"I am so happy to announce that I will be representing China at the World Cup. I'm really proud and honored to wear the Team China jersey," Minnesota Timberwolves forward/guard Kyle Anderson, also known by his Chinese name Li Kai'er, said in a video on Chinese social media on Monday after he officially obtained Chinese nationality.
The 29-year-old, 2.06-meter-tall basketball elite from New York has been competing in the US National Basketball Association (NBA) ever since joining the league as a first-round pick in 2014. Li has now become the first player to have ever been naturalized in China's basketball history, making him now eligible to join Team China at the upcoming FIBA World Cup that tips off on August 25.
According to an official release from the Chinese Basketball Association (CBA), Yao Ming, the NBA hall of famer and incumbent CBA president, has met with Anderson to mark the milestone event.
Yao said that "the naturalization of Li Kai'er complies with Chinese laws and regulations and the relevant rules of the FIBA, and blood and cultural identity are important reasons for us to meet each other. Li will be the first naturalized player in the history of Chinese basketball. It is also an innovation for the system and exploration for us. During this process, we have received strong support from all parties. We are very grateful for that. Li is an outstanding player, and I believe him joining the team can help the Chinese men's basketball team."
Anderson has averaged 9.4 points, 5.3 rebounds and 4.9 assists in 68 games in 2023 for Minnesota as a playmaking forward in his ninth NBA season. He was added to the talent pool list for China's national basketball team on Monday, meaning that Anderson can now suit up and play for China immediately once recruited by the national team.
To show his excitement, Anderson posted a photo on his Instagram account on Monday of himself wearing a red No.5 Team China jersey for the 2023 World Cup, with a message that said, "About damn time! Let's go!"
"With the help and support of all parties in China, today I have fulfilled my will to recognize my ancestors and the greatest wish of my family!" Anderson said in a Sina Weibo post.
Anderson's great-grandfather was from Shenzhen, South China's Guangdong Province. In 2018, Anderson and his mother Suzanne Anderson visited Xinmu New Village in Shenzhen, to seek out their roots. Their Chinese relatives welcomed them with a firecracker show, traditional cultural experiences and a huge banquet.
In video footage of the trip, Anderson described it as "one of the best times and moments" of his life.
"It's weird to come to a place I've never been before, yet feel at home. I can't explain in words... I am so thankful and honored that these people would accept me and give me such a warm welcome," he told Shenzhen TV at the time.
During the trip, Anderson was given the Chinese name Li Kai'er by one of his elder Chinese cousins. To honor his playstyle, Chinese basketball fans have also given him the endearing nickname "Li Dachui," which means "a big hammer" that is slow in motion but effective with every strike.
According to FIBA rules, each national team can include only one naturalized player. That player must have obtained citizenship of the adopted home country after turning 16 and never have represented his or her native country internationally. Eligibility is subject to approval by FIBA's secretary-general.
Chinese basketball insiders reached by the Global Times applauded the naturalization of Anderson, saying it marks a new beginning for Chinese basketball, and adding that Anderson brings a lot including versatility and a high basketball IQ to Team China. They noted that Anderson will boost China's chances at the 2023 World Cup, where only the best-performing Asian team wins direct qualification for the Paris Olympics in 2024.
"Li Kai'er, who made his break in the NBA when he played for Gregg Popovich with the San Antonio Spurs, could be the missing piece for Team China. His ball-handling skills, game-making abilities and great understanding of team play could effectively help link Team China's strong centers and still young guards on the court," Wei Qi, a basketball commentator with the Beijing Radio and Television Network, told the Global Times on Monday.
Wei pointed out that it has been a world trend to naturalize foreign-born players, citing US-born South Korean basketball player Ra Gun-ah for Team South Korea. Team China has now joined the trend starting with Anderson.
His Chinese lineage, love for Chinese culture and willingness to contribute his basketball skills to Team China are the main factors that qualified him for the naturalization process. His participation will be an example of win-win cooperation, Wei noted.
Anderson has joined a glittering cast of naturalized athletes who have chosen to suit up for China. They include California-born Olympic champion freestyle skier Gu Ailing, Canadian-born ice hockey player Brandon Yip and, most recently, Hungarian-born short-track speed skating brothers Sandor Liu Shaolin and Liu Shaoang. All of them have been hailed by Chinese fans.
Over the last decade, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has yield fruitful achievements and greatly enriched China-Africa relations. As this year marks the 10th anniversary of the proposal of BRI, Global Times reporters Liu Xin and Xing Xiaojing (GT) interviewed Chinese Ambassador to Kenya Zhou Pingjian (Zhou) and Chinese Ambassador to Madagascar Guo Xiaomei (Guo), to learn about their views on the BRI's achievements in the two African countries and their expectations for future cooperation.
GT: Over the last decade, China and Kenya have achieved fruitful results in their cooperation under the Belt and Road initiative (BRI). What do you see as the biggest highlight?
Zhou: The Mombasa-Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) is a landmark project by China and Kenya under the BRI, and it is also an exemplar of many fruitful results. In Kenya, the railway is affectionately called the SGR, and is well-known to almost every single Kenyan. As Kenyan President William Ruto said, the railway has completely changed the national landscape of Kenya.
The BRI has transformed Kenya's dreams into a reality. The narrow-gauge railway in Kenya was built in 1895 and has long been in disrepair. The country has always wanted to build a standard-gauge railway, which is also a key project in its Vision 2030 plan formulated in 2007.
Since the inauguration of the SGR, it has transported about 11 million passengers and about 28 million tons of cargo. It is worth mentioning that the official name of the railway in Kenya is "Madaraka Express" - "madaraka" means independence in the local Swahili language. Therefore, the most important significance of the railway is to enhance the confidence of the Kenyan people in their own development and make them proud.
GT: How do cooperation projects under the BRI, represented by the SGR, promote the development of other sectors by supporting infrastructure construction in Africa?
Zhou: Infrastructure construction is one of the key focuses of comprehensive cooperation under the BRI, and has unique significance for Kenya.
Kenya itself does not have abundant mineral resources, but its geographical location and regional centrality are very important. Without necessary infrastructure, it cannot consolidate this advantage. That is why Kenya attaches great importance to cooperation with China in building railways, roads, airports, and other forms of infrastructure.
In the construction of these projects, China and Kenya adhere to the principle of extensive consultation, joint contribution, and shared benefits, and implement the concepts proposed by the BRI. Each project effectively addresses Kenya's development concerns and brings significant benefits, such as creating job opportunities, consolidating regional centrality, and enhancing the confidence of the Kenyan people. No one agrees with the smear of the so-called debt trap.
GT: Based on your understanding, how do people from all walks of life in Kenya respond to the BRI? What role does the initiative play in communicating with the local people?
Zhou: The BRI has an excellent reputation in Kenya, and local friends highly praise the practical changes brought about by China-Kenya cooperation under the initiative.
In 2013, China and Kenya established a comprehensive cooperative partnership of equality, mutual trust, mutual benefit, and win-win cooperation. In 2017, China-Kenya relations were upgraded to a comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership. In the last 10 years, the exchanges between China and Kenya at the head-of-state level have provided strong strategic guidance for the joint construction of the BRI.
