S USEFUL DESIGNS

A. What has fins like a whale, skin like a lizard, and eyes like a moth? The future of engineering. Almost all living organisms are uniquely adapted to the environment in which they live so well that scientists study them in the hope of replicating their natural designs in technology. This process, called biomimetics, is the crossroads where nature and engineering meet.

B. Perhaps the best example of biomimetics is Velcro. In 1948 a Swiss scientist, George de Mestral, had trouble removing a plant’s prickle which was stuck to his god’s fur, so he studied it under a microscope. Impresses by the stickiness of the prickle’s hooks, he copied the design, engineering a fastener made of two pieces. One piece has stiff hooks like the prickly, while the other has soft loops that allow the hooks to stick. De Mestral named his invention Velcro – a combination of words ‘velour’ and ‘crochet’.

C. Andrew Parker, a research fellow at the natural History Museum in London and at the University of Sydney, is a leading proponent of biomimetics – applying designs from nature to problems in engineering, materials science, medicine, and other fields. He has investigated iridescence in butterflies and beetles and antireflective coatings in moth eyes – studies that have led to brighter screens for cellular phones and an anti-counterfeiting technique so secret he cannot say which company is behind it. He is working to make cosmetics that mimic the natural sheen of diatoms (a type of algae) and, with the British Ministry of Defense to emulate the water-repellent properties of these same creatures. He even draws inspiration from nature’s past: on the eye of a 45-million-year-old fly trapped in amber that he studies in a museum in Poland, Parker noticed microscopic corrugations that reduced light reflection. This feature is now being built into solar panels.

D. To Parker, every species, even those that have become extinct, is a success story, optimized by millions of years of natural selection. He asks: 'Why not learn from this?' Parker explained how the metallic sheen and dazzling colors of certain birds derive not from pigments but from neatly spaced microstructures that reflect specific wavelengths of light. Such structural color, fade-proof and more brilliant than pigment, is of great interest to people who manufacture paint and holograms on credit cards. Glowworms produce a cool light with almost zero energy loss (a normal light build wastes 98 percent of its energy as heat) and bombardier beetles have a highly effective combustion chamber in their posterior that heats chemicals and fires them at would-be predators.

E. For all nature’s sophistication, many of its clever devices are made from sample substances like keratin, calcium, carbonate, and silica, which are manipulated into structures of fantastic complexity and toughness. The abalone, for example, makes its shell out calcium carbonate, the same stuff as soft chalk. Yet by coaxing this substance into walks of staggered, nanoscale bricks through a subtle play of proteins, it creates an armor 3000 times harder than chalk. Understanding the microscale and nanoscale structures responsible for a living materials exceptional properties is critical to recreating it synthetically.

F. Though impressed by biological structures, Robert Cohen, an engineer at MIT in the United States, consider biology merely a starting point for innovation. ‘You don’t have to reproduce a lizard skin to make a water-collection device or a moth eye to make an antireflective coating,’ Cohen says. The biological structure provides a clue to what is useful. But maybe you can do it better. Ultimately, he considers a biomimetics project a success only if it has the potential to make a useful tool for people. ‘Looking at pretty structures in nature is not sufficient,' says Cohen. 'What I want to know is, can we actually transform these structures into something with true utility in the real world?'

G. This, of course, is the tricky bit. Potentially one of the most useful embodiments of natural design is the bio-inspired robot, which could be deployed in places where people would be too conspicuous bored to tears, or killed. But such robots are notoriously hard to build. Ronald Fearing, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, has taken on one of the biggest, challenges of all: to create a miniature robotic fly that is swift, small, and maneuverable enough for use in surveillance or search-and-rescue operations.

H. The key to making his micromechanical flying insect (MFI) work, Fearing says, is not to attempt to copy the fly, but to isolate the structures crucial to its feats of flying. The fly’s wing is driven by 20 muscles, some of which only fire every fifth wing beat, and all you can do is wonder, ‘what on earth just happened there?’ says Fearing. Some things are just too mysterious and complex to be able to replicate.

I. For all the power of the biomimetics paradigm, and the brilliant people who practice it, bio-inspiration has led to surprisingly few mass-produced products, and arguably only one household word - Velcro. Some biomimetists blame industry, whose short-term expectations about how soon project should be completed and become profitable clash with the time-consuming nature of biomimetics research. Others lament the difficulty in coordinating joint work among diverse academic and industrial disciplines, which is required to understand natural structures and mimic what they do. But the main reason biomimetics has not yet come of age is that from an engineering standpoint reproduce such intricate nano-puzzles. Nonetheless, the gap with nature is gradually closing.

