Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday attended a China-France-EU trilateral meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at Elysee Palace.
Named Long Chenchen, or the "dragon of Chenchen," the mascot for China's upcoming Dragon Spring Festival Gala has been released, with a lot of design details showing the aesthetics of Chinese cultural elements.
To celebrate 2024, which will be the Year of the Dragon in Chinese culture, "Long Chenchen" has been designed as a cute yet lively dragon, colored orange and red and with a pair of doll eyes.
The seemingly cute-looking dragon takes inspiration from Chinese archaeological discoveries. The design of its nose was inspired by a dragon shaped jade item that was discovered in the Erlitou Ruins, a major site in Luoyang, Central China's Henan province that witnessed the rise and fall of the Xia (c.2070BC-c.1600BC) and Shang (c.1600BC-1046BC) dynasties.
The fire shape pattern on its shoulder was inspired by a bronze piece with cloud patterns that dates back to the Spring and Autumn Period (770BC-476BC).
The bronze piece has 12 vividly depicted dragon sculptures, showing ancient Chinese creativity as well as skill for handicrafts.
Another source of inspiration was a gilded dragon sculpture that is currently in the Xi'an Museum.
The dragon mascot has been praised by netizens on China's social media platforms such as Sina Weibo. Some said Chenchen looks "amiable" and can bring more international visitors to see the profound yet adorable Chinese culture.
"I like this cartoon version of a dragon, as it is amiable and friendly. Those characteristics also represent the modern China," a netizen posted on Sina Weibo.
Despite receiving many likes, the mascot has also sparked criticism. It has four claws, some of which have five toes and others have three. This made some netizens speculate the dragon character might have been synthesized by artificial intelligence.
"The Spring Festival Gala is the gala of the year for all of us in China. It deserves a professional team to design a character for it," one netizen wrote.
On Thursday morning, China Media Group (CMG), the media platform that is going to be in charge of the gala, officially declared on Sina Weibo that the dragon mascot was created entirely by human beings but not AI.
Admitting that it has some "imperfections," CMG said that it was created by designers "one stroke after another." All the details about the dragon, including its patterns, colors and face have been revised by designers through many versions.
Along with such verbal explanations, a short video showing the design team working on the mascot has been posted on Sina Weibo by CMG. The media group's response to the character's design has become a trending topic on Sina Weibo and has been viewed by more than 200 million netizens.
"Whether it was created by AI or human beings, I think the mascot has successfully delivered the spirit of the dragon. The dragon is important to show the life-force of Chinese culture," one netizen posted on Sina Weibo.
Sichuan is experiencing light rain as Wu Lian walks on her way to work. Meanwhile, the earthworms emerging from the muddy ground along the road are also undergoing a migration.
However, some earthworms are getting stranded on the cement pavement. At moments like these, Wu Lian picks them up one by one and places them back into the soil, despite her hands getting covered in mud.
"Otherwise, they could easily be stepped on by passersby," she says. This unique habit stems from her trip to Lhasa, capital of the Xizang Autonomous Region, three years ago.
This "Earthworm Rescue Operation" is a very unique manifestation of the spirit of cherishing and protecting life that the Tibetan people have continued for centuries.
Near the Potala Palace, in the vicinity of Zong Juelu Kang (Dragon King Pond), during the rainy season, you can see people of all ages bending down to gently pick up earthworms that haven't been able to complete their journey and placing them back onto the grass.
This is because once the sun comes out in Lhasa, the worms quickly lose moisture and face danger. Some local children even take the initiative to inform unaware tourists to watch their step. Of course, this isn't just about rescuing earthworms; it's just that because earthworms are particularly fragile and inconspicuous, such a scene arises.
Even today, many Tibetan people still recite a protective mantra when drinking water, intending to liberate the microorganisms in the water about to be consumed. And they will tell their grandchildren the story of this small ritual like a tale.
Similar to how the Han people usually call for compassion for even the tiniest of ants, Tibetans start from rescuing earthworms. This custom originates from the core doctrine of "equality of all sentient beings" in Tibetan Buddhism.
