Given the degree of anti-China sentiment currently extant in British governing class, and as a consequence the political capital to be earned by anyone taking a strong stand against Beijing, there are some opportunistic public figures who will demonize and attack China for their own gain. 

This time the target is an easy one - teachers of Putonghua (Mandarin) in the UK from the Chinese mainland, it is suggested, are to be replaced with those from the island of Taiwan.  

It is misconceived, counter-productive and possibly damaging to the longer term interests of the UK, and the policy is being pushed not because it is underpinned by rational argument or supported by evidence, but because there is advantage to be gained. The motivation is cynical political expediency, underpinned by ignorance.

It is not even a new story. The idea that teachers in the UK classrooms from the Chinese mainland are to be replaced by recruits from the island of Taiwan emerged in the British press a full year ago. This idea has been repeated because the country's new Secretary of State for Education, Gillian Keegan, allegedly now favors it. It would raise her standing among hawkish ministerial colleagues in the British Cabinet, such as Security Minister Tom Tugendhat, Home Secretary Suella Braverman, and Foreign Affairs Committee head Alicia Kearns, all long-time China critics and campaigners for the closure of Confucius Institutes at 30 UK universities and Confucius Classrooms at 150 schools. 

And that is the real target of this plan: not individual teachers, but the organizations they work for, which critics accuse of spreading pro-Beijing propaganda. Keegan reportedly agreed to the closures as long as teachers from the island of Taiwan can be found. 

Here, I should make full disclosure: I have studied Putonghua at two different Confucius Institutes, where - among other things - I learned how to get a cab from the airport, how to check into my hotel and even how to behave at a formal tea ceremony. What was lacking in my classes was any form of indoctrination. Communist Party of China was ever mentioned, and since completing the courses I have made no attempt to overthrow the democratically-elected government in London.

The very idea of these institutes being nests of spies is ridiculous, and would be laughable if the situation was not so serious. If the UK closed these cultural operations, it would suffer most. Knowledge of China in the UK and the ability to speak Putonghua is very poor, though it has improved. Businesses are slowly starting to realize that to trade with China they need to better understand China.

The Confucius Institutes scattered around the world are no different to similar bodies set up by other nations.

Imagine an organization which promotes a nation's language and culture internationally through a network of shared educational facilities, helping promote understanding between countries and spreading its values in a context of mutual respect and benefit.

Now imagine this organization is the British Council, formed in 1934 to encourage the learning of the English language and British "value." It has spent several billions of pounds promoting arts and culture, and educational exchanges internationally.

On a political whim, the body which does the same for China is under threat: an egregious act of cultural vandalism and political spite.

These organizations represent international soft power, the non-coercive shaping of attitudes and opinions through exposure and interaction; manipulating the preferences of others through appeal and attraction. 

And Britain could certainly do with some wider engagement and understanding of China. An article in the political magazine The Spectator last year revealed the startling level of incompetence within the Foreign Office, where there were only 41 speakers of Putonghua in the entire department of 17,000 staff. Such a paucity of experience and knowledge about the world's most populous nation, and its second greatest economy, is reprehensible. But to compound this failing by promoting a policy which will further impoverish Britain's resources in this vital area is unforgivable. Similarly, replacing teachers from the Chinese mainland with teachers from the island of Taiwan will dilute the lived experience and knowledge which is so vital an asset from which students can learn. A concentration of experience across a narrow range of tutors introduces a risk of group think, not a wider world view. Businesses believe that students looking for work are better equipped for the future if they speak Mandarin.

The UK needs to create better conditions to learn about China, not diminish them. It is in its own interests to understand, even if some do view China as a rival and competitor. One can only hope that the proposal is nothing more than political posturing by the education minister, more to do with party political symbolism, than a serious policy, for if it goes ahead it is likely to prove an egregious act of self harm.

China’s space technology was deeply applied in the country’s various industries in 2022, forming an all-weather remote sensing monitoring system for infrastructure including all sea areas and islands under its jurisdiction, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) said on Wednesday during the release of the Blue Book of China Aerospace Science and Technology Activities. 

China has developed a series of satellites for ocean color, marine dynamics and surveillance, which have formed the capability of continuously and frequently covering observations of global waters, and have achieved remarkable results in applications in areas including island management, marine resource investigation and supervision, marine environmental monitoring and forecasting.

In 2022, China's marine satellites continued to carry out remote sensing inspections of key islands and reefs. In particular, they strengthened monitoring of the waters around Huangyan Island, Diaoyu Island and all the islands of Xisha, Zhongsha and Nansha Islands, providing important data support for the management of sea areas and comprehensive management of the islands.