In addition to the connectivity of facilities such as the SGR, "soft connectivity" in terms of standard rules and regulations has also been well-coordinated, ensuring smooth trade. A decade ago, the bilateral trade volume between China and Kenya was about $2.8 billion, and in 2022 it reached about $8.5 billion, growing rapidly. The cooperation between the two countries in financial connectivity over the last 10 years has also made great progress.
In the process of jointly building the BRI between China and Kenya, due to the high visibility of projects such as the SGR, the Lamu port, and the Thwake Dam, some people may think that the joint construction mainly focuses on infrastructure.
In fact, the achievements in people-to-people connectivity and cultural exchanges between the two countries are also very prominent. Kenya currently has four Confucius Institutes, the most in any African country. There are also scientific research institutions such as the Sino-Africa Joint Research Center and the Kenya-China Joint Laboratory for Crop Molecular Biology at Egerton University. The embassy staffers always feel enthusiasm when communicating with local people.
GT: We have noticed that many elites in Kenya have a Western education background, but in recent years, more and more young people have tended to opt to study in China. How do you view this change?
Zhou: In Kenya, we hardly hear any negative comments about China. The local people have confidence in China's development prospects, and naturally want their own future development to be related to China.
Officials from the Kenyan Ministry of Education have expressed that many Kenyan students want to study in China, which also reflects the increasing importance of cooperation with China in Kenya's consideration of future development. Before visiting China, a high-ranking Kenyan official told me that he needed to bring his 15-year-old son along to let him understand that the world is not only about Europe and America, but also about rapidly developing China.
Kenya is an open country, and both in the business and academic fields, more people are indeed turning their attention to China. The people-to-people exchanges between China and Kenya have laid a solid foundation since the time of Zheng He's voyages to the coast of East Africa. With the strong driving force of jointly building the BRI, the friendly exchanges between the two countries are expected to deepen further.
GT: While achieving fruitful cooperation with mutual benefits, Western media outlets have intensified their attacks using the so-called debt trap. How do you view this?
Zhou: There are always people who can't stand others' success. During our exchanges with local friends in Kenya, no one has agreed with the so-called debt trap insinuation. Even if some people are influenced by such rhetoric, misunderstandings can be eliminated as long as there is clear communication.
A country needs capital for development. If it lacks domestic capital, it needs to find ways to utilize external capital appropriately. Many Kenyans believe that it is good to borrow money to help in development.
As far as I know, the smear of the so-called debt trap lacks credibility in Kenya. China's financing in Kenya is based on the development projects in the Kenya Vision 2030 plan. Before these projects started, China was not the only country Kenya had contact with. After analyzing different options, Kenya independently chose China. The reason behind this is that Chinese financing brings project implementation and provides Kenya with the fairest and most reasonable financing arrangements within its capacity.
Other speculations such as "neocolonialism" have no standing in Kenya either. My feeling is that when certain media outlets hype such topics, the local media in Kenya reacts minimally because the people here have benefited from pragmatic cooperation under the BRI.
GT: What is the current status of the focus to align the BRI with Kenya's Vision 2030?
Zhou: The development of each country has different stages, and the demands at each stage are not the same. Any cooperation between China and other countries is based on the needs and absorptive capacity of the partners, as well as the assistance that China can provide, striving for win-win outcomes.
Infrastructure construction remains a priority for Kenya's national development, and China and Kenya will continue to promote cooperation in this area through innovative approaches. In addition, based on its own development needs, Kenya has a growing desire to cooperate with China in other fields.
For example, the Kenyan government has proposed a bottom-up economic transformation agenda with agriculture at the core, covering areas such as micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises, affordable housing, universal healthcare, and the digital and creative economy. There are broad prospects and ample space for cooperation between Kenya and China in these areas.
Taking the digital and creative economy as an example, China and Kenya have a good foundation for cooperation. Both countries have good cooperation in building 4G and 5G base stations, national fiber optic networks, and national data centers. How to improve and make better use of the infrastructure in these areas is a topic that can be further explored in the future.
There is even greater potential for cooperation between China and Kenya in the tourism industry. More and more Kenyans now recognize that China represents a huge opportunity. They say that China has over 100 million outbound tourists each year, and if even a small fraction of them could come to Kenya, the country's tourism industry would develop well. Additionally, there is also great potential for cooperation between China and Kenya in the film and television production industry, including animation.
GT: What are your expectations for the development prospects of the high-quality BRI in Kenya?
Zhou: The prospects are very broad. Kenya has its own advantages, and the two countries have gradually explored good methods of cooperation. The most important thing is that both sides adhere to the principles of consultation, joint construction, and shared benefits, aiming for win-win cooperation and promoting their respective development.
Kenya's leaders, government officials, and ordinary people from all walks of life have highly praised the joint construction of the BRI between China and Kenya.
When the former Kenyan Minister of Transport participated in a live broadcast on a local TV station and was asked why many projects were cooperating with China, he used the example of the SGR to explain how Kenya's century-old dream became a reality through cooperation with China. He mentioned that they had been talking about building an expressway to the airport for 20 years, and China helped them achieve it within one or two years.
His argument was simple: The projects carried out in cooperation with China are of good quality, cost-effective, and are completed quickly. What's wrong with that? It also explains, to some extent, why the BRI has borne fruitful results in Kenya. It is because of China's sincerity and correct concept of righteousness and interests in practical operations, which have helped Kenya achieve its own development.
At the same time, China has also enhanced its own experience, technology, and equipment through cooperation with Kenya, expanding the market for Chinese companies. From August 2008 to July 2011, I served as a counselor at the Chinese Embassy in Kenya. At the time, there was only one Chinese community here, but now there are 18. The number of Chinese tourists visiting Kenya was very small at that time, but before the pandemic, this number had exceeded 80,000.
Looking ahead, I believe that China and Kenya will achieve new breakthroughs in jointly building the BRI and implementing global development initiatives.
Among the numerous tourist destinations in China, a couple surnamed Wang from Yantai, Shandong Province, have set their sights on the Changbai Mountain. "It's cooler up north, and upon arrival, we discovered that not only is the air quality good here, but the water is also clean."
In the hot summer, the temperature in many cities has exceeded 30 C, and in some cases even 40 C. Under the low flying clouds, Changbai Mountain, a summer resort located in Northeast China's Jilin Province, still refuses to shed the dimly silver yarn. The water surface of Heavenly Lake, also known as Tianchi, in Changbai Mountain has just begun to break the ice and melt after more than 200 days of frozen. Compared with the dry heat in the city, the comfortable "cool" here has precisely spawned the "heat" of tourism.
As the temperature rises, the ice on the Tianchi Lake gradually thins, breaks up and melts, and the water also reveals its turquoise appearance.
"So beautiful! Changbai Mountain has always been my heart to punch the clock, fresh air, magnificent landscape, worth the trip," said Wang.