Carried on to the present day, it can be said that rather than merely being a religious tradition, it has long been internalized as a guiding principle in the daily lives of ordinary people.
Another story is about the origin of the Shoton Festival. Before the 17th century, the Shoton Festival was a primitive religious celebration.
According to folk tradition, as the weather warmed in the summer and all living things revived, monks going out for activities would inadvertently harm living creatures, violating the precept of "do not kill."
Therefore, the Gelug sect's monastic rules stipulated that from the fourth to the sixth month of the Tibetan calendar, monks could only recite scriptures and practice in the temples.
On the day the ban was lifted, monks would leave the temples and descend from the mountains. To thank the monks, local residents would prepare yogurt and organize outings and feasts, including traditional Tibetan opera performances, to celebrate the occasion.
It can be said that the practice of loving and protecting life is the starting point of the socialization process for Tibetan children. Life is adorable, life is respectable.
Tibetans believe that one should do everything possible to avoid harming any life. If there is truly no choice, then one should still hold an attitude of respect and gratitude.
Such beliefs permeate through people's daily lives, in the cycles of seasons, and in their daily activities.
The fundamental principle that every newborn baby first learns is a profound empathy toward the existence of any life. As an extension of this spirit, Tibetans often exhibit the utmost compassion toward the weak.
The essence of compassion includes, but is not limited to, "tolerance." Its broader meaning encompasses acknowledgment, empathy, and an emotionally driven commitment to action.
In Xizang, during feasts, not only were beggars not driven away, but they were also treated as honored guests.
Even in contemporary urban life, Tibetans are still able to treat all members of society more equally. On this land, the quality of being "snobbish" is disliked by everyone.
Faith is not confined to temples but also ingrained in everyday activities. When we talk about culture, it is never limited to external forms like singing, dancing, or intricate artwork.
The local people's outlook on life has gradually extended beyond the region with the opening up of Xizang.
Therefore, when you hear tourists from other regions or countries expressing admiration for how Tibetan culture has purified their souls, it is likely not an exaggeration.
MINNEAPOLIS — Pesticides that kill insects can also have short-term effects on seed-eating birds. Ingesting even small amounts of imidacloprid, a common neonicotinoid pesticide, can disorient migratory white-crowned sparrows, researchers report.
Neonicotinoid pesticides were designed to be safer than traditional pesticides: toxic to insects, but comparatively harmless to other animals. But the new findings add to evidence suggesting that the widely used pesticides, which are chemically similar to nicotine, might be sending ecological ripples beyond the intended targets.
In lab studies, researchers captured wild white-crowned sparrows, Zonotrichia leucophrys, that were migrating north and fed them small doses of imidacloprid for three days — the amount that birds would get from eating a few pesticide-coated wheat seeds. The birds that ate the pesticides lost weight, study coauthor Margaret Eng reported November 15 at the annual meeting of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry North America.
And when placed in a large, inverted funnel used to study birds’ migratory orientations, the neonic-fed birds tried to fly in directions other than north. Birds that consumed sunflower oil instead showed no ill effects.
For the birds that ate pesticides, the damage was temporary — after two weeks, the birds regained normal function and body weight, Eng, a toxicologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, and her colleagues also reported November 9 in Scientific Reports.
The fact that the effects reverse after a period of time is “good news,” says Thomas Bean, a toxicologist at the University of Maryland in College Park who wasn’t part of the study. The short-term malaise might incentivize birds to avoid that food in the future. Bean has found that Japanese quail, Coturnix japonica, also show similar temporary behavioral effects in response to neonicotinoids.
Preliminary results from field studies also appear to confirm the published lab findings. Eng’s team outfitted white-crowned sparrows in the wild with tiny tracking tags. The scientists gave the birds small amounts of pesticides, held the birds for six hours, and then released them.
When released, the birds still had traces of the chemicals in their blood plasma, the researchers reported at the November meeting. On average, there wasn’t a difference between groups in how long the birds hung around before resuming migration, but all of the birds that waited an abnormally long time had eaten neonics. Those animals’ flight paths also appeared to be slightly skewed from the route favored by the control birds.
