China reports 754 million domestic passenger trips made in the first 7 days of the 8-day National Day & Moon Festival holidays, up 78.9% year-on-year

A total of 754 million domestic passenger trips were made in China in the first seven days of the 8-day National Day and Mid-Autumn Festival  holidays, a year-on-year increase of 78.9%. Holiday tourism generated 668.1 billion yuan ($92.80 billion), up 132.6% year-on-year, official data showed on Friday.

China begins phase-II construction on far-reaching radar system, to boost defense against near-Earth asteroid impact

The second phase of a high-definition deep-space active observation facility, China Fuyan, which is dubbed as the world's most far-reaching radar system, kicked off in Southwest China's Chongqing Municipality, the Global Times learned from the project lead Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT) on Tuesday. 

The second phase of the project, codenamed China Fuyan [faceted eye], will involve building 25 radars with a 30-meter aperture, so as to realize the detection and imaging of asteroids over 10 million kilometers away, which will provide strong support for China's near-Earth asteroid impact defense and planetary science research.

Construction of phase II, which will cover an area of over 300 mu (20 hectares), is expected to be completed by 2025. It will be a new research and development phase for the project, Long Teng, president of BIT and a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said in a statement sent to the Global Times. 

China Fuyan will consist of distributed radars with more than 20 antennas, and each antenna will have a diameter of 25 to 30 meters. It is expected to become the world's most far-reaching radar system capable of carrying out high-definition observation of asteroids within 150 million kilometers. 

Long said that because the system has multiple antennas, like the faceted eyes of an insect, it was given the vivid name of China Fuyan.

Through high-resolution observation of asteroids, spacecraft, the moon, Earth-like planets and Jupiter Galileo satellites and other deep-space targets, China Fuyan will meet the need for the defense of near-Earth asteroids and situational awareness of space. It will provide key support for the study of habitability of the Earth, planet formation and other frontier scientific research.

The project has three stages of construction. The first stage was completed in December 2022 in Chongqing, consisting of four radars with a 16-meter aperture. It successfully captured the country's first ground-based three-dimensional radar image of lunar craters. 

After the completion of the second phase, the third phase of the project will expand the number of radar units to over 100, the Global Times learned. 

Unlike the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope nicknamed Tianyan, which is designed to collect passive observations of radio signals from space, Fuyan will be actively shooting radio signals to celestial bodies in order to obtain new observations, experts noted.

This will be very helpful for China's lunar exploration, as it is capable of monitoring Chinese spacecraft' journey to the moon, they said.

At an altitude of 4,526 meters, China’s first ‘zero-altitude astronomical observation station’ successfully handed over

The high-altitude pressurized liable building independently developed and built by China Construction Third Engineering Bureau Co. Ltd, China's first "zero-altitude astronomical observation station," held a handover ceremony in the Kizilsu Kirghiz Autonomous Prefecture, Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, and was officially delivered for demonstration application, authorities confirmed recently.

"Zero-altitude building" refers to the use of pressurization and other technologies to adjust the indoor key human settlement environment indicators to the low altitude level in the plain area, so that the human body feels more comfortable. When used, the altitude inside the building can be set according to the needs of personnel and reduce the impact of altitude sickness.

The observatory is located near Muztagh Ata, the third highest peak of the West Kunlun Mountains in Akto county. It sits at an altitude of 4,526 meters, with a total construction area of approximately 150 square meters, capable of supporting scientific research, residential, and office functions.

The observation station is a scientific research pressurized building specially designed for plateau astronomical work in response to the needs of its cooperative organization, Beijing Normal University. It can increase the overall atmospheric pressure inside the building to one standard atmospheric pressure while solving the problems of low pressure and oxygen deficiency in the plateau.

The facility provides a comfortable and healthy environment for astronomers to work and live in high-altitude areas, lowering the risk of physiological damage caused by the plateau's extreme environment.

It is expected to support a new phase of rapid development in China's astronomical scientific research work, according to media reports.

China’s self-developed monkeypox vaccine to enter clinical trial stage soon: experts

China saw a fourfold surge of monkeypox cases in July compared to the previous month, but experts reached by the Global Times noted on Friday noted that China's home-developed vaccine will soon enter the clinical trial stage. 

They also said that although in most cases people heal on their own, newborns, children, pregnant women and people with immunodeficiency may have a higher risk of developing severe or even fatal conditions. 

Due to the mild symptoms caused by the monkeypox virus and the lack of large-scale global outbreaks, research into monkeypox vaccines has been relatively limited worldwide, the experts explained.