China's marine satellites also continued to carry out remote sensing detection of key islands and reefs in 2022, in particular strengthening the monitoring of the waters around Huangyan Island, Diaoyu Island, as well as the Xisha, Zhongsha and Nansha Islands, providing a significant basis for the utilization of waters and coastal islands, the report noted.

In addition, China’s marine satellites are also carrying out global ocean observation and forecasting, providing services for global marine dynamic environment monitoring, marine forecasting and disaster monitoring, as well as remote sensing monitoring of global sea level changes.

China's marine satellites have successfully provided important data and technical support for monitoring and warnings for fires, typhoons and storm surges at home and abroad.

Lin Mingsen, director of the National Satellite Ocean Application Service, said China will further strengthen the integration of artificial intelligence, big data and other technologies with satellite remote sensing systems, so as to provide high-quality marine satellite public service products and promote the level of marine management in China.

South China’s Shenzhen vowed on Wednesday to intensify its crackdown on ill-intentioned speculation and smears against private businesses among its newly 20-point measures to boost the private economy, according to Shenzhen Fabu, the official WeChat account of the Shenzhen Government Information Office.

The move marks a prompt response from local authorities to implement the comprehensive guidelines recently issued by the central government to support the private sector.

According to the measures, Shenzhen will step up efforts to combat deliberate speculation, rumors, and defamation against private enterprises and entrepreneurs. The city will also crack down on "online blackmouths" in accordance with the law to create a favorable social atmosphere that respects and supports the growth of private entrepreneurs.

The city will also actively promote leading private enterprises in emerging fields such as new energy vehicles, artificial intelligence, and new energy storage. Moreover, it will foster national and provincial-level characteristic industrial clusters for small and medium-sized enterprises.

To strengthen financing support for private enterprises, Shenzhen will establish a 5 billion yuan ($685 million) fund to hedge risks in loans to small and micro enterprises and reduce the guarantee fee rate for financing these enterprises by government financing institutions to below 1 percent.

Efforts will also be made to support private companies in expanding the overseas market and participating in overseas projects brought by opportunities from the Belt and Road Initiatives and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership.

Shenzhen is home to a long list of renowned private firms such as Huawei, Tencent, and BYD. Its private sector has been one of the most dynamic in major Chinese cities, playing an outsized role in the city’s economy, according to Shenzhen Daily.

By the end of 2022, there were 2.379 million private companies in Shenzhen, accounting for 97 percent of the city’s overall firms. The private economy comprised 55.9 percent of the city’s GDP, according to the report.

SALT LAKE CITY — When black holes collide, astronomers expect to record a gravitational wave “chirp.” But rapidly spinning black holes, like the one featured in the 2014 film Interstellar, might prefer singing to chirping.

According to the calculations of Caltech physicist Kip Thorne, who served as scientific consultant for Interstellar, the movie’s black hole, known as Gargantua, must have had a mass 100 million times that of the sun and whirled about its own axis at breakneck speeds. These characteristics would explain the extreme time dilation on the world where the film’s intrepid planet hunters landed: In one hour there, seven elapsed on Earth, a phenomenon predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
If a rapidly spinning black hole merges with a companion, it would produce a unique signal — one that gravitational wave detectors might be able to observe, physicist Niels Warburton of MIT reported April 18 at a meeting of the American Physical Society. “There is a completely different gravitational wave signature,” said Warburton, who coauthored a related paper posted online at arXiv.org on March 3.

The standard signal of merging black holes is a “chirp,” named for the increase in frequency and amplitude of the gravitational waves produced as the black holes spiral inward. When converted into sound waves, this pattern sounds like a bird’s chirp. Warburton and colleagues performed calculations to determine the gravitational wave signature from a merger with a black hole spinning at nearly full tilt. Instead of a chirp, they found the gravitational waves would instead maintain a constant pitch, but slowly fade away.

“It was certainly very unexpected to see something that didn’t chirp,” says physicist Jolyon Bloomfield of MIT, who was not involved with the research. “This is really quite interesting work. It shows that the chirp actually goes away — something else is happening here.”

If such black hole mergers occur in nature, next-generation gravitational wave observatories like the Evolved Laser Interferometer Space Antenna might provide proof of their existence. Plans call for eLISA to measure gravitational waves from space beginning in 2034. “These are definitely detectable with eLISA,” Warburton said.

The Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, which made the first detection of gravitational waves in 2015 (SN: 3/5/16, p. 6), might be able to observe such mergers if the conditions were just right. Although LIGO can’t observe the mergers of black holes as massive as Gargantua, smaller spinning black holes would produce a similar effect.
Finding black holes like Gargantua would have an impact beyond Hollywood. Spinning black holes are “really interesting from a fundamental physics point of view,” says Samuel Gralla of the University of Arizona in Tucson, a coauthor on the new paper.

Black holes can spin up faster and faster as they suck in matter, but scientists think there’s a limit to how fast they can go. At the center of a black hole is a singularity, or region of infinite density, which is hidden by an event horizon — the surface beyond which nothing can escape the black hole’s greedy pull. But if the black hole twirls too fast, the singularity becomes exposed. Such a “naked singularity,” as it is known, is thought to be impossible to reach, because the known laws of physics would break down.

According to the scientists’ calculations, black hole mergers sing when the larger black hole is rotating just below the limit, at 99.99 percent of its maximum speed. This makes singing black holes an enticing prospect for understanding physics at its extremes.

A newly discovered species of tomato belongs in a haunted house, not on a sandwich.

Fruit from the bush tomato plant Solanum ossicruentum bears little resemblance to its cultivated cousins. The Australian tomato, about a couple centimeters wide, grows enclosed in a shell of spikes. These burrs probably help the fruit latch on to the fur of passing mammals, which then spread the tomato’s seeds elsewhere, researchers at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa., report May 3 in PhytoKeys.

Slice open the fearsome fruit and within five minutes, its sticky white-green flesh appears to bleed, flushing bright red to dark maroon in response to air exposure. One brave researcher tasted an unripe fruit and deemed it salty. The bush tomato becomes no more appetizing with time: Mature fruits harden into dry, bony nuggets.

The tomato’s gruesome qualities inspired its name, courtesy of a group of Pennsylvanian seventh-grade science students: “Ossicruentum” combines the Latin words for “bone” and “bloody.”

Social media supporters of the Islamic State, or ISIS, form online groups that may provide clues crucial to predicting when terrorist attacks will take place, a new analysis finds.

These virtual communities drive ISIS activity on a Facebook-like site called VKontakte, say physicist Neil Johnson of the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla., and colleagues. VKontakte, a social networking service based in Russia with more than 350 million users, allows messaging in many languages and is used worldwide.
In the June 17 Science, Johnson’s team describes a mathematical model that predicts online groups of ISIS supporters will proliferate days before real-world Islamic State attacks. That’s just what happened in September 2014, researchers say. Pro-ISIS groups on VKontakte mushroomed the day before Islamic State forces overran Kobane, a small Syrian town.

The researchers refer to groups of followers of an online page that form spontaneously as aggregates. “Our work suggests that, to manage and monitor online ISIS activity, we need to focus on aggregates rather than individuals,” Johnson says.

Pro-ISIS aggregates on VKontakte exchanged information on issues such as recruiting fighters to Syria and how to survive drone attacks.

The new model suggests that authorities need to shut down online pro-ISIS groups in their early stages. Small-scale aggregates favoring the same cause gradually expand when left alone and eventually merge into a much larger online community that’s more difficult to break up, Johnson’s model forecasts.

“This is the first serious, large-scale, data-driven study that shows how online support develops for terrorist groups such as ISIS,” says computer scientist V.S. Subrahmanian of the University of Maryland in College Park, who builds computational models of terror networks. But it remains to be seen whether the new model can predict when and possibly where future Islamic State attacks will occur, Subrahmanian cautions.
Johnson’s team identified 196 pro-ISIS aggregates, consisting of 108,086 individual followers, which operated between January 1 and August 31, 2015. Intelligence agencies, hackers and website moderators work to shut down these online groups, but to a lesser extent on VKontakte than on Facebook.

Pro-ISIS aggregates rapidly adapted to these survival threats in several ways, the researchers say. Fifteen percent of aggregates changed their online names; 7 percent flipped back and forth between opening their content to any VKontakte user or to current aggregate followers only; and 4 percent engaged in a digital form of reincarnation. Pro-ISIS aggregates under unusually intense attack by hackers and others opted for reincarnation, Johnson says.

Reincarnating aggregates disappeared and then returned, often within weeks, with new names and at least 60 percent of the same followers as before. Aggregates that vanished appear to have reassembled without any direction or urging from one or a few members, Johnson says. New names of reincarnated groups often resembled original names enough to alert former members but not enough to trigger VKontakte’s automated system for identifying names of probable pro-militant groups, he points out.

