单选题
Countless medical studies have concluded that playing too
many video games can be harmful to one's health. Now, however, it turns out that
one of the more popular video-game consoles on the market, the Xbox 360, could
be used to save lives. A computer scientist at the University
of Warwick in England has devised a way to use an Xbox 360 to detect heart
defects and help prevent heart attacks. The new tool has the potential to
revolutionize the medical industry because it is both faster and cheaper than
the computer systems that are currently used by scientists to perform complex
heart research. The system, detailed in a study in the August
edition of the Journal of Computational Biology and Chemistry, is based on a
video-game demo created by Simon Scarle two years ago when he was a software
engineer at Microsoft's Rare studio, the division of the U.S.-based company that
designs games for the Xbox 360. Scarle modified a chip in the console so that
instead of producing graphics for the game, it now delivers data tracking how
electrical signals in the heart move around damaged cardiac cells. This creates
a model of the heart that allows doctors to identify heart defects or conditions
such as arrhythmia, a disturbance in the normal rhythm of the heart that causes
it to pump less effectively. "This is a clever use of a
processing chip...to speed up calculations of heart rhythm. What used to take
hours can be calculated in seconds, without having to employ an extremely
expensive, high-performance computer," Denis Noble, director of Computational
Physiology at Oxford University, tells TIME. To create a heart
model now, researchers must use supercomputers or a network of PCs to crunch
millions of mathematical equations relating to the proteins, cells and tissues
of the heart, a time-consuming and costly process. Scarle's Xbox system can
deliver the same results at a rate five times faster and 10 times more cheap,
according to the study. "These game consoles aren't just
glorified toys. They are pieces of very powerful computing hardware," Scarle
says. "I can see this...being most useful for students and early-career
scientists to just quickly and cheaply grab that extra bit of computing power
they otherwise wouldn't be able to get." Scarle attributes his
breakthrough creation to his unusual background of working as a software
engineer in the gaming industry and performing electrocardio-dynamics research
at the University of Sheffield in England. The idea for the heart-modeling tool
came from a "little shooter game" he developed at Microsoft in which a player
tries to gun down enemies in an arena meant to resemble a heart. "I did a
gameified version of my old cardiac code. I could actually present some 'proper'
science based on the cool things us game developers do," Scarle says.
The Xbox 360 isn't the only video-game console that is being used for
scientific research. At the University of Massachusetts campus in Dartmouth,
scientists are using Sony PlayStations to simulate black-hole collisions to try
to solve the mystery of what happens when a supermassive black hole swallows a
star. So perhaps parents shouldn't be too worried if their children are spending
an inordinate amount of time playing video games. Who knows, today's Grand Theft
Auto or Halo addict may end up discovering a new moon around Saturn or finding a
cure for cancer.
单选题
Which of the following is NOT true about the Xbox 360?
A.It is a popular video-game.
B.It was originally developed to detect heart defects.
C.It is a good example that video games can benefit human beings.
D.It is preferred by the medical industry in terms of its speed and
cost.