Meanwhile, as monkeypox and smallpox viruses have extensive serological cross-reactivity, the existing vaccines used for monkeypox prevention are all smallpox vaccines. 

Retrospective studies conducted by the World Health Organization have shown that smallpox vaccine administration has an efficacy of 85 percent in preventing monkeypox. Currently, there are three smallpox vaccines approved for monkeypox prevention in Europe, the US, and Japan, Su Jinfeng, a senior biomedical engineer, told the Global Times. 

Su called for accelerated development of new vaccines to protect those at greater risk and to prevent potential outbreaks. However, the expert admitted that the development of vaccines faces several challenges due to the limited number of monkeypox cases in the country and the dispersed population, which makes it difficult to conduct large-scale clinical trials to assess a vaccine's efficacy. 

"Currently, the US, Japan and European countries have considered this type of vaccine as a reserve drug. China should also accelerate the development of a new smallpox/monkeypox vaccine, not only to prevent the spread of monkeypox outbreaks but also to protect national security and public health from threats of smallpox virus being used as a bioweapon," a vaccine expert who preferred not to be named told the Global Times. 

Given the large genome and complex structure of the monkeypox virus, as well as limited understanding of protective antigens, the development of a protective antigen-based vaccine is challenging, the expert said. Therefore, a better strategy would be to use attenuated live vaccine technology, building upon the existing smallpox vaccine, to develop a safer vaccine in human cells.

As of April 2023, preclinical research on monkeypox vaccines has been conducted primarily by the US and China, said Su. Previous reports have indicated that a total of 14 clinical studies on monkeypox vaccines have been conducted globally.

Currently, three types of vaccine have been approved for the prevention of monkeypox, from Denmark, the US, and Japan. 

Research institutions in China have already started developing monkeypox vaccines, mainly focusing on replication-defective monkeypox attenuated live vaccines and monkeypox mRNA vaccines.

In July, the replication-deficient monkeypox vaccine developed by China National Pharmaceutical Group Corporation (Sinopharm) has passed the clinical trial application with the National Medical Products Administration, making it the earliest domestically developed monkeypox vaccine to enter the clinical research stage in China.

The Chinese mainland has reported 491 new monkeypox cases across 23 provincial-level regions, the country's Center for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed on Wednesday, increasing over fourfold compared to last month. 

According to epidemiological reviews, all cases are male with 96.3 percent of them identified as men who had sex with other men, and the risk of transmission through other contact methods is low.

The majority of cases exhibited typical clinical symptoms including fever, rash, and swollen lymph nodes, with no severe or fatal cases.

HKSAR chief listens to public views on upcoming policy address with focus on talents, tourism

John Lee Ka-chiu, chief executive (CE) of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), listened to public concerns and suggestions from hundreds of people on Sunday during a district forum for the upcoming policy address in October, which is expected to include some new measures to attract talents and boost tourism. 

The two-session forum, held in Aldrich Bay Government Primary School and lasting two hours, was attended by about 120 people from all walks of life. During the forum, community members voiced their opinions on topics including land and housing, transport, innovation and technology, finance, culture and sports, education, youth, poverty alleviation, healthcare and social welfare, according to the website of the HKSAR government.

In the second session, participants were divided into four groups with the goal of engaging in extensive discussions with principal officials on themes that include boosting the economy and people's livelihoods. Lee interacted with those participating in each group in turn. 

Lee delivered his first policy address at the Legislative Council in October 2022, rolling out a series of measures in regard to attracting global talents, enhancing the city's competitiveness as an international financial hub, and further integrating into the country's overall development plan.

The CE said the public generally agreed to the governance policy in the 2022 Policy Address, and he hopes to listen to more public views and consolidate the objectives and implementation of different policies, so as to deepen and broaden policies as well as identify priorities.

The 2023 Policy Address is scheduled to be delivered on October 25, and the HKSAR government will conduct more than 30 consultation sessions to listen to views and suggestions of Legislative Council members, representatives of various sectors and members of the public.

Following the uncertainties in the global economy, Hong Kong society now expects the HKSAR government to formulate and implement policies to foster the local economy and business sustainability, some observers said. 

Lau Siu-kai, a member of the Chief Executive Policy Unit Expert Group, told the Global Times on Sunday that the HKSAR government should implement the important policies proposed in last year's policy address and deliver tangible results as soon as possible, so as to boost public confidence in the government and Hong Kong. "There's no need to force new policies every year," he said. 

"Many of the important policies proposed in last year's policy address have crossed the five-year term. The HKSAR government has been facing the financial pressure and grim external situation, so it should cherish and make good use of resources," Lau said. 