As with predictions of terror attacks based on the expansion of pro-ISIS aggregates, the new model shows promise in predicting when mass public protests will occur based on sudden jumps in numbers of pro-protest aggregates, the scientists say. There is a difference: Reincarnation did not appear within the last three years among Facebook aggregates consisting of civil protesters in Brazil and several other Latin American countries, the researchers found. Those online groups experienced fewer pressures to shut down than pro-ISIS aggregates on VKontakte did.

Johnson’s analysis moves the study of online militant groups forward, says terrorism analyst J.M. Berger of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. But it’s likely that considerably fewer members of pro-ISIS aggregates than the total studied in the new analysis were actually hard-core Islamic State supporters, Berger contends. Concerted efforts to shut down online terrorist networks have depressed numbers of committed ISIS supporters using social media, in his view. Berger and a colleague have found that English-language Twitter use has declined sharply among ISIS supporters over the last two years, due to suspensions of their accounts by the social media site.

Johnson suspects most pro-ISIS aggregate members were staunch supporters, since aggregates aggressively weed out those deemed unserious or hostile.

Terrorists use chains of social and messaging sites online to achieve their ends, Subrahmanian says. How that works, and whether the same aggregate operates under different guises from one site to the next, has yet to be studied.

Parasites can drive their hosts to do weird, dumb things. But in certain oak trees, the parasites themselves get played.

“Creepy and awesome,” says Kelly Weinersmith of Rice University in Houston, who has helped reveal a Russian doll of nested parasitisms.

The saga begins when two majestic live oak species in the southeastern United States send out new shoots, and female crypt gall wasps (Bassettia pallida) arrive to lay eggs. A wasp mom uses the delivery ­end of her reproductive tract to drill through tree bark, injecting each of her eggs into a separate spot in the oak.
Wasp biochemistry induces the tree to form a botanical womb with an edible lining largely free of oak defense chemicals. The tree is hijacked into nurturing each larva, and wasp life is good — until the unlucky ones get noticed by a second exploiter.

Another wasp species, a newly discovered Euderus, arrives, barely visible to the naked eye but “amazingly iridescent,” Weinersmith says. Her colleague at Rice, Scott Egan, named these jewel blue and green specks after Set, an Egyptian god of evil and chaos.
E. set wasps enslave the B. pallida as laborers and living baby food. E. set females sense their prey inside the gall and inject eggs that hatch and feed on the original occupant. When the invaders mature, they are typically too frail to dig themselves out of the tree.But that’s not a problem, Weinersmith, Egan and colleagues report in the Jan. 25 Proceedings of the Royal Society B. That’s because, despite having a gnawing parasite inside, B. pallida wasps dig a tunnel to freedom.

Almost. When infested with E. set, the tunnelers don’t manage a large enough hole for their own escape. They die with their heads plugging the tunnel exit, perfect for the E. set attackers, who chew an escape hole through the stuck noggins.

Weinersmith and Egan may be the first to describe E. set’s manipulation, but what could be a much earlier example was collected by Alfred Kinsey — yes, that Kinsey. Before shocking mid-20th century America with explicit chronicles of human sexual behavior, he specialized in gall wasps.

Kinsey named more than 130 new species in just three years, collecting at least 5.5 million specimens, now at New York’s American Museum of Natural History. One of his Bassettia has its head stuck in a too-small exit hole in a stem, suggesting a chaos-and-death wasp lurks inside.

It would be a memorable sight. But it would also be so wrong to tip over Galápagos giant tortoises to see how shell shape affects their efforts to leg-pump, neck-stretch and rock right-side up again.

Shell shape matters, says evolutionary biologist Ylenia Chiari, though not the way she expected. It’s taken years, plus special insights from a coauthor who more typically studies scorpions, for Chiari and her team to measure and calculate their way to that conclusion. But no endangered species have been upended in the making of the study.
“They’re amazing,” says Chiari of the dozen or so species of Chelonoidis grazing over the Galápagos Islands. Hatchlings start not quite the size of a tennis ball and after decades, depending on species and sex, “could be like — a desk,” says Chiari, of the University of South Alabama in Mobile.

