专业英语

MEN are notoriously insensitive to the emotional world around them. At least, that is the stereotype peddled by a thousand womens magazines. And a study by two researchers at the University of Melbourne, in Australia, confirms that men are, indeed, less sensitive to emotion than women, with one important and suggestive exception. Men are acutely sensitive to the anger of other men. Mark Williams and Jason Mattingley, whose study has just been published in Current Biology, looked at the way a persons sex affects his or her response to emotionally charged facial expressions. People from all cultures agree on what six basic expressions of emotion look like. Whether the face before you is expressing anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness or surprise seems to be recognized universallywhich suggests that the expressions involved are innate, rather than learned. Dr. Williams and Dr. Mattingley showed the participants in their study photographs of these emotional expressions in mixed sets of either four or eight. They asked the participants to look for a particular sort of expression, and measured the amount of time it took them to find it. The researchers found, in agreement with previous studies, that both men and women identified angry expressions most quickly. But they also found that anger was more quickly identified on a male face than a female one. Moreover, most participants could find an angry face just as quickly when it was mixed in a group of eight photographs as when it was part of a group of four. That was in stark contrast to the other five sorts of expression, which took more time to find when they had to be sorted from a larger group. This suggests that something in the brain is attuned to picking out angry expressions, and that it is especially concerned about angry men. Also, this highly tuned ability seems more important to males than females, since the two researchers found that men picked out the angry expressions faster than women did, even though women were usually quicker than men to recognize every other sort of facial expression. Dr. Williams and Dr. Mattingley suspect the reason for this is that being able to spot an angry individual quickly has a survival advantageand, since anger is more likely to turn into lethal violence in men than in women, the ability to spot angry males quickly is particularly valuable. As to why men are more sensitive to anger than women, it is presumably because they are far more likely to get killed by it. Most murders involve men killing other meneven today the context of homicide is usually a spontaneous dispute over status or sex. The ability to spot quickly that an alpha male is in a foul mood would thus have great survival value. It would allow the sharp-witted time to choose appeasement, defence or possibly even pre-emptive attack. And, if it is right, this study also confirms a lesson learned by generations of bar-room tough guys and schoolyard bullies: if you want attention, get angry.SOMETHING strange has been happening this year at company annual meetings in America: shareholders have been voting decisively against the recommendations of managers. Until now, most shareholders have, like so many sheep, routinely voted in accordance with the advice of the people they employ to run the company. This year managers have already been defeated at some 32 companies, including household names such as Boeing, ExxonMobil and General Motors. This shareholders revolt has focused entirely on one issue: the method by which members of the board of directors are elected. Shareholder resolutions on other subjects have mostly been defeated, as usual. The successful resolutions called for directors to be elected by majority voting, instead of by the traditional method of “plurality”which in practice meant that only votes cast in favour were counted, and that a single vote for a candidate would be enough to get him elected. Several companies, led by Pfizer, a drug giant, saw defeat looming and pre-emptively adopted a formal majority-voting policy that was weaker than in the shareholder resolution. This required any director who failed to secure a majority of votes to tender his resignation to the board, which would then be free to decide whether or not to accept it. Under the shareholder resolution, any candidate failing to secure a majority of the votes cast simply would not be elected. Intriguingly, the shareholder resolution was defeated at four-fifths of the firms that adopted a Pfizer-style majority voting rule, whereas it succeeded nearly nine times out of ten at firms retaining the plurality rule. Unfortunately for shareholders, their victories may prove illusory, as the successful resolutions were all “precatory”meaning that they merely advised management on the course of action preferred by shareholders, but did not force managers to do anything. Several resolutions that tried to impose majority voting on firms by changing their bylaws failed this year. Even so, wise managers should voluntarily adopt majority voting, according to Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, a Wall Street law firm that has generally helped managers resist increases in shareholder power but now expects majority voting eventually to “become universal”. It advises that, at the very least, managers should adopt the Pfizer model, if only to avoid becoming the subject of even greater scrutiny from corporate-governance activists. Some firms might choose to go further, as Dell and Intel have done this year, and adopt bylaws requiring majority voting. Shareholders may have been radicalised by the success last year of a lobbying effort by managers against a proposal from regulators to make it easier for shareholders to put up candidates in board elections. It remains to be seen if they will be back for more in 2007. Certainly, some of the activist shareholders behind this years resolutions have big plans. Where new voting rules are in place, they plan campaigns to vote out the chairman of the compensation committee at any firm that they think overpays the boss. If the 2006 annual meeting was unpleasant for managers, next years could be far worse.BACTERIA, like people, can be divided into friend and foe. Inspired by evidence that the friendly sort may help with a range of ailments, many people consume bacteria in the form of yogurts and dietary supplements. Such a smattering of artificial additions, however, represents but a drop in the ocean. There are at least 800 types of bacteria living in the human gut. And research by Steven Gill of the Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Maryland, and his colleagues, published in this weeks Science, suggests that the collective genome of these organisms is so large that it contains 100 times as many genes as the human genome itself. Dr Gill and his team were able to come to this conclusion by extracting bacterial DNA from the faeces of two volunteers. Because of the complexity of the samples, they were not able to reconstruct the entire genomes of each of the gut bacteria, just the individual genes. But that allowed them to make an estimate of numbers. What all these bacteria are doing is tricky to identifythe bacteria themselves are difficult to cultivate. So the researchers guessed at what they might be up to by comparing the genes they discovered with published databases of genes whose functions are already known. This comparison helped Dr Gill identify for the first time the probable enzymatic processes by which bacteria help humans to digest the complex carbohydrates in plants. The bacteria also contain a plentiful supply of genes involved in the synthesis of chemicals essential to human lifeincluding two B vitamins and certain essential amino acidsalthough the team merely showed that these metabolic pathways exist rather than proving that they are used. Nevertheless, the pathways they found leave humans looking more like ruminants: animals such as goats and sheep that use bacteria to break down otherwise indigestible matter in the plants they eat. The broader conclusion Dr Gill draws is that people are superorganisms whose metabolism represents an amalgamation of human and microbial attributes. The notion of a superorganism has emerged before, as researchers in other fields have come to view humans as having a diverse internal ecosystem. This, suggest some, will be crucial to the success of personalised medicine, as different people will have different responses to drugs, depending on their microbial flora. Accordingly, the next step, says Dr. Gill, is to see how microbial populations vary between people of different ages, backgrounds and diets. Another area of research is the process by which these helpful bacteria first colonise the digestive tract. Babies acquire their gut flora as they pass down the birth canal and take a gene-filled gulp of their mothers vaginal and faecal flora. It might not be the most delicious of first meals, but it could well be an important one.