"We have too much experience in tolerating the poor standard of civil services. Several departments have not done their roles properly. Patients have to queue up for a year just for a five-minute medical consultation in public hospitals. Somehow the public housing resources are wrongly allocated to those with their assets hidden outside the jurisdiction," Chu Kar-kin, a Hong Kong-based veteran current affairs commentator who has been following the forum, told the Global Times on Sunday. 

Also, talents are attracted to the city, but jobs are not secure and careers are not promising. Taxpayers are paying for services or resources they cannot enjoy, Chu said. 

"Property prices and rents have rocketed for a decade and is in an adjustment stage. The government should allocate more resources to invest in our future such as education and welfare for the elderly. The government should also foster the cultivation of the technology and creative sector," he said.

During the forum, Lee said that "it is necessary to look at the different needs of the public in their daily lives and understand the living conditions of various community sectors when formulating policies," so as to respond proactively to the people's aspirations, local media The Standard reported. 

Ancient DNA reveals who is in Spain’s ‘pit of bones’ cave

Neandertals hung out in what’s now northern Spain around 430,000 years ago, an analysis of ancient DNA suggests. That’s an earlier Neandertal presence in Europe, by at least 30,000 years, than many researchers had assumed.

Fragments of nuclear DNA from a tooth and partial leg bone discovered at Sima de los Huesos, a chamber deep inside a Spanish cave, resemble corresponding parts of a previously reassembled Neandertal genome, researchers say in a study published online March 14 in Nature.
Not much nuclear DNA survives in such ancient fossils, say paleogeneticist Matthias Meyer of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and his colleagues. Meyer’s group recovered DNA fragments covering a fraction of 1 percent of the newly recovered Neandertal tooth and leg genomes. Just enough DNA remained to enable comparisons with DNA of a Neandertal woman (SN: 1/25/14, p. 17) and a Denisovan woman (SN: 9/22/12, p. 5). Denisovans are considered close genetic cousins of Neandertals.

The early age for the new genetic finds challenges the idea that fossils from Sima de los Huesos, or pit of bones, come from a species called Homo heidelbergensis. Some researchers have suspected that by around 400,000 years ago, H. heidelbergensis gave rise to evolutionary precursors of both Neandertals and Homo sapiens.
An ancient genetic puzzle has also emerged at Sima de los Huesos. On one hand, nuclear DNA — which passes from both parents to their children — pegs the Spanish hominids as Neandertals. But mitochondrial DNA — typically inherited only from the mother — already extracted from one Sima de los Huesos fossil (SN: 12/28/13, p. 8) and described for a second fossil in the new study has more in common with Denisovans.

Denisovans lived in East Asia at least 44,000 years ago, but their evolutionary history is unknown.

If early Neandertals lived in northern Spain roughly 430,000 years ago, “we have to go back further in time to reach the common ancestor of Neandertals and Denisovans,” Meyer says.
The new genetic data from Sima de los Huesos now suggest that Denisovans split from Neandertals perhaps 450,000 years ago, says paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London. Genetic and fossil evidence point to Neandertals and H. sapiens diverging from a common ancestor around 650,000 years ago, he proposes.

But it’s hard to say whether that common ancestor was H. heidelbergensis, Stringer adds. “Research must refocus on fossils from 400,000 to 800,000 years ago to determine which ones might lie on ancestral lineages of Neandertals, Denisovans and modern humans.”

Hominids throughout Eurasia during that time may have shared a mitochondrial DNA pattern observed in Sima de los Huesos Neandertals and Asian Denisovans, Meyer suggests. If that was the case, Neandertals acquired a new form of mitochondrial DNA by interbreeding with modern humans or their direct ancestors from Africa sometime between 430,000 and 100,000 years ago (SN: 3/19/16, p. 6).

Another possibility is that Neandertals traveled to Europe from Asia more than 430,000 years ago, carrying Denisovan mitochondrial DNA with them, says paleogeneticist Carles Lalueza-Fox of the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona. Or hybrid descendants of early Neandertals and early Denisovans may have lived at Sima de los Huesos, carrying Denisovan mitochondrial DNA, he speculates.

“We really need more genetic data from Sima de los Huesos, and other sites of that age, to narrow down these scenarios,” Meyer says.