Those analyses are preliminary, cautions Eng, and a closer look at the data could change the story.
The first known pedestrian fatality involving a fully autonomous self-driving car will most likely raise questions about the vehicles’ safety.
But “until we know what happened, we can’t really know what this incident means” for the future of self-driving vehicles, says Philip Koopman, a robotics safety expert at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Only when we know more about the crash, including details on the actions of the pedestrian as well as data logs from the car, can we make judgments, he says.
The incident took place late Sunday night when a self-driving car operated by Uber hit and, ultimately, killed a woman crossing the street in Tempe, Ariz. Early reports indicate that a human safety driver was at the wheel, and the car was in autonomous mode. In response, Uber has suspended testing of its fleet of self-driving cars in Tempe and other cities across the nation. The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating, the New York Times reports.
The NTSB has previously conducted an investigation into the 2016 death of a man who was driving a partly autonomous Tesla, concluding that the driver ignored multiple safety warnings.
Self-driving cars already face high levels of mistrust from other motorists and potential passengers. In a AAA survey in 2017, 85 percent of baby boomers and 73 percent of millennials reported being afraid to ride in self-driving cars (SN Online: 11/21/17).
It is widely accepted by experts such as Koopman that autonomous cars will eventually be safer drivers than the average person, because the vehicles don’t get distracted, among other things. But proving that safety may be time-consuming. A 2016 study by Nidhi Kalra, an information scientist at the RAND Corporation in San Francisco, found that self-driving cars might have to drive on roads for decades to statistically prove their superior safety.
When — or if — self-driving cars are proven safer than human drivers, the vehicles will still have to contend with other questions, such as whether to take steps to protect passengers or pedestrians in a collision (SN: 12/24/16, p. 34).
The glossy leaves and branching roots of mangroves are downright eye-catching, and now a study finds that the moon plays a special role in the vigor of these trees.
Long-term tidal cycles set in motion by the moon drive, in large part, the expansion and contraction of mangrove forests in Australia, researchers report in the Sept. 16 Science Advances. This discovery is key to predicting when stands of mangroves, which are good at sequestering carbon and could help fight climate change, are most likely to proliferate (SN: 11/18/21). Such knowledge could inform efforts to protect and restore the forests.
Mangroves are coastal trees that provide habitat for fish and buffer against erosion (SN: 9/14/22). But in some places, the forests face a range of threats, including coastal development, pollution and land clearing for agriculture. To get a bird’s-eye view of these forests, Neil Saintilan, an environmental scientist at Macquarie University in Sydney, and his colleagues turned to satellite imagery. Using NASA and U.S. Geological Survey Landsat data from 1987 to 2020, the researchers calculated how the size and density of mangrove forests across Australia changed over time.
After accounting for persistent increases in these trees’ growth — probably due to rising carbon dioxide levels, higher sea levels and increasing air temperatures — Saintilan and his colleagues noticed a curious pattern. Mangrove forests tended to expand and contract in both extent and canopy cover in a predictable manner. “I saw this 18-year oscillation,” Saintilan says.
That regularity got the researchers thinking about the moon. Earth’s nearest celestial neighbor has long been known to help drive the tides, which deliver water and necessary nutrients to mangroves. A rhythm called the lunar nodal cycle could explain the mangroves’ growth pattern, the team hypothesized.
Over the course of 18.6 years, the plane of the moon’s orbit around Earth slowly tips. When the moon’s orbit is the least tilted relative to our planet’s equator, semidiurnal tides — which consist of two high and two low tides each day — tend to have a larger range. That means that in areas that experience semidiurnal tides, higher high tides and lower low tides are generally more likely. The effect is caused by the angle at which the moon tugs gravitationally on the Earth.
Saintilan and his colleagues found that mangrove forests experiencing semidiurnal tides tended to be larger and denser precisely when higher high tides were expected based on the moon’s orbit. The effect even seemed to outweigh other climatic drivers of mangrove growth, such as El Niño conditions. Other regions with mangroves, such as Vietnam and Indonesia, probably experience the same long-term trends, the team suggests.
