Tianjin University's neuroscience team has made a groundbreaking achievement by launching a high-speed brain-computer interface (BCI) with 216 targets during the 7th World Intelligence Congress 2023.

This cutting-edge device enables users to type at impressive speeds using their thoughts while wearing a compact BCI device and interacting with a virtual keyboard featuring 216 keys. The system also incorporates commonly used syllables in both Chinese and English spelling, offering seamless one-click switching between Chinese and English input methods, Global Times learned from the team.

BCI establishes a "dialogue" between the brain's electrical activity and an external device. It is categorized into invasive and noninvasive types, with the noninvasive variant, based on electroencephalography (EEG) signals, being safer, more convenient, efficient, and holding tremendous potential for commercial and industrial applications, according to the team.

The number of targets and commands is a key indicator of how well BCIs can decode the brain's intentions, Xu Minpeng, a professor from the neuroscience team at Tianjin University, told the Global Times.

Tianjin University's team has gained global prominence by developing the first high-speed BCI with over 200 targets.

At present, the team has built a domestic full-chain noninvasive BCI technology including chip, electrode, algorithm and system. Three core indicators, the EEG recognition accuracy, the number of targets and information transmission rate have reached the highest international level, according to the team.

An extraordinary story has emerged with the recent discovery of a rare fossil dating back approximately 125 million years ago, through joint efforts between Chinese and Canadian researchers. This fossil unveil a remarkable encounter where a large herbivorous dinosaur fell victim to an attack by a carnivorous mammal.

About the size of a large dog, the dinosaur fossil was identified as Psittacosaurus whereas the badger-like mammal fossil is an example of Repenomamus robustus, one of the largest mammals during the Cretaceous - a time when mammals had not yet become the dominant animals on Earth.

The two were found "locked in mortal combat," and "intimately intertwined," said Dr Jordan Mallon, the palaeobiologist with the Canadian Museum of Nature who handled the fossils.

The discovery of these two species Psittacosaurus and Repenomamus robustus was not a "novel finding" in and of itself, but the "predatory behaviour" on display is a rare find, Mallon emphasized.

Wu Xiaochun, a core figure on the project, told the Global Times that the fossils reveal the mammal was not feasting on an already dead dinosaur, but was actively attacking the animal.

"Similar articles that feature a predator mammal have been published before, but only until this one can we show it had its prey alive," said Wu, who is also the head of the Paleobiology Research and Collections Department of the Canadian Museum of Nature.
A typical case of a smaller predator attacking bigger prey, the fossils show, according to Mallon, that they had both lost their lives in the "roily aftermath."

While the fossil had been researched for years since it was first excavated in 2012 in Northeast China's Liaoning Province, the study was only published on Tuesday in Scientific Reports, a scholarly journal. Mallon is the co-author of the paper.

From excavation to publication, Wu played a pivotal role in bringing the researchers from China and Canada together for the project.

In 2012, the fossil was collected in Northeast China's Liaoning Province, more exactly from the Liujitun fossil beds, which are dubbed "China's Dinosaur Pompeii." After excavation, the fossils were in the care of study co-author Dr Han Gang in China, and later Wu helped Han connect with Mallon.

The research projects between China and Canada "will continue in 2023," Wu revealed to the Global Times.

"Joint research projects such as one on a marine reptile in Southwest China's Guizhou Province, is coming along," Wu said.

Some towns in Yancheng, East China's Jiangsu Province, were hit by a tornado on Sunday afternoon. The tornado took two lives and injured 15 people, according to the local authorities. 

The tornado hit Yancheng at around 4:15 pm Sunday, in some towns in Dafeng district, Yancheng, under the influence of strong convective weather. The tornado was identified by experts as EF2 level (medium intensity), China Central Television (CCTV) reported Sunday.

The wind speed of a EF2-level tornado is estimated at 178 to 217 km per hour and usually causes a considerable damage. Under a EF2-level tornado, whole roofs ripped off frame houses, interiors of frame homes damaged, and small, medium, and large trees uprooted. Weak structures such as barns, mobile homes, sheds, and outhouses have been completely destroyed. Cars were lifted off the ground.

According to local authorities, two deaths and 15 injuries were reported from the disaster. All of the injured have been sent to hospital for treatment and none of the injuries are life-threatening. 