Two extremes among the species’ shell shapes intrigue Chiari: high-domed mountains versus mere hillocks called saddlebacks because of an upward flare saddling the neck. Researchers have dreamed up possible benefits for the shell differences, such as the saddleback flare letting tortoises stretch their necks higher upward in grazing on sparse plants.
At the dryer, lower altitudes where saddleback species tend to live, fields of lava chunks and cacti make walking treacherous. “I fell on a cactus once,” Chiari says. Tortoises tumble over, too, and she wondered whether saddleback shells might be easier to set right again.
She went paparazzi on 89 tortoise shells, taking images from multiple angles to create a 3-D computerized version of each shell. Many shells were century-old museum specimens from the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, but she stalked some in the wild, too. The domed tortoises tended to pull into their shells with a huffing noise during their time in front of the lens and just wait till the weirdness ended. A saddleback species plodded toward the interruption, though, butting and biting (toothless but emphatic) at her legs.

To calculate energy needed to rock and roll the two shell types, Chiari needed to know the animals’ centers of mass. No one, however, had measured it for any tortoise. Enter coauthor Arie van der Meijden of CIBIO, Research Center in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources at the University of Porto in Portugal. With expertise in biomechanics, he scaled up from the arthropods he often studies. For a novel test of tortoises, he arranged for a manufacturer to provide equipment measuring force exerted at three points under a tiltable platform. As the first giant tortoise, weighing in at about 100 kilograms, started to lumber aboard the platform at Rotterdam’s zoo, Chiari thought, “Oh my gosh, it’s going to crush everything.” For a gentler and more even landing, four men heaved the tortoise into position.

Calculating the centers of mass for Rotterdam tortoises, the researchers extrapolated to the 89 shells. The low, flattened saddleback shape actually made shells tougher to right, taking more energy, the team reports November 30 in Scientific Reports. Now Chiari muses over whether the saddle at the shell front might let freer neck movements compensate after a trip and a flip.

Hundreds of eggs belonging to a species of flying reptile that lived alongside dinosaurs are giving scientists a peek into the earliest development of the animals.

The find includes at least 16 partial embryos, several still preserved in 3-D. Those embryos suggest that the animals were able to walk, but not fly, soon after hatching, researchers report in the Dec. 1 Science.

Led by vertebrate paleontologist Xiaolin Wang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, the scientists uncovered at least 215 eggs in a block of sandstone about 3 meters square. All of the eggs belonged to one species of pterosaur, Hamipterus tianshanensis, which lived in the early Cretaceous Period about 120 million years ago in what is now northwestern China.
Previously, researchers have found only a handful of eggs belonging to the winged reptiles, including five eggs from the same site in China (SN: 7/12/14, p. 20) and two more found in Argentina. One of the Argentinian eggs also contained a flattened but well-preserved embryo.
One reason for the dearth of fossils may be that the eggs were rather soft with a thin outer shell, unlike the hard casings of eggs belonging to dinosaurs, birds and crocodiles but similar to those of modern-day lizards. Due to that soft shape, pterosaur eggs also tend to flatten during preservation. Finding fossilized eggs containing 3-D embryos opens a new window into pterosaur development, says coauthor Alexander Kellner, a vertebrate paleontologist at Museu Nacional/Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro.
The eggs weren’t found at an original nesting site but had been jumbled and deformed, probably transported by a flood during an intense storm, Kellner says. Sand and other sediments carried by the water would then have rapidly buried the soft eggs, which was necessary to preserve them, Kellner says. “Otherwise, they would have decomposed.”
Using computerized tomography, the researchers scanned the internal contents of the eggs. Two of the best-preserved embryos revealed a tantalizing clue to pterosaur development, Kellner says. A key part of a wing bone, called the deltopectoral crest, was not fully developed in the embryos, even in an embryo the researchers interpret as nearly at term. The femur, or leg bone, of the embryo, however, was well developed. This suggests that, when born, the hatchlings could walk but not yet fly and may have still required some parental care for feeding, the scientists propose.
Such an interpretation requires an abundance of caution, says D. Charles Deeming, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Lincoln in England not involved in the study. For example, he says, there isn’t enough evidence to say for certain that the embryo in question was nearly at term and, therefore, to say that it couldn’t fly when born, a point he also raises in a column published in the same issue of Science. “There’s a real danger of overinterpretation.” But with such a large group of eggs, he says, researchers can make quantitative measurements to better understand the range of egg sizes and shapes to get a sense of variation in animal size.

Kellner says this work is ongoing and agrees that there is still a significant amount of study to be done on these and other eggs more recently found at the site. And the hunt is on for more concentrations of eggs in the same site. “Now that we know what they look like, we can go back and find more. You just have to get your knees down and look.”