Disney’s ‘The Jungle Book’ resurrects giant extinct ape

In the 1967 animated Disney film The Jungle Book, the feral boy Mowgli encounters a jazz-singing orangutan named King Louie, who implores Mowgli to teach him the secret of fire. King Louie presented a challenge for the producers of Disney’s live-action, CGI-enhanced remake of the film, opening April 15. “We had this notion that we would be as authentic as we could be to the region,” says producer Brigham Taylor. The problem: Orangutans are not native to India.
In fact, King Louie himself is not native to Rudyard Kipling’s original stories. But instead of scrapping the character, the filmmakers got creative. While researching India’s wildlife, the film’s art department learned that a colossal ape named Gigantopithecus once roamed the region. Various species of Gigantopithecus lived in India, China and Southeast Asia from about 6.5 million years ago until as recently as a few hundred thousand years ago. The ape was truly gigantic — by some estimates, twice as big as a gorilla.

So King Louie morphed from orangutan to Gigantopithecus. The switch was a “fun justification,” Taylor says, to keep the character and play up his size while still staying true to India’s fauna. (Yes, the ape is extinct, but this is a movie about talking animals. And fossil evidence does suggest that the ape at least mingled with the human ancestor Homo erectus.)

Using the scientific information they could find on the Internet, visual effects artists imagined how the animal would look and move, Taylor says. The result: an ape that resembles an overgrown orangutan, Gigantopithecus’ closest living relative. The movie ape has shaggy hair, flaring cheeks and a saggy pouch that hangs from the throat like a double chin — and towers about 12 feet tall.
It’s difficult to judge how accurate Disney’s rendering is. Despite possibly having been the largest primate ever to have lived, Gigantopithecus
left behind few fossils. Scientists have just four lower jaws and over a thousand teeth, says biological anthropologist Russell Ciochon of the University of Iowa. That’s not much to go on, but Ciochon and colleagues made their own reconstruction a couple decades ago.
The researchers took a jaw from China and made an outline of a skull that could fit such a jaw. Because most primate skulls scale to body size, Ciochon says, his group could estimate Gigantopithecus’ weight, 800 to 900 pounds, and height, about 9 feet from head to toe. (The species that lived in India was actually probably smaller.) Adding other details like hair to the animal is a matter of conjecture, Ciochon says.

But the teeth do offer some solid details about the ape’s lifestyle. Wear patterns and microscopic debris stuck to the teeth indicate Gigantopithecus dined on fruits, leaves, shoots, roots and perhaps even bamboo. Last year, researchers confirmed those details after analyzing the ratios of carbon isotopes in teeth found in Southeast Asia. The analysis also determined that Gigantopithecus was a strict forest dweller, even though it also lived near grasslands in some areas. In fact, the researchers contend, Gigantopithecus’ reliance on forests and its big size — and therefore big appetite — may have been the animal’s undoing. As Southeast Asia’s jungles gave way to expanding grasslands during the last glacial period, Gigantopithecus may have been unable to cope.

Perhaps if our ancestors had shared the secret of fire with Gigantopithecus, the giant ape would still be around today.

Heat may outpace corals’ ability to cope

Corals are in hot water — and may soon lose their ability to handle the heat.

In Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, most past bouts of warming allowed many corals to adjust their physiology and avoid serious damage. But as waters warm even more, corals could run out of wiggle room, researchers report in the April 15 Science.

“One of the things that we have been striving for is trying to figure out the rate and limit of … physiological adjustments that corals have, how far you can push them,” says marine biologist Stephen Palumbi of Stanford University, who was not involved with the study. Corals may not be able to cope with much more ocean warming, Palumbi says. “I would take this paper as being the first real indication that we have half a degree at most.”
If water temperatures surge quickly, corals may bleach, losing the bacterial residents that provide them with nutrients and oxygen (and color). But if waters warm slightly — less than the roughly 2 degrees Celsius above average heat spike where bleaching begins — and then cool for a brief time before heating up to a greater extent, corals are better prepared to survive the heat. In the lab, corals exposed to this two-step heating process experienced less bleaching and less cell death than corals suffering a high initial heat wave, the researchers found.

“We liken it to the idea of training for a marathon,” says study coauthor Scott Heron, a physical oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coral Reef Watch in College Park, Md. “If they have a little bit of exposure, and then the recovery period after that … they’re better prepared for the race when it comes.”

From 1985 to 2011, around 75 percent of warming events on Great Barrier Reef sites occurred in this stepwise fashion, probably allowing corals to steel themselves and survive warmer waters. But with climate models predicting a 2-degree increase in sea temperatures by the end of the century, warming events could soon push corals past their bleaching point with no chance to prepare.

