Science
China Focus: China employs sci-tech to improve biological breeding, seed varieties
China has boosted its biological breeding industry through scientific and technological methods, contributing greatly to the country's steady supply of grain and other major agricultural products.
In recent years, China has solidly pushed forward its seed industry revitalization, and has achieved a number of breakthroughs.
China has independently bred three new white-feather broiler chicken varieties, thereby ending its previous complete dependence on imports, according to the latest statistics from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs and the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. The market share of these new varieties reached 25.1 percent in 2023 and they were exported abroad for the first time last year.
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China last year also successfully cultivated a new oilseed rape variety with a growth period of only about 169 days. This short growth cycle enables farmers to fully utilize the winter fallow fields in southern China by planting oilseed rape without delaying the planting of early season rice the following year.
In addition, China has managed to establish an independent and complete bio-breeding research and development system, and has secured independent intellectual property rights and core technologies concerning important genes and genetic features, such as insect resistance, herbicide tolerance, drought resistance, salt tolerance, and improved nutritional quality.
Recently, the country's 37 genetically modified corn varieties and 14 genetically modified soybean varieties passed preliminary examinations, according to the ministry. This marked a pioneering step for the industrialization of bio-breeding.
These genetically modified crops showed both outstanding herbicide-tolerant and insect-resistant traits. They could also see a 10 percent rise in yields, demonstrating great development potential.
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As the "chips" of agriculture, seeds are crucial to the development of the industry. Accelerating the promotion and application of transgenic technology is an inevitable choice for increasing future international competitiveness and optimizing industrial division, and is also a key way to ensure the country's food security and boost the sustainable development of agricultural science and technology.
The contribution rate of improved varieties to the increase in grain yield currently exceeds 45 percent, according to official statistics. As a core focus area for the development of the seed industry, sci-tech innovation will help improve China's agricultural sci-tech level and narrow the production capacity gap between China and some leading foreign countries.
"The core goals in the future are to increase production and improve the quality of seeds, reduce the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and decrease losses caused by natural disasters," said Li Jiayang, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Internet users in Bangladesh reach 131 mln as of 2023
The number of internet subscribers reached 131 million at the end of December, 2023, including nearly 7 million new users in the last year, showed the recently released data by the country's telecom regulator.
The Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) data showed that of the internet subscribers, some 118.49 million are mobile internet users and 12.88 million broadband internet users.
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Meanwhile, with 10.61 million new mobile users in 2023, the number of subscribers in the country reached 190.81 million in December 2023.
Bangladesh has currently four mobile companies in operation, three of them being foreign-backed cellphone operators.
The number of subscribers of mobile operators Grameen Phone, Robi Axiata, Banglalink Digital Communications and Teletalk Bangladesh stood at 82.20 million, 58.67 million, 43.48 million and 6.46 million, respectively, at the end of December, the data shows.
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Astronauts from Turkey, Italy and Sweden return to Earth, ending private space station trip
Astronauts from Turkey, Italy and Sweden returned to Earth on Friday, ending a private three-week mission to the International Space Station.
The trio were accompanied by a retired NASA astronaut who now works for Axiom Space, the Houston company that arranged the chartered flight. The crew returned in a SpaceX capsule that parachuted into the Atlantic off the Florida coast.
Turkey celebrated Alper Gezeravci’s launch from Cape Canaveral last month. A former fighter pilot and captain for Turkish Airlines, he became the first person from his country to fly in space.
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Gezeravci was joined on the trip by Italian Air Force Col. Walter Villadei, Sweden’s Marcus Wandt, a former fighter pilot chosen as a reserve astronaut by the European Space Agency in 2022 and Michael Lopez-Alegria, their escort.
Turkey, Italy and Sweden financed the mission, paying roughly $55 million apiece. It was Axiom’s third private mission to the space station; the fourth is planned later this year.
Before leaving the space station, Gezeravci thanked his country for its “bold and determined decision” to send a citizen into space as part of its 100th anniversary as a republic.
While in orbit, the astronauts conducted science experiments and chatted with schoolchildren and officials from their countries. They enjoyed a few extra days at the space station, waiting for the weather to improve in the splashdown zone.
Fatty acids play crucial role in memory formation: study
A team led by researchers from the University of Queensland (UQ) has recently shed new light on the crucial role of saturated free fatty acids (FFAs) in the brain's memory creation process.
"We've shown previously that levels of saturated fatty acids increase in the brain during neuronal communication, but we didn't know what was causing these changes," Isaac Akefe, lead author of the study and research fellow at UQ, said on Tuesday.
"Now for the first time, we've identified alterations in the brain's fatty acid landscape when the neurons encode a memory," the scholar noted.
In their latest paper published in EMBO Journal, researchers dived deep into a novel interaction between the Phospholipase A1 (PLA1) isoform DDHD2 and a key synaptic protein dubbed STXBP1 by conducting longitudinal experiments on mice.