Changbai Mountain is one of the ten most famous mountains in China. Every December, the crater lake Tianchi will begin to freeze , the lowest temperature reaches minus 44 degrees Celsius, until the ice melts around the middle of June of the next year. With the frozen Tianchi Lake ice begins to melt, Changbai Mountain ushered in the summer tourism peak.
As of July 20, 2023, the number of visitors to Changbai Mountain Nature Reserve has exceeded one million, surpassing the one million mark seven days earlier than in 2019, the Global Times learned from the Management Committee of the Changbai Mountain Conservation and Development Zone on Tuesday.
The influx of tourists has not only driven the local tourism economy but also brought more challenges and opportunities for ecological protection and scenic area development.
Breathtaking wonderland
The Changbai Mountain scenic area is located in the northeastern part of China, spanning across the border of Jilin Province and North Korea. It is a vast and picturesque region known for its stunning natural beauty and diverse ecosystems.
The centerpiece of the scenic area is Changbai Mountain, also known as Mount Baekdu in Korean. It is an active volcano and the highest peak in northeastern China, standing at an impressive height of 2,744 meters. The mountain is covered in snow for most of the year, creating a breathtaking winter wonderland. One of the most famous attractions within the Changbai Mountain scenic area is the Tianchi Lake. It is a crater lake formed by volcanic activity and is renowned for its crystal-clear blue waters. Surrounded by lush forests and snow-capped peaks, the lake offers a serene and tranquil atmosphere.
The scenic area is also home to numerous waterfalls, hot springs, and alpine meadows and is rich in biodiversity, with a wide variety of flora and fauna. It is home to rare and endangered species such as the Siberian tiger, red-crowned crane, and Korean pine.
To gear up for tourism boom in peak season, Changbai Mountain scenic area has completed upgrades and renovations in various areas to create a comfortable and safe tourism consumption environment for visitors.
Bao Gang, deputy manager of the Management Committee, told the Global Times that in the past month, the staff of Changbai Mountain have carried out large-scale repairs and renovations on the plank roads in preparation for the peak tourist season. Currently, the refurbished plank roads are open to visitors, providing a comfortable experience for sightseeing.
Han Quan, in his 30s, stood out this recruitment process and joined the driver team at the scenic area. During the training period of over a month, Han gradually adapted to the altitude and local environment. With the guidance of experienced drivers, he gained a deep understanding of the driving routes and can complete a one-way trip within the designated 16-minute time frame.
To effectively alleviate the pressure of tourist flows during the peak season, the management committee limits the ticket sales, and guides tourists to use online booking system and make scheduled entry with different time slots.
"The management committee never blindly increases the limit in pursuit of economic benefits Overtourism would not only exert negative impact on the experience of visitors, but also cause environmental degradation and ruination of fragile natural habitat," Bao said.
Transformation of small towns With its natural scenery, rare species, and folk culture, Changbai Mountain has gained nationwide recognition and attracted tourists from all over the world, leading to changes in the small town Erdaobaihe and improvement in the living standards of its residents.
Sun Minzhong, who lives in Erdaobaihe town, used to be a taxi driver. About 10 years ago, he passed the assessment in the public recruitment conducted by the Changbai Mountain Tourism Management Committee and became a shuttle bus driver at the scenic spot. During each peak tourist season over the past decade, he has driven the specially customized off-road shuttle bus up and down the mountain more than 10 times a day. Through this process of transporting tourists while enjoying the beauty of Changbai Mountain, he has developed a unique attachment to the mountain.
According to his recollection, Erdaobaihe town relied heavily on logging as a source of income many years ago, with many residents making a living as forestry workers. In the Forestry Culture Park in Erdaobaihe town, people can still sense the scenes of workers engaging in forest logging, sawing, lifting, and transporting from the standing bronze statues.
However, now "relying on the mountain for sustenance" has taken on a new meaning. Protecting the forest and developing the tourism industry have become a consensus among more and more residents, and the tourism boom has attracted an increasing number of people from outside settle in the town.
With active policy guidance, a favorable investment and business environment, and breathtaking natural scenery, the catering and homestay industries in Erdaobaihe have rapidly developed, and their capacity to accommodate tourists has gradually increased.
More and more ordinary people like Sun have found ways to improve their quality of life, whether as drivers, forest protection officers, tour guides, homestay staff, or scenic area managers.
When talking about the development of his hometown, Sun is full of gratitude and hope. "Without Changbai Mountain, I wouldn't have this job. When the high-speed railway to Shenyang is completed, there will be even more tourists coming here."
'We become Changbai Mountain people here' Sustainable development serves as the foundation for ecological tourism at Changbai Mountain. The management committee emphasizes ecological protection while promoting ecological tourism and prioritizing ecological conservation.
Starting from 2019, the Changbai Mountain Nature Reserve and 12 small hydropower stations in the surrounding area were all dismantled. This move not only alleviated the road traffic pressure in the northern scenic area but also protected the local ecological environment.
In 2022, efforts were made to strengthen coal pollution control, ensuring that four centralized heating companies meet emission standards.
From past to present, one of the most noticeable changes is that the management area of private vehicles has extended to the foot of the mountain. In 2021, the northern section of the Changbai Mountain scenic area relocated its entrance gate to the tourist distribution center in Changbai Mountain Legendary Town, located in the Chibei District. Along the 45-kilometer route from the tourist distribution center to the transfer center in the scenic area, private cars are no longer allowed in this area. Instead, tour buses with a capacity of up to 50 people are taking visitors to their destination. These changes not only alleviate the traffic pressure and reduce waiting times for the visitors, but also minimize human interference with the surrounding environment.
"In the past, people used to say that they had to take train to visit our hometown. Now we have highways, high-speed trains, and air routes. This proves that Changbai Mountain's tourism development has been recognized in recent years," Bao, who graduated from university in 2007 and entered the industry, sees no distinction between outsiders and locals. "We all become Changbai Mountain People here."
According to Bao, there exists a dynamic balance between the maintenance of the ecological environment and human activities. On one hand, the ecological environment requires not only the efforts of scenic area staff but also the adherence to proper visitor behavior by every tourist. On the other hand, a good environment will also encourage tourists to cherish the natural wonder.
On the road departing from the nearby Erdaobaihe town, the Global Times reporter saw wild ducks, deer, and other wildlife, feeling that the harmonious co-existence between humans and nature has already taken shape.
The Global Times learned from the management committee that relying on the advantages of border scenery and folk culture, the management committee will focus building an industrial system for border trade and developing themed tourism such as ecological tourism, hot spring health preservation, summer retreats, and winter ice and snow activities.
"We not only want everyone to see Changbai Mountain during the peak summer tourism season but also want to showcase the beauty of Changbai Mountain throughout the year," said Bao.
Zhou Qian, Chen Zihan, Ji Jiaxin, Xiang Yi, Zhang Yaoyu, Kang Huaishuo from Communication University of China contributed to the story
Japan, in an irresponsible manner, has started to dump its nuclear-contaminated wastewater into the ocean, despite the environmental impact this will have on the ocean and strong oppositions from countries in the Pacific region. It's a crime against humanity. Why does Japan insist on doing so? What should countries, which will be directly affected by the dumping, do in response? Global Times (GT) reporter Wang Wenwen talked to Dr. Arjun Makhijani (Makhijani), president of the US-based Institute for Energy and Environmental Research and member of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) Expert Panel, over these issues. This is the first installment of the series.
