Racing back-to-back in an intensive competition schedule often creates extreme fatigue for athletes, but several Chinese track and field stars are shrugging off this issue.

The Chinese national athletics team did not achieve what they were expecting at the Budapest world championships in August, bagging only two bronze medals thanks to two female athletes, Feng Bin in the women's discus throw and Gong Lijiao in the women's shot put.

Feng, who finished in third place at the world championships with a career second-best of 68.20 meters, is among the Chinese athletes taking on high-profile events one after another, from the 2022 World Athletics Championships in August to the Diamond League event over the weekend, followed by the Asian Games to be hosted by China.

The 28-year-old, who clinched her third career best at the Diamond League in Xiamen, East China's Fujian Province, with a sensational last throw of 67.41 meters to defeat Croatia's title contender Sandra Perkovic and newly crowned world champion, US' Laulauga Tausaga, said that the result boosted her confidence of doing better at the upcoming Asian Games. 

"My best form sometimes comes at the late stage during the competition," Feng told reporters after the Diamond League race. "It's an honor to win a title on home soil.

"My goal at the Asian Games is to make some breakthroughs for myself, as I believe everything is possible in athletics," Feng said, before noting that she hopes to set a new personal best at the Asian Games.

Feng's current personal best sits at 69.12 meters, which was set at the 2022 World Athletics Championships where she won the gold medal. 

At the Asian Games in 2018, she won a silver medal with a 64.25-­meter throw. Currently the Asian Games' record sits at 66.18 meters, set by Feng's compatriot Li Yanfeng during the 2010 Asian Games in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province. 

Sprinting hopes

Sprinter Xie Zhenye, who has been pinned as China's hopes in the men's 100-meter sprint after trailblazer Su Bingtian decided to sit out in 2023 due to an injury, finished in eighth place with a time of 10.12 seconds in a 10-man race. 

In a fiercely competitive sprint race, 30-year-old Xie faced several elite sprinters, including 2011 world champion Yohan Blake, 2019 world champion Christian Coleman, 2022 world champion Fred Kerley, and Tokyo Olympics gold medalist Marcell Jacobs. 

Xie however said that he is aiming for the gold medal at the Asian Games in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province.

"I fell behind at the beginning of the race when competing with these elites," Xie told reporters after Coleman won the race in 9.83 seconds. "As we continue to troubleshoot, I still have nearly a month to hone my skills for the Asian Games."

Xie, who is a Zhejiang native, said his goal at the Asian Games is to win the championship at hometown. 

"The Asian Games is vital for me as it is being held in my hometown. Participating in the Diamond League competition could activate my best form for the Asian Games," Xie noted. 

Xia Sining, who became an online sensation, clocked in at 13.19 seconds in the women's 100 meters hurdles. Her season was beleaguered by injuries as they prevented the star athlete to progress. 

"Athletes are no stranger to injuries," 20-year-old Xia told reporters. "But we need to figure out ways of how to alleviate it and avoid injuries in the first place."

When asked about the online attention she receives, she said the only way is to channel pressure into motivation.

"Athletics is not only about winning championships however, but also gives returns to everyone who loves the sport passionately," Xia said. 

"I just train when I need to train as it is a competitive sport, to turn the pressure outside of the field into motivation," said Xia, who is training with Sun Haiping, the man who ensured hurdles star Liu Xiang's rise to fame two decades ago.

However, Xia will not compete for China at the Asian Games, as her current personal best, 13.14 seconds, is shy of leading athletes Wu Yanni and Lin Yuwei's times as they have broken the 13-second barrier. 

Wu skipped Saturday's race and Lin won the event by clocking in at 13.00 seconds. Lin has also eyed the upcoming Asian Games for a better performance.

"I will bring my all effort to the coming Asian Games," Lin said after the race, before paying tribute to teammate Ge Manqi, a 100 meters sprint specialist from Fujian, for soldiering on through the tough times. 

"We have been encouraging each other through the common difficulties we have faced this year. Hopefully we will give a better performance at the Asian Games," Lin said.

More to come

Xiamen is no stranger to athletics as the city's annual marathon race is considered one of the most picturesque races, attracting thousands of participants every year. 

The Diamond League race held in Xiamen on Saturday marked its debut in the coastal city, as Xiamen will play host to the Diamond League for 10 consecutive seasons. 

The debut of the Xiamen Egret Stadium, the venue of the Diamond League and a return of the prestigious athletics event to China after a three-year hiatus, witnessed nearly 30,000 spectators in attendance at the 53,405-seat stadium, according to event organizers. 