They found that STXBP1 controls the targeting of DDHD2 to the plasma membrane and the subsequent generation of saturated FFAs.
"To determine the importance of free fatty acids in memory formation, we used mouse models where the PLA1 gene is removed," said Frederic Meunier, co-author of the study and professor at UQ.
"Even before their memories became impaired, their saturated free fatty acid levels were significantly lower than control mice. This indicates that this PLA1 enzyme, and the fatty acids it releases, play a key role in memory acquisition," he noted.
As the fattiest organ in the body, 60 percent of the human brain consists of lipids, while fatty acids serve as the building blocks of those lipids or fats and are instrumental in communication between nerve cells.
Meunier believed that manipulating this new memory acquisition pathway has "exciting potential" as a treatment for neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease.
As cancer treatment advances, patients and doctors push back against drugs' harsh side effects
For cancer patients, the harsh side effects of powerful drugs have long been the trade-off for living longer. Now, patients and doctors are questioning whether all that suffering is necessary.
They’ve ignited a movement to radically change how new cancer drugs are tested, with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration urging drugmakers to do a better job at finding the lowest effective dose, even if it takes more time.
Advances in treatment mean millions of people are surviving for years with incurable cancers. Jill Feldman, 54, of Deerfield, Illinois, has lived 15 years with lung cancer, thanks to that progress. Her parents both died of lung cancer months after their diagnoses.
But her cancer drug causes joint pain, fatigue and mouth sores that make eating and drinking painful.
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“If you drink something that’s too hot, you really burn your mouth. That’s how my mouth feels 24/7,” Feldman said.
She has lowered the dose with her doctor’s blessing but she wants drugmakers to study lower doses early in the research process.
“No one should have to endure avoidable harmful effects of treatment,” she said.
Unlike in other diseases, cancer drug development has focused on finding what’s called the “maximum tolerated dose.”
To speed testing of chemotherapy drugs, researchers ramp up the dosage in a few people in early studies to determine the highest possible dose patients can tolerate. That “more is better” philosophy works for chemotherapy, but not necessarily for newer cancer drugs — like the one Feldman takes — which are more targeted and work differently.
Chemotherapy is like a battering ram where aggressive strikes are a good strategy. But newer cancer drugs are more like having a front door key. They target a mutation that drives cancer cell growth, for example, or rev up the body’s immune system to join the fight.
“You might only need a low dose to turn off that cancer driver,” said Dr. Lillian Siu, who leads cancer drug development at the Princess Margaret Cancer Center in Toronto. “If you can get the same bang for your buck, why go higher?”
Through a program called Project Optimus, the FDA is pushing drugmakers to include more patients in early dose-finding trials to get better data on when lower doses can work. A key motivation for the project was "the growing calls from patients and advocates that cancer drugs be more tolerable,” said FDA spokesperson Chanapa Tantibanchachai in an email.
Many of the new cancers drugs were developed using the old strategy. That leads to problems when patients skip doses or stop taking the drugs because of side effects. Some dose recommendations have been officially lowered after the drugs were approved. Other dose-lowering happens one patient at a time. Nearly half of patients in late-stage trials of 28 targeted therapy drugs needed to have their doses lowered, according to one study.
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“We were pushing the dose as high as we could go,” said Dr. Patricia LoRusso, who leads drug discovery at Yale School of Medicine. “You get side effects and then you have to stop the drug to recover from the side effects and the tumor can grow.”
There's also huge patient-to-patient variation. The amount of a pill that reaches the bloodstream can vary because of liver and kidney function and other differences. But that means lowering the dose for everyone risks underdosing some patients, LoRusso said.
“The challenge is: Where is the sweet spot?” LoRusso said.
Dr. Julie Gralow, chief medical officer of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, is planning a 500-patient study to test whether lower doses of two drugs for breast cancer that has spread.
The study will compare two strategies: Starting treatment at the full dose then lowering the dose for side effects versus starting with a lower dose and increasing dosage if the patient does well.
Much of the questioning of high doses has come from metastatic breast cancer patients, including the Patient Centered Dosing Initiative, which has done influential surveys of patients and cancer doctors.
“We will be on treatment for the rest of our lives,” said Lesley Kailani Glenn, 58, of Central Point, Oregon. “We want to try to live the best that we can, knowing that treatment is never-ever going to stop.”
During the 11 years she's lived with the disease, she has summited Mount Whitney in California, hiked the Cinque Terra in Italy and started a nonprofit.
When Glenn learned how cancer drug research favors high doses, she started working with her doctor. She has taken drugs at lower doses and even lower when she can’t live with the side effects. Diarrhea is her deal-breaker: She wants to be able to walk her dog or shop for groceries without worrying about a bathroom emergency.