According to preliminary verification, 283 agricultural houses and 32 vegetable greenhouses have been damaged. The damage is being further verified, CCTV reported.

All the affected people have now been properly relocated, while post-disaster recovery and reconstruction work is being carried out in an orderly manner, according to CCTV.

The Senj Wind Farm, a project of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), is an example of the mutually beneficial and win-win cooperation between Croatia and China, said Luci Veljacic, manager of the Grupa Company in southern Croatia, in a recent interview with Xinhua.

"For me and my company it was a great honor to be part of the Senj Wind Farm project," Veljacic said, adding that in July 2019, the Grupa Company was offered a contract for supervision and implementation of safety and health protection, fire protection and environmental protection during construction of the Senj Wind Farm project.

Despite numerous unfavourable conditions, including the extremely complex mountainous terrains, the COVID-19 pandemic, snow, strong winds and thunderstorms during the construction process, the Senj Wind Farm, undertaken by China's Norinco International Cooperation Ltd. (Norinco International), was completed on schedule and "without any worker injuries, deaths or incidents," Veljacic noted.

"During the construction, all legal regulations of Croatia and the European Union (EU) and all safety measures were observed to the maximum," Veljacic said.

The Grupa Company is one of the more than 70 contractors from across Croatia participating in the construction, and among the daily turnover of about 300 workers during the construction, more than half of them were from Croatia, Veljacic said, adding that most Croatian workers were from the local Lika-Senj County.

Moreover, participation in the project has made many Croatian companies gain extensive professional experience, which will certainly make them more competitive in the EU market, not just in Croatia, Veljacic said.

Veljacic hailed the "exceptional" cooperation with the Chinese side during the construction process.

"We had an exceptional cooperation, both professional and friendly, with all Chinese companies and workers at the Senj Wind Farm project," Veljacic said, noting that in spite of the language barrier, "we successfully communicated, negotiated, solved daily problems and performed work safely."

In addition, "We also found time to socialize during the project, getting to know the cultures of the two countries ... we talked about history, music, education, customs and the like," Veljacic added.

Veljacic was deeply impressed by the hard work and expertise of the Chinese workers during the construction process.

"During this project, Chinese workers performed the most demanding work and showed exceptional expertise, professionalism, endurance and technological progress," she said, adding that she and her company colleagues also received a lot of help from Chinese engineers who "were always ready to help with their professional knowledge and experience."

The Senj Wind Farm, located on the Adriatic coast of western Croatia and inaugurated in December 2021, produces about 530 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) of green electricity each year and reduces Croatia's carbon dioxide emissions by about 460,000 tonnes per year.

In the eyes of Veljacic, the Senj Wind Farm is a project valuable and important not only for the Lika-Senj County but also for the whole Croatia, as it can significantly contribute to the total annual production of electricity from clean and renewable sources, reduce electricity imports and further promote low-carbon development.

"With this project, Norinco International has become one of the largest investors in green energy and the green economy in Croatia ... The example of the Senj Wind Farm project, the joint successful cooperation of Chinese and Croatian workers and companies will certainly be further developed," Veljacic said.

Most people don’t live close to a coral reef. If we want to visit one, we have to travel far, to the tropical waters that are home to these beautiful and diverse ecosystems. But, it turns out, most coral reefs aren’t that far from people. And it’s those really accessible reefs that we should be worrying about, a new study argues.

Eva Maire of the University of Montpellier in France and colleagues started by breaking up all of the world’s coral reefs into 1-kilometer-square cells. They then calculated how much travel time sat between each of those cells and the nearest human settlement, doing their best to account for whether a person would have to use a boat, a road or a meager track to reach the reef.
Fifty-eight percent of the cells are less than 30 minutes from people, the group reports February 15 in Ecology Letters. Most of those reefs can be found in the Caribbean, the Coral Triangle off Southeast Asia, the Western Indian Ocean and around islands in the Pacific. Others, such as those in the Coral Sea or the northwest Hawaiian Islands, are largely inaccessible, requiring 12 hours or more to reach — too far for a quick fishing jaunt.