US sprinter Kerley was impressed by the design of the stadium and the surrounding view, saying it would be great to see Xiamen hosting an athletics world championship. 

Xiamen will also host the 2027 Asian athletics championships.

The women's discus winner Feng said she is looking forward to seeing more top-tier international athletics events held in China.

"The more top-level international events held in China, the more chances we can compete with other internationally high-level athletes," Feng said. 

"This could facilitate exchanges between Chinese track and field athletes and the international counterparts."

China attaches great importance to promoting gender equality and also has great concern for women's rights in Afghanistan, but it will not threaten to cut off aid to Afghanistan as have many Western countries to exert pressure, which would only exacerbate conflict, said Zhao Haihan, Chargé d'Affaires of the Chinese Embassy in Afghanistan. 

Since the establishment of the Taliban interim government in Afghanistan, a series of policies restricting women's access to education and employment has been implemented, attracting much attention from the international community. 

Zhao said that Chinese government through the embassy in Afghanistan has also made inquiries about this issue to Afghan officials and received a response that Afghanistan is establishing relevant committees to study and tackle issues such as the creation of a women's education curriculum, and they will reinstate access to higher learning once such provisions are in place, after existing internal disagreements are resolved.  

Some Afghan officials reached in the course of finding a resolution said that they do value the protection of women's rights. After the Taliban took over, they immediately banned the prevalent practice of child marriage and fought for equal inheritance rights for women, especially widows. However, these positive changes have been ignored by the international community, especially by the US and other Western countries.

The approach taken by some Western countries, including issuing threats to cut off aid to Afghanistan to pressure to force the Afghan government hand are unlikely to exert effect as the government has a strong sense of sovereignty and consistently opposes foreign interference, said Zhao. 

"We prefer to work in ways that are in line with Chinese traditional culture and diplomatic principles. We will initiate full and patient communication to persuade them to adapt to the development trend of the times and the expectations of the people, and make positive changes themselves. This approach may be more effective," said Zhao. 

It is also important to emphasize that while women's rights are important, they are only part of the many issues in Afghanistan. Moreover, the unfair treatment of Afghanistan, such as the imposition of unjust sanctions and asset freezes, should not be ignored. The international community needs to comprehensively, objectively, and fairly address and resolve issues in Afghanistan, without selective disregard for certain aspects, said Zhao.

China's idea of building a global community of shared future has broken up the zero-sum mentality of certain Western countries, and illuminated a new development path for human society. It is a holistic approach that embodies China's wisdom and vision in global governance, foreign scholars said on Tuesday.

The comment comes after China on Tuesday released a white paper entitled "A Global Community of Shared Future: China's Proposals and Actions." The white paper, which summarizes the meaning of building a global community of shared future, its practices and development, is released at the 10th anniversary of China's proposal about building the global community of a shared future.

"In the past decade, globalization has seen signs of retreating, due to US-inflicted trade war, tech barrier and unilateral sanctioning, which mirrors that the West-led international order is purely based on Western interests. Against this backdrop, the global community has been in urgent need for a new governing system," Wirun Phichaiwongphakdee, director of the Thailand-China Research Center of the Belt and Road Initiative, told the Global Times.

Countries, especially the Global South, wanted to change the current system, which is unfair and disproportionate. As a result, many countries are looking at China's proposal as an engine to boost their own economic recovery by aligning with it, Maya Majueran, director of Bel t&Road Initiative Sri Lanka (BRISL), told the Global Times on Tuesday.

The implementation of the concept of building a global community of shared future has entitled individual country with equal rights to development, and make the developing world able to lift them out of poverty and genuinely participate in global governance, Wirun said.

"It shows what China says that development is an inalienable right of all countries, not a privilege of just a few countries," Majueran said. He exemplified by various China-constructed BRI projects in Sri Lanka, which has led to a huge overhaul of Sri Lankan infrastructure which had dragged down its economic development for generations. BRI also helps Sri Lanka's economic growth, job creation and people's livelihood improvement, according to him.

Wirun took note of a number of BRI projects in Southeast Asia including the China-Thailand High-Speed Railway now being built, which he said demonstrates how China and the ASEAN are working together to build a community of shared future.

According to the white paper, China's vision of a global community of shared future has gained broader support over the past decade. To date, China has constructed community of shared future in different forms with dozens of countries and regions. China-proposed Global Development Initiative and Global Security Initiative have gained public support from more than 100 countries, while the Global Civilization Initiative has also received warm feedback from many countries.

"The concept is a major public good that China has provided to the world. And it is of vital importance that China's wisdom helps build more consensus, maintain peace, and allow more countries to participate in the building of a community of shared future for the mankind," Wirun added. 