“The last thing we want to do is have our quality of life stolen from us,” Glenn said.
Through Project Optimus, the FDA is encouraging drug developers to conduct more head-to-head dosing comparisons. That could slow down the process, said Dr. Alice Shaw, who leads early cancer drug development at Novartis.
“That will require more patients and then, as you can imagine, also will require more time to identify, enroll and treat those patients,” said Shaw said. Adding six months to a year to the process, Shaw said, needs to be balanced against the urgent need for new cancer drugs.
But getting the dose right early will in the long run lead to more effective drugs, said Dr. Timothy Yap, a drug developer at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. “If the patients are not taking the drug, then it’s not going to work.”
Is the moon shrinking? Here’s what scientists say
New research suggests that the moon’s South Pole, a hotspot for future exploration, might be more challenging than expected due to “moonquakes” and landslides.
The moon's allure as a target for space agencies like NASA and private companies like SpaceX is undeniable. But a recent study funded by NASA throws a cautionary flag on the lunar South Pole, a region rich in potential water ice and the target for several upcoming missions, reports CNN.
The study revealed that the moon’s core is cooling and shrinking, causing its surface to wrinkle and crack, similar to a raisin, it said.
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These “faults” trigger moonquakes lasting for hours and landslides, potentially posing a threat to future human settlements and equipment.
The moon may seem geologically dead, but its interior is still hot, making it seismically active. The study links a powerful moonquake detected by Apollo astronauts to faults near the South Pole, highlighting the potential dangers.
While the findings won’t affect the upcoming Artemis III mission due to its short duration, they raise concerns for long-term lunar settlements. Future site selection may consider factors like proximity to tectonic features.
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Yosio Nakamura, , a professor emeritus of geophysics at the University of Texas at Austin, who was among the researchers who first looked at the data collected by the Apollo seismic stations, disagreed with the study’s cause of shallow moonquakes, suggesting they originate deeper within the moon. He emphasized the need for more data.
Allen Husker, a research professor of geophysics at the California Institute of Technology, said “It is very unlikely that a large moonquake will happen while they are there. However, it is good to know that these seismic sources (causing the quakes) exist. They can be an opportunity to better study the moon as we do on the earth with earthquakes,” Husker said. “By the time there is an actual moon base, we should have a much better idea of the actual seismic hazard with upcoming missions.”
Jeffrey Andrews, an associate professor of planetary science at the University of Arizona, said, “Moonquakes are an incredible tool for doing science.” “They are like flashlights in the lunar interior that illuminate its structure for us to see. Studying moonquakes at the South Pole will tell us more about the moon’s interior structure as well as its present-day activity,” he added.
Japan becomes the fifth country to land a spacecraft on the moon
Scientists spot previously unknown colonies of emperor penguins in Antarctica
Previously unknown colonies of emperor penguins have been spotted in new satellite imagery.
Emperor penguins, considered “near threatened” with extinction, are the world’s largest penguins. They raise their chicks in Antarctic winter on patches of frozen sea ice. But if the ice breaks up before the chicks have fledged, most will die.
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At least some emperor penguins are moving their colonies as melting ice from climate change threatens breeding grounds, according to research released on Wednesday.
One penguin colony near Halley Bay appears to have moved around 30 kilometers (19 miles) to the east, said Peter Fretwell, a researcher at the British Antarctic Survey. He said unstable conditions beginning in 2016 had made the old location perilous.
“Emperor penguins have taken it upon themselves to try to find more stable sea ice,” he said.
The four newly found colonies likely existed for many years, but scientists hadn't previously spotted them, said Fretwell. They are mostly small colonies, with less than 1,000 breeding pairs each, he said. Scientists currently know of 66 emperor penguin colonies.
The newly spotted colonies don't greatly change overall population estimates — currently less than around 300,000 breeding pairs — but they help scientists understand where penguins might be moving, said Fretwell.
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It's unclear if any of the newly identified colonies could be breakaway groups from other larger colonies, said Daniel Zitterbart, a penguin researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who was not involved in the study.
But it's clear the breeding sites are in flux and a warming world means more "penguins will be on the move,” he said.
Astronauts from Turkey, Sweden and Italy launch to space station on latest chartered flight
Turkey’s first astronaut along with a Swede and Italian launched Thursday to the International Space Station on a chartered SpaceX flight.
The Falcon rocket blasted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in late afternoon, carrying the three men, all with military pilot experience and representing their homelands. Their escort on the trip: A retired NASA astronaut who now works for the company that arranged the private flight.
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Their capsule should reach the space station on Saturday. They will spend two weeks performing experiments, chatting up schoolchildren and soaking in the views of Earth, before returning home.
It's costing each of the three countries $55 million or more. That's the rough per-person price for the trip, the third such journey organized by the Houston company Axiom Space with NASA and SpaceX. Russia has been welcoming paid visitors to the space station for more than two decades; NASA didn't until two years ago.