Being close to people means that a reef and its resources can be more easily accessed and exploited. Proximity to a market — a source of income for fishermen with easy access to a rich catch — may make that even easier. The researchers found that a quarter of the reefs were within four hours of a major market, and nearly a third were more than 12 hours away. And how close a reef sat to a market appears to matter when it comes to the amount of fish swimming on the reef — those that are closer have lower amounts of fish, the team calculated.

Then the group looked at the pattern of protection for reefs. Many reefs are in marine protected areas that have been set up to limit exploitation. But the reefs most likely to be in a protected area are those that are far from people. An isolated coral reef is more than twice as likely to be protected than average.

The pattern is easy to explain. To set up a protected area, a government has to get everyone who is using that swath of ocean — for fishing, recreation, tourism or anything else — on board with the restrictions that will be placed on usage. And it’s a lot easier to do that with remote patches that not many people are using.

The problem with this, Maire and her colleagues note, is that it means that we may be protecting areas of the ocean that don’t really need protection. And it’s possible that the global goal of protecting 10 percent of the ocean by 2020 “can be met without actually reducing human impacts on the seascape,” they write.

There needs to be more work analyzing the pattern of marine protected areas before any such conclusion can be drawn. And there’s also something to be said for protecting coral reefs now, before they’re totally exploited. Corals already face an uphill battle for survival, given the threats of climate change and ocean acidification. Setting some reefs aside before fishermen and others can do damage doesn’t seem like a bad idea.

When your barista says today’s cuppa joe has rich, spicy notes found only in Colombia’s soil or ‘terroir,’ he or she might not be completely full of … beans.

Before going global, the coffee bean plant originated in Ethiopia, while cacao was first cultivated in the Amazon. Both coffee and cacao beans undergo fermentation prior to roasting. Wild yeast and other microbes that live on the bean digest the pulp that coats the beans, altering flavor and color as well. Researchers wondered, are these yeasts a product of the plants’ current geography or their original roots?

So, they bought unroasted coffee and cacao beans from 27 countries, isolated bean yeasts and analyzed the yeasts’ genes. While coffee and cacao yeasts are even more diverse than wine yeasts, strains that came from the same continents and countries had more in common genetically with their immediate neighbors. Still, some cacao strains from South America share genes with European vineyard yeast and North American oak tree yeast. Such hybrids are probably the result of human trade and travel, the team reports March 24 in Current Biology.

Determining the flavor fallout of all this yeast diversity requires further study, but wine yeasts from different locales are linked to specific chemical profiles.

Resistance may soon be futile. With machine implants worthy of a Star Trek villain, a new breed of beetle takes walking instructions from its human overlords.

Hirotaka Sato and his colleagues at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore inserted electrodes into flower beetles (Mecynorrhina torquata) to stimulate specific leg muscle groups. By altering the order of electrical zap sequences, the team was able to control a beetle’s gait. Changing the duration of the electrical signals also altered the insects’ speed and step length, Sato and colleagues report March 30 in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

Scientists have already made cyborg insects that can fly, scuttle, and crawl, but controlling things like speed could allow biobots to do more complex tasks. Cyborg beetles and other insects provide a more energy efficient and easier-to-assemble alternative to plain old robots and double as a means to study insect locomotion, the researchers argue.

Dome effect dōm ih-fekt n.
Airborne black carbon, also called soot, can cause the dome effect by warming the atmosphere’s top layer and blocking sunlight that would otherwise warm the surface air. The reduced temperature difference between the two layers lowers the boundary between them. This effect traps pollution around major cities, worsening air quality, new research suggests.

Researchers observed the dome effect around several of China’s megacities in December 2013. The compressed near-surface layer of the atmosphere led to thick hazes of pollution, the researchers report online March 16 in Geophysical Research Letters. Reducing local black carbon emissions from industry, biofuel burning, diesel vehicles and coal burning would quickly improve air quality around many megacities, the researchers propose.

The sperm whale is one of the odder-looking cetaceans swimming the oceans. Its massive, blocky head is unlike anything sported by other whales. The space above the mouth holds two large, oil-filled organs stacked one on top of the other — the spermaceti organ on top, and another below it called the (we did not make this up) junk. And in the last couple of decades, scientists have determined that the two organs amplify and direct the sonar clicks that the whales use to navigate in the water.