Having access to data stretching back decades was key to this discovery, Saintilan says. “We’ve never really picked up before some of these longer-term drivers of vegetation dynamics.”
It’s important to recognize this effect on mangrove populations, says Octavio Aburto-Oropeza, a marine ecologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., who was not involved in the research.
Scientists now know when some mangroves are particularly likely to flourish and should make an extra effort at those times to promote the growth of these carbon-sequestering trees, Aburto-Oropeza says. That might look like added limitations on human activity nearby that could harm the forests, he says. “We should be more proactive.”
Cocooned within the bowels of the Earth, one mineral’s metamorphosis into another may trigger some of the deepest earthquakes ever detected.
These cryptic tremors — known as deep-focus earthquakes — are a seismic conundrum. They violently rupture at depths greater than 300 kilometers, where intense temperatures and pressures are thought to force rocks to flow smoothly. Now, experiments suggest that those same hellish conditions might also sometimes transform olivine — the primary mineral in Earth’s mantle — into the mineral wadsleyite. This mineral switch-up can destabilize the surrounding rock, enabling earthquakes at otherwise impossible depths, mineral physicist Tomohiro Ohuchi and colleagues report September 15 in Nature Communications.
“It’s been a real puzzle for many scientists because earthquakes shouldn’t occur deeper than 300 kilometers,” says Ohuchi, of Ehime University in Matsuyama, Japan.
Deep-focus earthquakes usually occur at subduction zones where tectonic plates made of oceanic crust — rich in olivine — plunge toward the mantle (SN: 1/13/21). Since the quakes’ seismic waves lose strength during their long ascent to the surface, they aren’t typically dangerous. But that doesn’t mean the quakes aren’t sometimes powerful. In 2013, a magnitude 8.3 deep-focus quake struck around 609 kilometers below the Sea of Okhotsk, just off Russia’s eastern coast.
Past studies hinted that unstable olivine crystals could spawn deep quakes. But those studies tested other minerals that were similar in composition to olivine but deform at lower pressures, Ohuchi says, or the experiments didn’t strain samples enough to form faults.
He and his team decided to put olivine itself to the test. To replicate conditions deep underground, the researchers heated and squeezed olivine crystals up to nearly 1100° Celsius and 17 gigapascals. Then the team used a mechanical press to further compress the olivine slowly and monitored the deformation.
From 11 to 17 gigapascals and about 800° to 900° C, the olivine recrystallized into thin layers containing new wadsleyite and smaller olivine grains. The researchers also found tiny faults and recorded bursts of sound waves — indicative of miniature earthquakes. Along subducting tectonic plates, many of these thin layers grow and link to form weak regions in the rock, upon which faults and earthquakes can initiate, the researchers suggest.
“The transformation really wreaks havoc with the [rock’s] mechanical stability,” says geophysicist Pamela Burnley of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who was not involved in the research. The findings help confirm that olivine transformations are enabling deep-focus earthquakes, she says.
Next, Ohuchi’s team plans to experiment on olivine at even higher pressures to gain insights into the mineral’s deformation at greater depths.
The key to landing your dream job could be connecting with and then sending a single message to a casual acquaintance on social media.
That’s the conclusion of a five-year study of over 20 million users on the professional networking site LinkedIn, researchers report in the Sept. 16 Science. The study is the first large-scale effort to experimentally test a nearly 50-year-old social science theory that says weak social ties matter more than strong ones for getting ahead in life, including finding a good job.
“The weak tie theory is one of the most celebrated and cited findings in social science,” says network scientist Dashun Wang of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., who coauthored a perspective piece in the same issue of Science. This study “provides the first causal evidence for this idea of weak ties explaining job mobility.”
Sociologist Mark Granovetter of Stanford University proposed the weak tie theory in 1973. The theory, which has garnered nearly 67,000 scientific citations, hinges on the idea that humans cluster into social spheres that connect via bridges (SN: 8/13/03). Those bridges represent weak social ties between people, and give individuals who cross access to realms of new ideas and information, including about job markets.
