Questões de Inglês - Reading/Writing

THIS COULD PUT BIOPSIES OUT OF BUSINESS

At last month’s American Physical Society meeting, Dartmouth researcher Mary Ann Myeek described a new laser system that will help doctors identify a malignant tumor without having to do a biopsy. The laser system can detect slight chemical and structural changes in a tissue that may signify the very early stages of cancers. When tested on patients with colon polyps, this new detection method was just as accurate as conventional procedures.  

Normally, when a doctor finds a suspicious growth a piece of the tissue is removed and sent to laboratory for analysis. Getting the result can take days even weeks. Myeek’s new laser system, however, gives immediate answers, and it’s much less invasive than a biopsy. Myeek’s team tested the laser system on 17 patients who were undergoing routine colon examinations. Every time a polyp was discovered, doctor took a picture of the tissue’s molecular structure with the laser. For comparison, a tissue sample was also biopsied. In nearly every case, the two methods gave similar results. Myeek says this device could be widely available in a few years.

Fonte: Business week, 12/04/09, p. 61. 

[1]THE FUTURE OF TWITTER

[2]  Microblogging platform Twitter has 32 million users, an increase
[3]  from about 2 million a year ago, according to research mentioned
[4]  in the Wall Street Journal. Some Internet measurement services
[5]  show that figure increasing 50% to 100% month over month.
[6]  While it is not clear that Twitter will become as large as social
[7]  networks MySpace and Facebook or video-sharing site YouTube,
[8]  the company could certainly have 50 million visitors by the end of
[9]  the year.
[10]  Because Twitter can be used with ease on both PCs and mobile
[11]  devices, and because it limits users to very short messages of 140
[12]  characters or fewer, it has become one of the largest platforms in
[13]  the world for sharing real-time data. A number of large businesses and celebrities have hundreds of thousands of
[14]  followers on Twitter.
[15]  As Twitter grows, it will increasingly become a place where companies build brands, do research, send information to
[16]  customers, conduct e-commerce and create communities for their users. Some industries, like local retail, could be
[17]  transformed by Twitter - both at one-store operations that cater to customers within a few blocks of their locations and
[18]  at the individual stores of giant retail operations like Wal-Mart (WMT). In either case, having the opportunity to tell
[19]  customers about attractive sales and new products can be done at remarkably low cost while providing for greater
[20]  geographic accuracy.
[21]  Twitter users have set up their own rules of conduct when using the service, not unlike those with MySpace and
[22]  Facebook. These rules were not put together by Twitter itself, which mandates only rules of use. Like many
[23]  social-network sites, Twitter is self-governed by its members, and companies must take that into account as they join
[24]  the service.
[25]  Twitter is still in the early stages of developing a plan for making money as a company, but plenty of large corporations
[26]  like Starbucks are already using it as a marketing tool. Twitter will probably evolve into both a community of individuals
[27]  and a community of companies that provide goods and services for those individuals.
[28]  Adapted from Time Magazine (Douglas A. McIntyre)
[29]  http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1901188_1901207_1901196,00.html