媒體英語會帶大家一起學習 BBC 撰稿人在報道世界大事時常用到的單詞和短語。

美國總統(tǒng)奧巴馬最近斥資一億美元發(fā)起了一項旨在研究人類大腦所蘊藏的“巨大奧妙”的科研計劃。奧巴馬總統(tǒng)希望這一“大腦計劃”能夠幫助世人了解和學習到人類大腦的運轉方式以及一些如老年癡呆等不同的腦部疾病。BBC 記者 Paul Adams 從美國華盛頓報道：

The president's advisors call the BRAIN project ambitious, even audacious. It aims to produce dynamic pictures of the brain that show, in the words of a White House statement, how individual cells and complex neural circuits interact at the speed of thought. Announcing the programme, Barack Obama said humans could identify distant galaxies and study subatomic particles, but still had a limited understanding of the brain.

Barack Obama:

"There's this enormous mystery waiting to be unlocked. The BRAIN Initiative will change that by giving scientists the tools they need to get a dynamic picture of the brain in action and better understand how we think and how we learn and how we remember."

That knowledge, he said, would be transformative: families no longer helpless at the onset of Parkinson's, and war veterans able to reverse the effects of traumatic brain injury. The administration reckons it costs around $500bn a year to treat the various conditions this project hopes to address. It believes that technological advances, in data processing and revolutionary new techniques like optogenetics mean that, for the first time, this hugely ambitious research is actually possible.