But the influential theory has come under fire in recent years. In particular, a 2017 analysis in the Journal of Labor Economics of 6 million Facebook users showed that increasing interaction with a friend online, thereby strengthening that social tie, increased the likelihood of working with that friend.
In the new study, LinkedIn gave Sinan Aral, a managerial economist at MIT, and his team access to data from the company’s People You May Know algorithm, which recommends new connections to users. Over five years, the social media site’s operators used seven variations of the algorithm for users actively seeking connections, each recommending varying levels of weak and strong ties to users. During that time, 2 billion new ties and 600,000 job changes were noted on the site.
Aral and his colleagues measured tie strength via the number of mutual LinkedIn connections and direct messages between users. Job transitions occurred when two criteria were met: A pair connected on LinkedIn at least one year prior to the job seeker joining the same company as the other user; and the user who first joined the company was there for at least a year before the second user came onboard. Those criteria were meant in part to weed out situations where the two could have ended up at the same company by chance.
Overall, weak ties were more likely to lead to job changes than strong ones, the team found. But the study adds a twist to the theory: When job hunting, mid-tier friends are more helpful than either one’s closest friends or near strangers. Those are the friends with whom you share roughly 10 connections and seldom interact, Aral says. “They’re still weak ties, but they are not the weakest ties.”
The researchers also found that when a user added more weak ties to their network, that person applied to more jobs overall, which converted to getting more jobs. But that finding applied only to highly digitized jobs, such as those heavily reliant on software and amenable to remote work. Strong ties were more beneficial than weak ties for some job seekers outside the digital realm. Aral suspects those sorts of jobs may be more local and thus reliant on members of tight-knit communities.
The finding that job seekers should lean on mid-level acquaintances corroborates smaller studies, says network scientist Cameron Piercy of the University of Kansas in Lawrence who wasn’t involved in either the 2017 study or this more recent one.
That evidence suggests that the weakest acquaintances lack enough information about the job candidate, while the closest friends know too much about the candidate’s strengths — and flaws. “There’s this medium-ties sweet spot where you are willing to vouch for them because they know a couple people that you know,” Piercy says.
But he and others also raise ethical concerns about the new study. Piercy worries about research that manipulates people’s social media spaces without clearly and obviously indicating that it’s being done. In the new study, LinkedIn users who visited the “My Network” page for connection recommendations — who make up less than 5 percent of the site’s monthly active users — got automatically triggered into the experiment.
And it’s unclear how LinkedIn, whose researchers are coauthors of the study, will use this information moving forward. “When you are talking about people’s work, their ability to make money, this is important,” Piercy says. The company “should recommend weak ties, the version of the algorithm that led to more job attainment, if its purpose is to connect people with work. But they don’t make that conclusion in the paper.”
Another limitation is that the analyzed data lacked vital demographic information on users. That was for privacy reasons, the researchers say. But breaking down the results by gender is crucial as some evidence suggests that women — but not men — must rely on both weak and strong ties for professional advancement, Northwestern’s Wang says.
Still, with over half of jobs generally found through social ties, the findings could point people toward better ways to hunt for a job in today’s tumultuous environment. “You may have seen these recommendations on LinkedIn and you may have ignored them. You think ‘Oh, I don’t really know that person,’” Aral says. “But you may be doing yourself a disservice.”
A single, doomed moon could clear up a couple of mysteries about Saturn.
This hypothetical missing moon, dubbed Chrysalis, could have helped tilt Saturn over, researchers suggest September 15 in Science. The ensuing orbital chaos might then have led to the moon’s demise, shredding it to form the iconic rings that encircle the planet today.
“We like it because it’s a scenario that explains two or three different things that were previously not thought to be related,” says study coauthor Jack Wisdom, a planetary scientist at MIT. “The rings are related to the tilt, who would ever have guessed that?”
