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Our brains could be hard-wired to be male or female long before we begin to grow testes(丸)or ovaries(卵巢)in the womb. This discovery might explain why some people feel trapped in a body that’s the wrong sex, and could also lead to tests that reveal the true "brain sex" of babies born with ambiguous genitalia(生殖器). Till now, the orthodoxy among developmental biologists has been that embryos develop ovaries and become female unless a gene called SRY on the Y chromosome is switched on. If this gene is active, it makes testes develop instead. This switch is seen as the key event in determining whether a baby is a girl or a boy. Only after the gonads(性腺) form and flood the body with the appropriate hormones, the theory goes, is the sex of our minds and bodies determined. But in a study of mice, a team at the University of California, Los Angeles, has now found that males and females show differences in the expression of no fewer than 50 genes well before SRY switches on. "It’s the first discovery of genes differentially expressed in the brain, "says Eric Vilain, who led the UCLA team. "They may have an impact on the hard-wired development of the brain in terms of sexual differentiation independent of gonadal induction." Vilain is presenting details of seven of the 50 genes to the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics in Baltimore this week. Three of these genes are dominant in females and four are dominant in males. The next step for Vilain and his team will be to show that the genes in question really do influence brain sexuality—and not just in mice. This is likely to be a much tougher proposition than merely showing there are differences in expression. But if the findings are confirmed, they could one day yield blood tests that allow doctors to establish the brain sex of babies born with genitalia that share features of both sexes. At present doctors and parents have to guess which gender to assign for surgical "correction". What has been found by the study at UCLA

A. We human beings have fewer than fifty genes.
B. Males and females have similar expression genes.
C. Differences in the expression of genes appear before SRY switches on.
D. Sexual differentiation depends mainly on gonadal induction.

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For more than thirty years after astronauts first set foot on the Moon, scientists have been unable to unravel the mystery of where the Earth’s only satellite came from. But now there is direct evidence that the Moon was born after a giant collision between the young Earth and another planet. Previous studies of rocks from the Earth and the Moon have been unable to distinguish between the two, suggesting that they formed from the same material. But this still left room for a number of theories explaining how—for example, that the Moon and Earth formed from the same material at the same time. It was even suggested that the early Earth spun so fast it formed a bulge that eventually broke off to form the Moon. Franck Poitrasson, and his colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology have compared Moon rocks with rocks from Earth and discovered a surprising difference. They analysed the weight of the elements present in the rock using a highly accurate form of mass spectroscopy(光谱研究) that involves vaporising a sample by passing it through an argon (氩) flame. Although they appeared very similar in most respects, the Moon rocks had a higher ratio of iron-57 to iron-54 isotopes(同位素)than the Earth rocks. "The only way we could explain this difference is that the Moon and the Earth were partly vaporised during their formation," says Poitrasson. Only the popular "giant planetary impact" theory could generate the temperatures of more than 1700℃ needed to vaporise iron. In this scenario, a Mars-sized planet known as Theia crashed into Earth 50 million years after the birth of the Solar System. This catastrophic collision would have released 100 million times more energy than the impact believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs—enough to melt and vaporise a large portion of the Earth and completely destroy Theia. The debris from the collision would have been thrown into orbit around the Earth and eventually coalesced to form the Moon. When iron is vaporised, the lighter isotopes burn off first. And since the ejected debris that became the Moon would have been more thoroughly vaporised, it would have lost a greater proportion of its lighter iron isotopes than Earth did. This would explain the different ratios that Poitrasson has found. Franck Poitrasson and his colleagues analyzed the weight of the elements present in the rock in order to ______.

A. find out which rock contains more iron
B. see how hot it needs to vaporize irons
C. investigate how the Moon was formed
D. estimate which rock is more valuable

在不同速度的设备之间传送数据 (40) 。

A. 必须采用同步控制方式
B. 必须采用异步方式
C. 必须采用应答方式
D. 可以选用同步方式,也可以选用异步方式

案例分析题8层完全二叉树至少有()个结点,拥有100个结点的完全二叉树的最大层数为()。 拥有100个结点的完全二叉树的最大层数为()。

A. 6
B. 7
C. 8
D. 9

On her way to Wuhan on business, a pickpocket _____.

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