GT: What concerns you most about the dumped nuclear-contaminated wastewater?
Makhijani: A great deal of the water in the tanks exceeds all norms and standards. Some tanks contain sludges; particulates are likely to be stirred up when water is withdrawn from them potentially clogging the filters. Water in some of the tanks is heavily contaminated with radionuclides like strontium-90, cesium-137 and iodine-129 far exceeding the acceptable limits. This is because the filtration system worked poorly and the early system was inadequate.
A small part of the tanks doesn't appear to have significant contamination. But even this statement is uncertain because, as the PIF Expert Panel wrote, the sampling is biased and not representative of the contents of the tanks. This means neither TEPCO (Japan's Tokyo Electric Power Company) nor the IAEA (the International Atomic Energy Agency) has a statistically valid idea of the radionuclide content in the tanks.
It's concerning that TEPCO and Japan do not seem bothered by their lack of knowledge regarding the tank contents. This is scientifically problematic. TEPCO should know what is in the tanks; for example they need to test the filtration system with the different kinds of contaminated water it will have to handle. Japan has resisted the idea that they should know what is in the tanks, saying they will sample before discharge.
IAEA is also of the opinion that it doesn't matter if the tank contents are not accurately known now. I think this is scientifically unacceptable, but apparently it has been acceptable to the IAEA, TEPCO and the Japanese regulators.
One of the things that the Expert Panel said is that Japan hasn't tested the ALPS system adequately enough. We asked what they will do if they find that the water before discharge is not up to the norms. Both Japan and the IAEA said that they are going to repeatedly run the water through the ALPS system. How many times? One of the IAEA representatives said if there is proof that the water doesn't meet the norms, they could run it through ALPS 300 times, if necessary, to bring it to the standard for discharge. Even a dozen times would be too much; it would mean the filtration is not working properly and that it hasn't been tested enough. You can't just say you're going to run the water through many times. That's not a technically sensible answer.
GT: People from countries around the Pacific have been the main force opposing Japan's dumping of the nuclear-contaminated wastewater. Why did we fail to stop Japan?
Makhijani: I think this is something for the Japanese government to answer. We as an Expert Panel asked them, what is the justification for this? Countries in the Pacific region, like China, South Korea, the Philippines and the Marshall Islands will be harmed. We know that some harm has already happened. There was a salt panic in South Korea. There is some societal harm, which can be measured. Countries like South Korea and China receive no benefit. It is very clear that the dumping is not justified.
Japan believes it can unilaterally decide to pollute the oceans. Despite claiming that the Pacific region is one society, Japan alone will make the decision. So other countries don't have a decision-making authority, because Japan is deciding for the whole Pacific region. I think this is scandalous. It is a position that could lead to ecological chaos, because other countries could say the same and dump pollutants into the ocean.
GT: How do you comment on the lukewarm attitude of some Western countries toward this issue?
Makhijani: The US has supported Japan's dumping plan. It relied on the IAEA's assertion that the impact is negligible, partly because it is also doing dumping itself. There is a lot of protest in the US about this. There are petitions circulating. Now the US has its own tritium problem. There are decommissioned plants in Massachusetts and New York where they are proposing to dump tritiated water into the ocean. People are protesting and they don't want this.
I know G7 has supported Japan. Germany somewhat objected. I don't know if G20 will take this up. Many countries have their own nuclear dumping problems. So it's easier to say yes to Japan than to say no. It's not a secret that there are big political tensions and questions surrounding this matter, and there are alignments happening between the US and Japan. I don't know whether political considerations have been a part of this, but I wouldn't be surprised if they have.
Apart from all that, I want to note that I recommend that all countries who are now dumping tritium contaminated water from nuclear power plants should stop doing it and begin the process of the best way to do it now.
GT: While China bans all Japanese seafood imports, Japan has warned China of WTO action. How do you see such buck-passing moves by Japan?
Makhijani: Japan thinks it can take the issue to the WTO to compel China to stop banning seafood imports from Japan. But China can counter by taking the issue to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea when it comes to legal questions. There are so many legal forums. The WTO in my opinion does not have a very friendly attitude toward the environment. Maybe China should use this occasion to urge the WTO to be more environmentally friendly. In the WTO, military, security and trading issues trump everything else. Well, not all values are confined to those areas. I think it would be much better if Japan stops dumping. It would make things much easier.
There are many other avenues for seeking redress beyond the WTO. China is a big, powerful and wealthy country, the second biggest economy in the world and technically very sophisticated. My suggestion for China would be to push the IAEA to withdraw its endorsement because of bad science and the lack of justification for the dumping, which violates the fundamental safety principle No. 4 of the IAEA and the corresponding guidance in GSG-8. If Japan goes to the WTO, why doesn't China go to many other forums in which this can be addressed?
The amount of dumping that has happened so far is relatively small. This is an activity that is going to go on for 30 years at least. If the intention is to stop Japan from dumping, there have to be more forums than the WTO. The IAEA should be held accountable both for its own sake and also as a way of holding Japan accountable. If the IAEA admits that it should have considered the deficiencies in Japan's environmental impact assessment, or more importantly, should have considered justification, then Japan's position on dumping will likely have to change because they relied on the IAEA's statement that the impact will be negligible in order to start dumping.
Recently, there has been a rampant surge of negative reports targeting the Chinese economy throughout the Western media. However, closer examination of these reports shows that many of them are self-contradictory and lack any form of coherence. Their so-called "serious" analysis and arguments about China's economy are actually a mix of manipulating numbers, selectively blind and false narratives, and nothing but another round "China collapse" hype, which is doomed to fail.
For starters, some Western media commentators intensively exaggerate certain issues in the Chinese economy, such as the short-term investment downturn and slowing consumption growth caused by the structural adjustment of the real estate industry and debt held by local governments. They repeatedly claim that China's economic slowdown poses risks to the global economy, while hyping that the continuous upgrading of Chinese industries and China's increasing share of global trade as a "threat" to their own economies.
Western media has been pushing the "China collapse theory" for a long time. After China's economy surpassed Japan's to become the second-largest economy in 2010, the "China threat theory" had raised its voice. But Western naysayers have always been unable to answer the contradiction in their narratives: If China's economy is really heading toward a cliff as claimed, which means the gap between China's economy and that of the US will only widen, why should Western media worry about the so-called threat from China?
The reality is that even in the face of multiple challenges, China's economic development in high-tech industries such as new-energy vehicles, large aircraft, and shipbuilding continues to show strong momentum. These industries were previously dominated by developed countries, and as China accumulates experience and expertise in these sectors, its overall supply chain advantage has indeed put pressure on some Western countries in economic competition but its contributions to facilitating global trade are tremendous and cannot be ignored.