Saturn’s rings appear surprisingly young, a mere 150 million years or so old (SN: 12/14/17). If the dinosaurs had telescopes, they might have seen a ringless Saturn. Another mysterious feature of the gas giant is its nearly 27-degree tilt relative to its orbit around the sun. That tilt is too large to have formed when Saturn did or to be the result of collisions knocking the planet over.
Planetary scientists have long suspected that the tilt is related to Neptune, because of a coincidence in timing between the way the two planets move. Saturn’s axis wobbles, or precesses, like a spinning top. Neptune’s entire orbit around the sun also wobbles, like a struggling hula hoop.
The periods of both precessions are almost the same, a phenomenon known as resonance. Scientists theorized that gravity from Saturn’s moons — especially the largest moon, Titan — helped the planetary precessions line up. But some features of Saturn’s internal structure were not known well enough to prove that the two timings were related.
Wisdom and colleagues used precision measurements of Saturn’s gravitational field from the Cassini spacecraft, which plunged into Saturn in 2017 after 13 years orbiting the gas giant, to figure out the details of its internal structure (SN: 9/15/17). Specifically, the team worked out Saturn’s moment of inertia, a measure of how much force is needed to tip the planet over. The team found that the moment of inertia is close to, but not exactly, what it would be if Saturn’s spin were in perfect resonance with Neptune’s orbit.
“We argue that it’s so close, it couldn’t have occurred by chance,” Wisdom says. “That’s where this satellite Chrysalis came in.”
After considering a volley of other explanations, Wisdom and colleagues realized that another smallish moon would have helped Titan bring Saturn and Neptune into resonance by adding its own gravitational tugs. Titan drifted away from Saturn until its orbit synced up with that of Chrysalis. The enhanced gravitational kicks from the larger moon sent the doomed smaller moon on a chaotic dance. Eventually, Chrysalis swooped so close to Saturn that it grazed the giant planet’s cloud tops. Saturn ripped the moon apart, and slowly ground its pieces down into the rings.
Calculations and computer simulations showed that the scenario works, though not all the time. Out of 390 simulated scenarios, only 17 ended with Chrysalis disintegrating to create the rings. Then again, massive, striking rings like Saturn’s are rare, too.
The name Chrysalis came from that spectacular ending: “A chrysalis is a cocoon of a butterfly,” Wisdom says. “The satellite Chrysalis was dormant for 4.5 billion years, presumably. Then suddenly the rings of Saturn emerged from it.”
The story hangs together, says planetary scientist Larry Esposito of the University of Colorado Boulder, who was not involved in the new work. But he’s not entirely convinced. “I think it’s all plausible, but maybe not so likely,” he says. “If Sherlock Holmes is solving a case, even the improbable explanation may be the right one. But I don’t think we’re there yet.”
A child who lived on the Indonesian island of Borneo around 31,000 years ago underwent the oldest known surgical operation, an amputation of the lower left leg, researchers say.
One or more hunter-gatherers who performed the operation possessed detailed knowledge of human anatomy and considerable technical skill, enabling the youngster to avoid fatal blood loss and infection, say archaeologist Tim Maloney of Griffith University in Southport, Australia, and colleagues.
Healed bone where the lower leg was amputated indicates that the ancient youth survived for at least six to nine years after surgery before dying at age 19 or 20, the investigators report September 7 in Nature. Since there is no evidence of crushing from an accident or an animal’s bite at the amputation site, the researchers suspect that an unidentified medical problem led to the operation.
Maloney’s team excavated this individual’s remains in 2020 from a grave inside a large, three-chambered cave. Radiocarbon dating of burned bits of wood just below the grave along with another dating technique on a tooth from the youth’s lower jaw let the researchers estimate when the surgery took place.
Until now, the oldest known amputation involved a farmer from France whose left forearm was surgically removed nearly 7,000 years ago. In North Africa, surgeries to create skull openings may have occurred as early as 13,000 years ago (SN: 3/31/22).
Faced with rapid wound infections in a tropical region, ancient people on Borneo developed antiseptic treatments from local plants, Maloney’s group suspects. It’s unknown what type of tool was used in the Stone Age operation or whether the patient was sedated with a plant-based concoction.