Computer simulations predicted that as waters grow warmer, reef heat waves will increase overall. But the fraction of such events that could condition corals to withstand bleaching will fall from 75 percent to 22 percent, the team reports. Most reefs that have experienced preconditioning in the past will start losing the ability to prepare when water temperatures increase by 0.5 degrees, the team predicts. Warming trends suggest that the added half degree should appear within 40 years. “If that protective mechanism does get lost going into the future, then what we’ve seen so far as being bad impacts could become worse,” Heron says.

For now, preparation may help some corals survive in warming seas, but reduced carbon emissions will also be required to sustain coral cover throughout the century, the team’s data suggest. Palumbi says these predictions are very important. “If we get a handle on emissions, there are substantial predicted differences in the way that coral populations live in the future,” he says. “We are still in a position to choose how the future of coral reefs works out.”

Baby titanosaur was parents’ Mini-Me

A baby titanosaur looked a lot like a grown-up — and it probably acted like one, too.

The (relatively) tiny fossils of a roughly 1- to 2-month-old dinosaur, Rapetosaurus krausei, discovered in what is now Madagascar, suggest that babies and adults had similar limb proportions, researchers report in the April 22 Science. That’s a sign that the babies were precocious, or didn’t require a whole lot of parental care, says study coauthor Kristi Curry Rogers, a vertebrate paleontologist at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn. After hatching, she says, the tiny titanosaur may have been more self-reliant than babies of other dinosaur species.

A lack of very young titanosaur specimens has made it tough to understand the enormous dinosaurs’ growth patterns. Curry Rogers and colleagues estimate that when newly hatched, the baby weighed 3.4 kilograms — about the weight of a newborn human. But in just a few weeks, the dinosaur’s weight shot up to 40 kilograms, roughly as heavy as a 12-year-old boy.

During the growth spurt, all of the baby’s limbs grew at about the same rate, the team calculated with data from microscopic images and CT scans. Those data plus features of the bones’ tissue point toward a life that, though cut short by starvation, was both active and independent.

Cause of mass starfish die-offs is still a mystery

In the summer of 2013, an epidemic began sweeping through the intertidal zone off the west coast of North America. The victims were several species of sea star, including Pisaster ochraceus, a species that comes in orange and purple variants. (It’s also notable because it’s the starfish that provided ecology with the fundamental concept of a keystone species.) Affected individuals appeared to “melt,” losing grip with the rocks to which they were attached — and then losing their arms. This sea star wasting disease, as it is known, soon killed sea stars from Baja California to Alaska.

This wasn’t the first outbreak of sea star wasting disease. A 1978 outbreak in the Gulf of California, for instance, killed so many Heliaster kubinjiisun stars that the once ubiquitous species is now incredibly rare.

These past incidents, though, happened fast and within smaller regions, so scientists had struggled to figure out what had happened. With the latest outbreak happening over such a large — and well-studied — region and period of time, marine biologists have been able to gather more data on the disease than ever before. And they’re getting closer to figuring out just what happened in this latest incident.

One likely factor is the sea star-associated densovirus, which, in 2014, scientists reported finding in greater abundance in starfish with sea star wasting disease than in healthy sea stars. But the virus can’t be the only cause of the disease; it’s found in both healthy and sick sea stars, and it has been around since at least 1942, the earliest year it has been found in museum specimens. So there must be some other factor at play.
Earlier this year, scientists studying the outbreak in Washington state reported in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B thatwarm waters may increase disease progression and rates of death. Studies of California starfish came to a similar conclusion. But a new study, appearing May 4 in PLOS One , finds that may not be true for sea stars in Oregon. Bruce Menge and colleagues at Oregon State University took advantage of their long-term study of Oregon starfish to evaluate what happened to sea stars during the recent epidemic and found that wasting disease increased with cooler , not warmer, temperatures. “Given conflicting results on the role of temperature as a trigger of [sea star wasting disease], it seems most likely that multiple factors interacted in complex ways to cause the outbreak,” they conclude.
What those factors are, though, is still a mystery.

Also unclear is what long-term effects this outbreak will have on Pacific intertidal communities.

In the 1960s, Robert Paine of the University of Washington performed what is now considered a classic experiment. For years, he removed starfish from one area of rock in Makah Bay at the northwestern tip of Washington and left another bit of rock alone as a control. Without the starfish to prey on them, mussels were able to take over. The sea stars, Paine concluded, were a “keystone species” that kept the local food web in control.

If sea star wasting disease has similar effects on the Pacific intertidal food web, Menge and his colleagues write, “it would result in losses or large reductions of many species of macrophytes, anemones, limpets, chitons, sea urchins and other organisms from the low intertidal zone.”

What happens, the group says, may depend on how quickly the disease disappears from the region and how many young sea stars can grow up and start munching on mussels.