The back-and-forth between the "China collapse theory" and the "China threat theory" actually reflects the contradictory misconceptions of the Chinese economy by Western media, which may also be influenced by the US' geopolitical game against China.
Furthermore, Western media often claim to be professional and impartial, and use data to support their arguments. However, they only select data that serves their biased viewpoints.
Some Western media reports claim that China's economic growth is slowing down while the US economy is thriving. In reality, measuring the true state of an economy requires a wide range of data from different dimensions, rather than just one or two surface-level indicators. For example, China's social electricity consumption - an important economic indicator - has maintained steady growth this year, reflecting steady economic recovery. On the other hand, in the US, the core indicator of social electricity consumption has not increased.
There are some reports in Western media outlets that selectively or intentionally choose to highlight negative news about the Chinese economy while completely ignoring positive developments. This creates a false impression that the Chinese economy is on the verge of "collapse," undermining foreign investors' confidence in China and driving global private capital toward the US.
These reports selectively overlook the Chinese government's determination to forge ahead with short-term adjustments in the real estate and local debt sectors in order to maintain long-term sustainable economic development.
In the context of the US' intensifying containment on China, whenever the Chinese economy faces challenges, these "China collapse theories" resurface. However, presenting facts and reasoning is the best way to debunk such ill-intentioned slandering. The real outlook of the Chinese economy is not reflected by the views held by a handful of anti-China Western politicians, but by foreign governments and businesses' actions toward Chinese market.
Just take a look at how US officials and executives of US companies are eager to visit China and the establishment of economic working groups between China and the US. If the Chinese economy were truly heading toward a "collapse" would the US officials and businesses still pay such attention to the Chinese market? Look at Washington's attitude, and people will have the answer regarding the real condition and outlook for the Chinese economy.
Since the historic Shenzhou-8 mission in 2011, China's space refrigerators have soared beyond Earth to become an integral part of the country's manned space missions. This groundbreaking achievement shattered the long-time technological monopoly held by foreign nations, positioning China as the third country, following the US and Russia, to master the core technology of space refrigeration.
In an industrial park in Foshan, South China's Guangdong Province, the local government has harnessed cutting-edge aerospace technology to propel the development of intelligent medical refrigerators and cold-chain logistics, which has become a new engine driving economic growth in the region.
Specifically designed for space
What's special about refrigerators used in space is they're specifically designed for the space environment, allowing them to serve unique purposes compared to household refrigerators.
Given the highly specialized nature of the space environment, space refrigerators boast unparalleled performance that set them apart from traditional household models. In the microgravity environment of space where objects float, stability and convenient access must be ensured, analysts noted.
For one thing, manned space missions demand exceptional precision down to the gram, and that requires space refrigerators to be much lighter than household ones. Moreover, during the rocket launch phase, the Shenzhou spacecraft is subject to various extreme challenges such as vibrations, impacts, and noise, necessitating space refrigerators to be more stable and possess stronger structural integrity capable of withstanding momentary maximum accelerations of 12g for vibrations and 500g for impacts. This is equivalent to space refrigerators enduring instantaneous impacts 500 times their own weight.
Additionally, taikonauts in space need to handle multiple tasks at the same time. To lighten their workload, space refrigerators need to incorporate Internet of Things technology, so that taikonauts can control power on/off, temperature settings, and other operations using a handheld terminal similar to a PAD, a solution not even present at the International Space Station.
Combining these designs in medical coolers and cold-chain logistics, the local government of Foshan city's Nanhai District has successfully developed a series of technologies for multi-usage refrigerators as part of the "National Major Instrument Development Project," including low-power, high-efficiency refrigeration, high-density phase-change energy storage, intelligent temperature control, temperature distribution, and cold storage and insulation under extreme conditions.
The technology transfer of "space refrigerators" has demonstrated its effectiveness in Guangdong Province, aiding in addressing issues related to the last-mile delivery, monitoring, and management of vaccines and food transportation, the Global Times learned from the project manager.
Outstanding benefits
According to the smart cold storage system developer Genshu (Guangdong) Technology Co., Ltd., traditional cold storage facilities have a number of drawbacks such as high costs for energy, difficulty in maintaining a constant temperature, and the need for multiple transfers between warehouses during transportation due to their large sizes. In contrast, the smart cold storage system offers several benefits.
By leveraging intelligent manufacturing and aerospace technology, this system provides an innovative and advanced solution for cold-chain logistics for medical supplies such as vaccine.
For one thing, it allows for flexible sizing according to specific needs and eliminates the need for on-site construction. The system also offers significant cost savings compared to building and maintaining large cold storage facilities, Deng Yulin, founder of the company who is also a professor in the School of Life Sciences at the Beijing Institute of Technology and member of the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA), told the Global Times.
Each compartment of the refrigerator is equipped with information pallets that record all necessary data, including the items in store, temperatures and quantities, making it easier for transportation personnel to track and manage goods, Deng said.
Cloud monitoring further enhances control and transparency by providing real-time information about the location, handling, and opening of the containers.
Another key advantage of the system is the ability to maintain a consistent temperature throughout the transportation process.
Space materials are also used for weight reduction in the cold storage devices, meanwhile ensuring that different locations within the device can maintain the same desired temperature with minimal variation. "The technologies we have applied on these cold-chain storage units are even more advanced than those we use in space, as they have been remodeled to suit ground conditions," Deng told the Global Times.
China has dealt with more than 36,000 corruption-related cases impacting the public interest in the first half of 2023, with more than 52,000 individuals receiving criticism, education, assistance, or punishment, China's highest supervisory and anti-corruption authority announced on Monday.
Discipline inspection and supervisory authorities at all levels have consistently strengthened their inspection covering the implementation of policies supporting the public interest while punishing acts of embezzlement, misappropriation, false reporting and extortion, according to the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the National Commission of Supervision.
The top anti-graft watchdog vowed to eliminate corruption at the grassroots level in areas such as employment and entrepreneurship, education and healthcare, pensions and social security, ecological and environmental protection, workplace safety, food and drug safety, law enforcement, and judicial fields.
The top anti-corruption authority emphasized the need to strengthen frontline research and closely monitor prominent issues which impact people's livelihoods to address public concerns, giving the example of solving the corruption problem in handing out subsidies to villagers in the city of Baoshan of Southwest China's Yunnan Province and providing financial relief to low income people in the city of Longyan in East China's Fujian Province.
Anti-corruption authorities in East China's Zhejiang Province and Southwest China's Guizhou Province have made full use of big data to deepen grassroots governance of public interest issues. On an updated online supervision platform, the public can submit requests and understand how cases are processed. As China highlighted dealing with corruption as it related to public interest, the National Health Commission launched a one-year campaign to crack down on corruption in the healthcare sector across the country earlier in August, focusing on a "key few" in the pharmaceutical industry to ensure high-quality development of the country's medical and healthcare sector.
As Superstorm Sandy threatened the East Coast of the United States in fall of 2012, people stocked up on bread and batteries. They boarded their windows. And they tweeted. During the height of the storm and its impact, between October 26 and November 10, people sent more than 20 million hurricane-related tweets.