But there have long been suggestions that the massive head could serve another purpose — to ram other whales. The hypothesis dates back to the 19th century, when sperm whales sometimes rammed — and even sank — whaling vessels. “The structure and strength of the whale’s head is admirably designed for this mode of attack,” wrote Owen Chase, first mate of the Essex, which was sank by a whale and inspired the tale of Moby Dick.

Scientists have largely been leery of this hypothesis, though, in part because ramming would risk damage to organs used to generate sound, and because no one had seen a sperm whale ram another. Or at least no one had ever reported such an event in the scientific literature. But a new study, appearing April 5 in PeerJ, shows that Owen and his whaling buddies just may have been right.

Olga Panagiotopoulou of the University of Queensland in Australia and colleagues created computer simulations of a sperm whale’s head and what might happen when the head rammed another object. Partitions of connective tissue inside the junk, they found, appear to reduce the stresses created by impact, “and thus potentially function as a protective mechanism during ramming,” the team writes.

An impact creates tension in the connective tissue that serves as partitions between pockets of oil in the junk. That tension disperses the impact over a greater volume of the head, protecting both bone and soft tissue from injury. When the connective tissue was removed from the simulations, stresses increased by 45 percent and it became more likely that the skull would crack.

Scars on the heads of sperm whales tend to be around the junk, which may indicate that the whales avoid contact over the spermaceti organ — behind which is the whale’s sound generating system, the researchers note. So if the whales are ramming into one another, they probably can do so without hurting their ability to generate sonar clicks.

But are sperm whales really ramming each other? There is other evidence to suggest they just might be. For one, male sperm whales are as much as three times bigger than females, and such size differences are often found in species in which males compete through fighting. There are those sunken whaling ships, too, which add to the argument that ramming behavior may have been something natural for the whales.
But there’s also a report from a wildlife pilot who, on January 30, 1997, while flying over the Gulf of California, saw two males swim directly toward each other at a speed of about 17 kilometers per hour — and then collide, forehead to forehead.

Just before impact, the whales dove just below the surface of the water. That may explain why no one else has reported such sperm whale contests: If they’re occurring below the water’s surface, a person would have to be directly above the event, or in the water with the whales. And besides, if two 50-ton mammals are about to go head-to-head, it might be best to get out of the way.

Raging wildfires could burn away efforts to reduce Arctic-damaging soot emissions. Soot produced by burning fossil fuels and plants, also called black carbon, can cause respiratory diseases and greenhouse warming, and can accelerate the melting of ice.

Rising temperatures and changing weather patterns will shift where and how fiercely wildfires burn and spew soot, new simulations show. Outside of the tropics, fire seasons will last on average one to three months longer during the 2090s than they do currently, researchers report online April 8 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres. Soot emissions from wildfires will as much as double in regions that border the Arctic and counteract projected reductions in soot from human activities, the researchers predict.
“Humankind would do well to proactively develop adequate land and fire management strategies to have at least some control on future wildfire emissions,” says study coauthor Andreas Veira, an earth system scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg.

Predicting the future of fires is difficult because many factors — from weather to vegetation — influence wildfires. Veira and colleagues strung together three different computer simulations that projected the impact of climate change on wildfires (SN Online: 7/15/15). The first predicted future changes in global vegetation, which fed into the second, a wildfire simulation called SPITFIRE. Finally, the researchers plugged their predicted fires into a climate simulation.

If carbon emissions aren’t cut, overall soot emissions from wildfires will stay fairly steady but shift in location. Outside of the tropics, wildfire soot emissions will increase 49 percent by the end of the century as fire seasons get longer, the researchers predict. In the tropics, changing land usage and fewer human-caused ignitions due to urbanization will help decrease emissions there by 37 percent.

A northward shift in wildfires will push more soot emissions toward the Arctic, the researchers warn. Fallen soot darkens ice and snow, accelerating melting (SN: 10/5/13, p. 26). A 2009 study estimated that soot was responsible for more than a third of Arctic warming between 1976 and 2007. The new simulations show that about 53 percent more soot will fall on the Arctic at the end of the century, even if humans cut their own soot emissions in half.

Many factors that could influence future wildfires remain uncertain, says atmospheric scientist Shane Murphy of the University of Wyoming in Laramie. “We shouldn’t take the absolute numbers to mean too much, just to inform us that there’s the potential for severe consequences.”