READING PASSAGE 3

Read the text and answer questions 27-40.

THE ART OF DECEPTION

Do tiny changes of facial expression show whether someone is telling lies?

Forty years ago, the research psychologist Dr Paul Ekman was addressing a group of young psychiatrists in training when he was asked a question, the answer to which has kept him busy ever since. Suppose the group wanted to know, a particular patient swears they are telling the truth. They look and sound since. So here is the question is there any way you can be sure they are telling the truth? Ekman did not know the answer then, but wanted to find out.

As part of his research, he had already filmed a series of 12-minute interviews with psychiatric patients. In a subsequent conversation, one of the patients sold him that she had lied to him. So, Ekman sat and looked at the film but saw nothing noteworthy. Then he slowed it down and looked again. Then he slowed it even further. And suddenly, there, across just two frames of the film, he saw it: an intense expression of extreme anguish. It lasted less than a 15th of a second, but once he had spotted the first expression, he soon found three more examples in that same interview. He termed his discovery micro-expression: very rapid intense demonstrations of emotion that the subject intended to be concealed.

Over the course of the next four decades, Ekman successfully demonstrated a proposition first suggested by Charles Darwin: that the ways in which we express rage, disgust, contempt, fear, surprise, happiness and sadness are universal. The facial muscles triggered by those seven basic emotions are, he has shown, essentially standard, regardless of language and culture, from the US to Japan and Brazil to Papua New Guinea. What is more, expressions of emotion are impossible to suppress and, particularly when we are lying, micro-expressions of powerfully felt emotions will inevitably flit across our face before we get the chance to stop them.

Fortunately for liars, most people will fail to spot these fleeting signals of inner torment. Of the 15000 Ekman has tested, only 50 people, whom he calls ‘naturals’, have been able to do it. But given a little more training. Ekman says, almost anyone can develop the skill. He should know, since these tests were completed in the mid-1980s and the first publication of his research, he has been called in by the FBI and CIA (among countless more law-enforcement and other agencies around the world), not just to solve cases, but to teach them how to use his technique for themselves. He has held workshops for defense and prosecution lawyers, health professionals, even jealous spouses, all of them wanting to know exactly when someone is not being 100 per cent candid.

Most recently, Ekman’s research has resulted in a new television series about the exploits of the fictional Dr Cal Lightman, a scientist who studies involuntary body language to discover not only if you are lying. But why you might have been motivated to do so. According to the publicity blurb, Lightman is a human lie detector, even more accurate than a polygraph test. Ekman concedes has was skeptical when the producer first approached him with the idea of turning his life’s work into a TV series, and initially would have stopped the project if he could. In particular, he was fearful that the show would exaggerate the effectiveness of his techniques and create the quite inaccurate impression among audiences that criminals could no longer hope to get away with lying. In the worst-case scenario, he was concerned about unfair convictions, that one day someone not properly trained in his techniques might be sitting on a jury and wrongly find someone guilty of a crime simply on the basis of a television programme.

In the end though, he was won over because the series is unusual in several respects. It is the first time, as far as Ekman is aware, that a commercial TV drama has been based on the work of just one scientist. That scientist is also deeply involved in the project, talking through plot ideas and checking five successive drafts of each script to ensure details are correct. He was also impressed with the producer’s manifestly serious and well-intentioned reasons for making the programme. Now that the first series has been completed, he believes probably 80-90 per cent of the show is based on fact and that’s good enough for what is. After all, a drama, not a documentary.

Ekman, incidentally, professes to have been a terrible liar ever since he was a small boy and observes that ability to detect a lie and the ability to lie successfully are completely unrelated. He has been asked by people running for high office if he could teach them to become more credible with the public but has always refused to use his skills in that way on ethical grounds. He also insists that there are various kinds of lies. A ‘true’ lie can be identified by having two essential characteristics there must be a deliberate intent to mislead and there must be no notification that this is what is occurring. This means that an actor or a poker player isn’t a true liar. They’re supposed to deceiving you, it’s part of the game, and the same is true of flattery. He prefers to focus on the kinds of lies where the liar would be on grave trouble if they were found out, and where the target would feel properly aggrieved if they knew.