Turkey’s Alper Gezeravci, a former fighter pilot and captain for Turkish Airlines, is the first person from his country to rocket to space. He noted Turkey just celebrated its 100th anniversary, and, until now, the nation's view of the sky has been limited to "that we could see with our bare eyes.”
“Now this mission is opening that curtain all the way,” he told reporters before the flight. “This is the beginning of our next centennial."
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Also flying: Sweden’s Marcus Wandt, a former fighter pilot and test pilot for Swedish Aeroplane Corp. who was chosen in 2022 as a reserve astronaut by the European Space Agency, and Italian Air Force Col. Walter Villadei, who flew to the edge of space last summer with Virgin Galactic.
Among the symbolic items they’re taking up: a Nobel Prize medal from Sweden, fusilli pasta from Italy and tokens of Turkey’s nomadic culture.
With them is Michael Lopez-Alegria, who launched four times as a NASA astronaut before joining Axiom Space and escorting its first chartered flight. He's the only repeat passenger on a SpaceX Dragon, the capsule that's been used to ferry astronauts to the space station for NASA since 2020.
“Welcome to the Dragon frequent flyer club,” radioed SpaceX Launch Control.
A cluster of lost cities in Ecuadorian Amazon that lasted 1,000 years has been mapped
Archeologists have uncovered a cluster of lost cities in the Amazon rainforest that was home to at least 10,000 farmers around 2,000 years ago.
A series of earthen mounds and buried roads in Ecuador was first noticed more than two decades ago by archaeologist Stéphen Rostain. But at the time, "I wasn't sure how it all fit together," said Rostain, one of the researchers who reported on the finding Thursday in the journal Science.
Recent mapping by laser-sensor technology revealed those sites to be part of a dense network of settlements and connecting roadways, tucked into the forested foothills of the Andes, that lasted about 1,000 years.
"It was a lost valley of cities," said Rostain, who directs investigations at France's National Center for Scientific Research. "It's incredible."
The settlements were occupied by the Upano people between around 500 B.C. and 300 to 600 A.D. — a period roughly contemporaneous with the Roman Empire in Europe, the researchers found.
Residential and ceremonial buildings erected on more than 6,000 earthen mounds were surrounded by agricultural fields with drainage canals. The largest roads were 33 feet (10 meters) wide and stretched for 6 to 12 miles (10 to 20 kilometers).
While it's difficult to estimate populations, the site was home to at least 10,000 inhabitants — and perhaps as many as 15,000 or 30,000 at its peak, said archaeologist Antoine Dorison, a study co-author at the same French institute. That's comparable to the estimated population of Roman-era London, then Britain's largest city.
"This shows a very dense occupation and an extremely complicated society," said University of Florida archeologist Michael Heckenberger, who was not involved in the study. "For the region, it's really in a class of its own in terms of how early it is."
José Iriarte, a University of Exeter archaeologist, said it would have required an elaborate system of organized labor to build the roads and thousands of earthen mounds.
"The Incas and Mayans built with stone, but people in Amazonia didn't usually have stone available to build — they built with mud. It's still an immense amount of labor," said Iriarte, who had no role in the research.
The Amazon is often thought of as a "pristine wilderness with only small groups of people. But recent discoveries have shown us how much more complex the past really is," he said.
Scientists have recently also found evidence of intricate rainforest societies that predated European contact elsewhere in the Amazon, including in Bolivia and in Brazil.
"There's always been an incredible diversity of people and settlements in the Amazon, not only one way to live," said Rostain. "We're just learning more about them."
Japan scientists create world's 1st AI-generated images using brain activity
Japanese scientists have succeeded in creating the world's first mental images of objects and landscapes from human brain activity by using artificial intelligence (AI) technology, local media reported.
The team of scientists from the National Institutes for Quantum Science and Technology (QST) and other organizations was able to produce rough images of a leopard, with a recognizable mouth, ears and spotted pattern, as well as objects like an airplane with red lights on its wings, Kyodo News reported Saturday.
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The technology, dubbed "brain decoding," enables the visualization of perceptual contents based on brain activity, and could be applied to the medical and welfare fields, the report said.
During research, participants were shown 1,200 images of objects and landscapes, with the relationship between their brain signals and the images analyzed and quantified using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. The same images were input into the generative AI to learn their correspondence with the brain activity.
The technology could be used in the development of communication devices and to gain an understanding of the brain mechanisms of hallucinations and dreams, according to the researchers.
QST researcher Kei Majima said humans have used microscopes and other devices to view a world that was invisible to the naked eye, but they have not been able to step inside a person's mind, noting this is the first time for humans to peer inside another person's mind.
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The findings were published recently in the online edition of the international scientific journal Neural Networks.