Now, scientists have taken almost 10 million of those tweets and used them to show where Sandy hit. They also found that tweets about the storm’s damage were associated with how much financial support ended up getting handed around. The results show that social media can be used to track the damage from natural disasters. And they suggest that eventually, these social networks might be able to contribute to disaster response.
These days, if an earthquake happens miles away, you may read about it on Twitter before you even feel the tremor. In some cases, earthquake information actually travels faster via tweet than from scientific instruments. In 2009, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency held the DARPA Network Challenge — a contest designed to see how social media and the Internet could be used to solve time-sensitive problems. Manuel Cebrian, a computational social scientist now based at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Clayton, Australia, won that challenge with his colleagues by using social media to hunt down 10 red weather balloons released across the United States.
Since then, Cebrian and his colleagues have been applying social networks to other, more disastrous events.
First, they tried to see if they could predict outbreaks of contagious disease. But soon, they turned their minds to large-scale disasters. Hurricane Sandy was the perfect target. It was a disaster big enough that everyone cared about it. The storm, which made landfall in New Jersey on October 29, 2012, killed at least 147 people. It also caused $50 billion in damages and left 8.5 million people without power.
The disaster was large — and came at a time when Twitter had become “a pervasive technology that everyone was using,” Cebrian explains. This made Sandy a good storm to test the powers of Twitter.
A storm of social media The scientists analyzed 9.7 million tweets from 2.2 million users posted between October 15 and November 12, 2012. They restricted their search to tweets where they could determine the location of the user. Cebrian and his group compared “hurricane-related” messages using keywords such as “Frankenstorm,” “Sandy,” and “hurricane” to tweets that contained vague, non-Sandy-related terms such as “weather.”
By comparing Twitter use in 50 cities in the United States, the researchers found that the closer the city was to the hurricane’s path, the more storm-related tweets were sent in the period immediately before, during and after Sandy’s big day, the researchers report March 11 in Science Advances.
Showing that tweets could track a storm’s path was “the main goal,” Cebrian explains, but then the team moved on to a more difficult question: Whether tweets were also associated with material storm damage. “It was kind of a long shot for us,” Cebrian admits. But Superstorm Sandy again had good data to offer. Using the publicly available data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and private insurance companies on how much money was spent on storm recovery, the scientists were able to show the volume of tweets about Sandy in New Jersey and New York was associated with how much money people in the area received for damages. Cebrian and his group were even able to apply their methods to 12 other natural disasters, including the South Napa earthquake and the Oso mudslide, and see similar results.
“We were surprised there was any correlation at all” between tweet volume and damage, Cebrian notes. “These are two very different processes.” On one hand, you have Twitter, something many people do when distracted, “you are looking at a million things and talking to your mom and then you tweet,” Cebrian says. “On the other hand, to know how much money goes into your house…they have to take pictures and assessment and get the numbers approved. You are looking at a well calibrated process.”
The study is much larger than many previous studies of social media and disaster, says Julia Skinner, who studies social media, political unrest and natural disasters at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. “It combines a lot of different ways that researchers have considered social media and disasters into one approach,” she explains.
The study also showed that people retweet less in the path of the hurricane, which suggests there is “more new information coming from areas close to the hurricane,” says James Bagrow, who studies social media and disaster response at the University of Vermont in Burlington. “This isn’t ‘cowboy science,’” he says. “They did a good job of supporting the decisions they made along the way.”
To tweet or not to tweet Though Cebrian has done several analyses of Twitter, he himself doesn’t tweet. “I’ve never used Twitter,” he admits. “I’m not very good with this technology.”
But it has still proven to be a rich resource to mine. “Twitter is this weird mix of a social network where people check on their friends, but also an information network where agencies try to reach out to people,” Cebrian says.
Twitter is also useful because it’s public, Skinner explains. “Even if you don’t have an account, you can see what people are saying about a disasters, while on a platform like Facebook or Snapchat, people’s privacy settings might prevent you from seeing what they have to say.”
But not everyone tweets, and that means the results will end up skewed. “Twitter has great penetration in America,” Cebrian notes. But other countries might not be so well represented. “We can’t claim universality,” he says. It also depends on the natural disaster. People may be very excited about issues that are not yet local. “Twitter can be very good if you want to raise awareness, but it might not be a good tool today to see where Zika is traveling,” Cebrian notes.
So far, the associations between tweet and destruction was still only moderate. “This is the beginning,” Cebrian notes. He hopes that down the line, companies such as Twitter and Google might want to help do further research. But he also says, in the end, the emergency aid groups have many methods, and “this is only another tool.”
The scene was stranger than it looked, even by Las Vegas standards: Two young men pull up in a U-Haul truck to a motel outside the city. They check in and move a cooler into their room. They appear to be handling something of importance, and look to see if the ice needs replenishing. Inside the cooler is not the makings of epic hangovers but instead an experiment in eternal youth.
Tucked within, protected from the desert heat, are more than a hundred tiny pond invertebrates. One of the men, Daniel Martínez, with a Ph.D. in ecology and evolution a month or so old, is rearing these little organisms to test a claim that they somehow stay young all their lives, no more likely to die as years go by as they are early on. They can die, however, from high temperatures or starvation. Leaving the animals on their own for more than a day invites disaster, so if Martínez travels, even stopping for sightseeing with his brother in Las Vegas, all the animals in the aging experiment travel, too. Their road trip was in 1993, when the “dogma,” as Martínez recalls, was that evolution would not allow any multicelled organism to escape aging. Just as humans age, the thinking was, other organisms also decline in health as time goes by, with death becoming more and more likely. Yet few people at the time were bothering to document aging in any creatures other than a few standard lab residents. Biologists have long tracked aging in fruit flies and lab mice (SN: 7/23/16, p. 16), but a bloom of recent data from more diverse organisms is stirring up discussion about how aging could have evolved — and if it’s inevitable. The ongoing studies of Martínez’s pampered pond invertebrates and a massive effort to study aging in a roadside weed are good examples of these provocative approaches. They’re shaking up basic assumptions of a long-standing theory and inspiring new thinking to explain why there’s so much crazy variety in how life deteriorates — or maybe doesn’t. Old ideas Deciding whether an organism is aging can get tricky. For humans, the slowing and graying, the wrinkling and creaking are all too obvious. But what about plants? Or fungi? For a metric that applies across many species, evolutionary biologists often focus on how the number of deaths in a population changes over a particular period of time. If this death rate increases as time passes, the organism ages. (In this scheme, life span is irrelevant. A hypothetical species that lives for just a few months but keeps its death rate flat until the end would still be considered “biologically immortal.”)
Early evolutionary thinkers proposed that aging followed by death is a good thing, another marvel of the mindless force of natural selection. Built into individuals, this inevitable decline kept feeble parents from sapping resources from the young.
But the idea that aging evolved as a boon for the next generation “is really nonsense,” says Axel Kowald of Newcastle University in England, a biochemist who specializes in the bioinformatics of aging. Among the many objections: It’s hard to see why a lucky few that could live a bit longer and continue to reproduce wouldn’t overtake a population. With more offspring, they’d spread more of their genes. Over time, then, genes for aging should be few, fewer, gone.
One of the modern mainstream explanations of aging rests on the idea that evolutionary forces lose their power to edit as adulthood stretches on. As genes are copied generation after generation, mutations are made. Natural selection can remove from a population the typos that harm the young; disadvantaged carriers don’t pass those mistakes down to the next generation in much abundance.
Mistakes that cause trouble late in life, however, can be almost impossible to purge, argued the late zoologist Sir Peter Medawar, a Nobel laureate who titled his autobiography Memoir of a Thinking Radish. In a 1951 lecture, he explained this approach to aging by whimsically tracing the perilous lives of laboratory test tubes. The mortality rate of these hypothetical test tubes, which for the sake of explanation reproduced more than once in their lives, allowed few tubes to reach old age. Test tubes that don’t reach old age don’t reveal detrimental effects from mutations that act only late in life. Therefore natural selection didn’t have a chance to stop those mutations from being passed down to test tube babies. In a scenario now called mutation accumulation, the late-acting mutations could thus build up and cause the declines of aging, also known as senescence. Natural selection doesn’t weed out these mutations because, Medawar said, wild organisms “simply do not live that long.”
In a perverse twist on this idea, natural selection might not just allow genes that bring late-life decrepitude to accumulate but also might favor those genes. Evolutionary biologist George C. Williams, later eulogized as a quiet and deep thinker with the look of Abraham Lincoln, argued in 1957 that genes with split personalities, like Jekyll and Hyde, could help explain aging. The benefits of these genes appear early in life and the gene is thus passed to the next generation, with its downside revealed as frailty only late in life. Till death do us part In the 1990s, as the theories were then understood, a widespread idea was that “nothing can escape aging,” Martínez says. Yet as a graduate student at Stony Brook University in New York, he read about some tiny hydra species that had extraordinary powers. These branching bodies can reproduce by budding off clone babies, and they can rebuild themselves after dismemberment. What’s more, they didn’t appear to deteriorate with passing time. Biological immortality was a grand claim for these distant jellyfish relatives, soft translucent stalks a few millimeters tall with a tuft of tentacles wiggling from the top. But no one had done a rigorous test collecting the hydra and tracking their death rates. Martínez eventually set up 145 Hydra vulgaris in laboratory luxury, where no predator could reach them and they could enjoy catered food all their lives. “When I started doing the experiment, I thought that I was going to prove that hydra could not escape aging,” he says. “A year and a half later I got my Ph.D. — the hydra were still with me.” The expected rise in death rate that characterizes aging organisms still hadn’t started. “I got a postdoc at University of California, Irvine,” he says, “so I crossed the country in a U-Haul truck with the hydra and all my furniture.”
The truck was supposed to be air-conditioned but wasn’t, and with a hot engine right under the cab, driving a southern route pulling a trailer, Martínez had to keep careful track of ice for the hydra cooler. Plus, there was all the changing of water, the feeding, the raising brine shrimp so the hydra had live prey. This was when the whole party visited Las Vegas.
The hydra made it. (Martínez, however, no longer even considers a hydra project without a technician to manage their care.) In 1998 he published results of four years of hydra watching. His title was cautious: “Mortality patterns suggest lack of senescence in hydra.”
“I published the paper and forgot about it,” says Martínez, now at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif.
Opinions about the inevitability of aging continued to run strong — as demographer James Vaupel of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany, discovered in 2002. At a workshop on aging in nonhuman species, Vaupel stood up to say that the paper he had found most interesting was one describing mortality rates in a roadside weed. The rates appeared to drop as time passed, leading Vaupel to propose it as a possible case of what he called “negative senescence.”
“My remark was met with ululations of horror, cries of derision, hisses and boos,” Vaupel says. Eminent biogerontologists said that theorist William Hamilton had proved decades earlier that mortality, at least in repeatedly reproductive adults, universally rises with age and “there was no need for the audience to listen to a demographer who didn’t understand biology.”
Further data on the weed showed a more complex story, but the meeting outcry had a meaningful effect. As soon as Vaupel got back to his Rostock lab, he asked Annette Baudisch, then a new Ph.D. student, to “figure out why Hamilton’s proof was wrong.”
Baudisch published her critique of Hamilton in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2005. Hamilton’s proof could not explain the full diversity of aging, she argued. Some species that keep growing throughout adulthood, tortoises and many plants, for example, might not be included.
Though some researchers believe there’s still much truth to Hamilton’s approach, Vaupel took this conclusion as a cue to go questing for examples of prolonged youth. He talked Martínez into redoing the hydra experiment — but bigger. Instead of four years, the test ran for eight. Instead of 145 animals, the team had multiyear data from 2,256.
The resulting paper came out last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Two species of hydra, with their many representatives divided between Claremont and Rostock for raising, had continued their usual low-drama lives, feeding and budding off babies but not showing any upsweep in their mortality rates. In 10 of the 12 groups, the annual probability of death stayed around 0.6 percent, and two groups held steady with an even lower annual rate of 0.09 percent.
Continuing the tests until the whole study population died, which would be ideal for tracking the hydra’s entire life history, would take more than 1,000 years, researchers calculate. But eight years of data gave Martínez and Vaupel confidence. The old view that aging is inevitable, the paper declared, “is no longer tenable.”
The hydra results so far are “solid evidence” that not all species age, Kowald says. And there are other, less-studied candidates for what’s called negligible senescence, too: three-toed box turtles and bristlecone pines, for instance.
Into the wild The lab, of course, isn’t where evolution shapes life. Biologists seeking to understand how aging evolved need to know if and how organisms age in the wild, research that is likewise challenging Medawar’s pronouncements.
The plant study that caused a ruckus for Vaupel was an early version of a test by Deborah Roach, a plant evolutionary biologist now at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Her results from 4,476 ribwort plantains (Plantago lanceolata), set out at a long-term research site in Durham, N.C., had suggested that this common roadside weed was escaping the supposedly inevitable decline of aging. But construction of a new art museum wiped out those plots after less than five years.
After moving to Virginia and summoning the resolve to start the experiment again, Roach selected meadows at Thomas Jefferson’s birthplace, close to Charlottesville and under the protection of local historical preservationists. During the years 2000 through 2002, an army of undergraduates set out 30,000 plantains, all of known genetic heritage and marked for individual monitoring.
After collecting seven years of data on when plants died, Roach picked up a subtle signal she hadn’t observed in Durham. At first, plantains of different ages had about the same mortality rates, all relatively low, with six-month mortality rates at less than 10 percent. But during the three years that followed, the plantains clearly struggled. Roach suspects soggy winters plus competition from neighboring foliage were to blame. Death rates rose to around 30 percent and — this was the important bit — the death rates climbed higher for the older plants. A population that had looked as if it weren’t physically declining with age showed signs of senescence when the going got tough.
The results contradict Medawar’s fundamental assumption that life is so short and brutal in the wild that the possibility of seeing frail, aged organisms there would be exceedingly rare. “Now we have a great body of literature showing that in fact there are these old animals out there, these old plants,” Roach says. A 2013 tally by Dan Nussey of the University of Edinburgh and an international array of colleagues documented more examples of aged organisms in the wild — 175 species, in fact, including Dall sheep, antler flies and great tits, among others. A study of painted turtles published June 7 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences added that species to the list, showing that human impacts might inadvertently be nudging an Illinois population toward senescence.
Across the tree of life, aging now looks more varied than old ideas predicted. Drawing on data for 46 species, Vaupel, Baudisch (now at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense) and 12 coauthors published a paper in 2014 featuring a full page of mortality curves, which track how the number of deaths in a given group changes over time. Many of the organisms show the expected upsweep with time, but other curves are idiosyncratic. The curve of Soay sheep curls concavely downward during early adulthood before rising again to a rounded hilltop in old age. Alpine swifts’ curve looks like a side view of a lawn chair relaxed way back for a summer snooze.
With mortality data on so few of the species on Earth, it’s too early to pronounce big trends. So far, body size and life span don’t appear to dictate the shape of the curve: The curves of water fleas and lions look remarkably similar. Organisms from different kingdoms can also have similar curves: The curves for desert tortoises and netleaf oaks both tilt downward.
“We’re going to have to figure out what it is about the biology of these species that explains the variety,” Roach says. The new reports, she adds, “are putting a big, bold spotlight on the theories and saying, ‘Hey guys, we need to update.’”
Think again Last year in Experimental Gerontology, Kowald and Thomas Kirkwood of the Institute for Ageing at Newcastle University proclaimed that Medawar’s idea about natural selection losing its power appears to be “difficult to reconcile” with new research. The discussion on that point isn’t over yet, though.
Baudisch, for her part, would like theoretical frameworks that describe aging (or its lack) as part of the whole topography of change during a life. “Theories that just deal with the end of life don’t speak to all this diversity,” she says. “Physicists don’t make theories that only apply on Sundays.”
One long-standing approach does offer more of a whole-life framework. Kirkwood proposed the approach, called disposable soma theory, back in 1977. Wild organisms have to split their limited resources between reproduction and maintaining the soma, the nonreproducing parts of the body, he noted. In many cases, the best strategy demands such liberal spending on reproduction that there’s not enough left for full upkeep of the rest of the body. Aging is, in this interpretation, the sum of deferred maintenance. Australian Antechinus marsupials and members of two related genera offer the most dramatic example of mammals that forgo upkeep for extravagant reproduction. The climate where these marsupials live supplies a surge of insect nourishment for nursing moms only once a year. The males, roughly the size of mice or rats, grow disproportionately large testes and devote all their resources to vying for fatherhood, Diana Fisher of the University of Queensland in Australia and her colleagues reported in 2013. After healthy males reach adulthood, they stop producing new sperm , start mating and, a few weeks later, are all dead. Their immune systems collapse. A once-per-lifetime bout of intense competition leads males to what Fisher calls “suicidal reproduction.” The hydra species in the big lab test pursue a different strategy. Because they can regenerate and reproduce through budding, there is no distinction between reproductive cells and soma. Kirkwood says that the lack of senescence in hydra fits easily with the disposable soma approach. He would bet on their immortality.
He also thinks the ideas proposed by Medawar and Hamilton still have great value, with “central relevance to understanding aging.” To explain all the recently uncovered variety in aging, researchers may simply need more than these theories. They might need to know, for example, the particulars of a species’ home, be it pond, meadow or bug-rich forest.
Understanding these details may or may not allow humankind to do much about the process of aging. But creating better theories might finally reveal how some pale brainless squiggles of pond life may have achieved perpetual youth when humankind, despite all its apparent sophistication, has not.
Rare evidence has emerged that humanborne infectious diseases moved across Asia around 2,000 years ago via the famous Silk Road. Clues to this ancient illness spread come from cloth wrapped around the ends of sticks once used by travelers as the equivalent of toilet paper.
Preserved feces on cloth caps of sticks previously excavated from a latrine at a Silk Road way station in north central China contain microscopic eggs of intestinal worms, including a species found only far to China’s south and east. A traveler or government official must have carried the infectious parasite to the desert-bordering pit stop from at least 1,500 kilometers away, says a team led by archaeologists Hui-Yuan Yeh and Piers Mitchell of the University of Cambridge. The scientists report their findings online July 22 in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. Yeh and Mitchell’s group shows for the first time that an infectious disease “must have been transported in the bodies of actual travelers on the Silk Road,” says linguist and China authority Victor Mair of the University of Pennsylvania.
The Silk Road consisted of a network of thoroughfares connecting eastern China to Central Asia, the Middle East and Europe (SN: 2/27/10, p. 14). Merchants, pilgrims, monks, soldiers and nomads traveled these routes. Historical documents suggest that the Xuanquanzhi relay station, where the cloth-capped latrine sticks were excavated, was built by China’s Han Dynasty 2,127 years ago (in 111 B.C.) and used for nearly 200 years. The location of the sticks in excavated sediment layers indicates they date to that time period. The Silk Road remained a key trade and travel route for roughly another 2,000 years.
Scholars have long suspected that Silk Road travelers spread infectious diseases such as bubonic plague and leprosy. But they have lacked biological evidence of such transmission.
The Xuanquanzhi latrine, located in the town of Dunhuang, dates to the Silk Road’s earliest period of use, Mitchell says. “Even at that early date, travelers were making huge journeys along its length,” he says. (Marco Polo made the best-known Silk Road trek, but in the late 1200s, long after Xuanquanzhi’s heyday.)
Yeh and her colleagues studied a combined fecal sample collected from cloth covers on six latrine sticks, as well as a larger fecal sample from a seventh stick cover. A high-powered microscope revealed eggs of four species of parasitic intestinal worms: whipworm, roundworm, tapeworm and, on the sample from the seventh stick, Chinese liver fluke. The first three types of worms provide insight into hygiene and food practices in ancient China. Today, whipworm and roundworm infect people throughout the world via contamination of food and hands by human feces. In ancient Asia, people probably came into contact with the worms while handling human feces used as a crop fertilizer, the researchers say. Tapeworm found at Xuanquanzhi probably spread throughout the continent when people ate raw or undercooked meat, such as pork or beef, the researchers suspect.
The Chinese liver fluke tells a different story. Causing stomach pain, diarrhea, jaundice and liver cancer, the parasitic flatworm lives in marshy, humid parts of East Asia, including eastern and southern China. These flatworms grow inside water snails before departing to live inside freshwater fish. Humans get infected by eating raw fish.
Xuanquanzhi is situated at least 1,500 kilometers from any region where the Chinese liver fluke exists today, the researchers say. Most cases of Chinese liver fluke infection now occur about 2,000 kilometers south of the Silk Road site, they add.
Han government officials established Xuanquanzhi as a military garrison and way station at what was the starting point of the Silk Road in Han times, says historian and Silk Road specialist Xinru Liu of the College of New Jersey in Ewing. Soldiers from various parts of China traveled to Dunhuang to man the garrison, some possibly carrying Chinese liver fluke, Liu suggests.