When the brain runs low on oxygen, red blood cells sense the deficit and hurl themselves through capillaries to deliver their cargo. That reaction, described online August 4 in Neuron, suggests that red blood cells can both detect and remedy low oxygen.

When researchers stimulated the feet of mice, nerve cells fired off signals in the corresponding part of the brain, depleting that area’s oxygen. Red blood cells in capillaries picked up their speed in response. And in artificial capillaries, the lower the oxygen, the faster the red blood cells moved, Jiandi Wan of the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York and colleagues found. That swiftness was caused by the cells becoming more flexible, a bendiness that let them squeeze through narrow capillaries faster. When researchers stiffened red blood cells with a chemical, the effect of low oxygen on speed disappeared.

The results reinforce the complex and important role of blood in the brain. The findings might ultimately be relevant for disorders in which the link between neural activity and blood flow is damaged, including Alzheimer’s disease, says study coauthor Maiken Nedergaard of the University of Rochester Medical Center.

Metallic odyssey
Scientists are getting closer to turning hydrogen into a solid metal, Emily Conover reported in “Chasing a devious metal” (SN: 8/20/16, p. 18).

“If, as some scientists think, [metallic hydrogen] formed under intense pressure remains solid at room temperature, why don’t we find any on our planet?” asked Michael Brostek. “If formed in a star that subsequently explodes, wouldn’t some make its way to us like other elements we have that were formed within stars?
“We do not believe that conditions exist in stars for solid metallic hydrogen to form,” says Harvard University physicist Isaac Silvera. “The temperatures are too high.” Above a certain temperature, solid metallic hydrogen would convert to a more stable phase. If that transition temperature is low enough, it could explain why we don’t see metallic hydrogen on Earth.

The relationship between metallic hydrogen and everyday hydrogen is similar to the relationship between diamond and graphite, a more stable phase. “If diamond is heated to a few thousand degrees Kelvin, it will convert to graphite,” Silvera says. “I do not recommend experimenting with a valuable stone!”

Pass the salt
In “Quenching society’s thirst” (SN: 8/20/16, p. 22), Thomas Sumner reported on next-generation desalination technologies that use improved and energy-efficient materials. Desalination efforts could help meet the world’s growing need for freshwater.

Reader Sallie Reynolds wondered what happens to the salt left behind.
Most desalination plants end up with briny leftover water that they pump deep underground (away from sources of drinking water) or dilute into a nearby water source, such as the ocean. But some facilities extract salt crystals from the desalination leftovers using evaporation ponds. In solid form, the salt can be stored, transported or dumped at landfills. “This salt could potentially be used for industrial
purposes, such as glassmaking, tanning, metal refining and cement manufacturing,” Sumner says. “The downside of evaporation ponds is that you need a lot of available space and a relatively warm, dry climate.”

Sun spotting
The sun’s magnetic field rises to the surface no faster than about 500 kilometers per hour — the same speed that gas rises and falls within the sun. Moving gas may help guide the field, Christopher Crockett reported in “Gas steers sun’s magnetic fields” (SN: 8/20/16, p. 5).

Mary Jane Knox wondered whether planets, moons and other celestial bodies in the solar system might contribute to the formation of sunspots and other solar activity: “Could they be reflecting the sun’s rays back on it causing hot spots which might allow the eruption of the magnetic fields?”

Planets don’t have anything to do with dark spots on our sun, Crockett says. Sunspots, which are cooler than the surrounding gas, are caused by strong magnetic fields that prevent hot gas from bubbling up to the surface. “Planets were once considered culprits,” he notes. In 1972, aerospace engineer Karl Wood calculated that periodic planetary alignments seemed to correspond to upticks in sunspot activity. But later work showed no link.

For other stars, planets may play a role in boosting solar activity. Some stars host planets roughly the size of Jupiter on very tight orbits. Magnetic fields from a few of these worlds appear to trigger hot spots on their parent stars.

Correction
“Quenching society’s thirst” (SN: 8/20/16, p. 22) states that a floating desalination farm would cover three-tenths of a square kilometer of ocean. In fact, each floating farm would stretch 300 meters long by 100 meters wide, covering only three-hundredths of a square kilo­meter of ocean. This area could provide about a square kilometer’s worth of stacked cultivable surfaces, depending on the crop.

When I first found out my daughter existed, she was about half the size of a mini chocolate chip.

I was six weeks pregnant; she was four weeks into development. (The pregnancy timer officially begins two weeks before conception.) Already, the structures that would become her eyes had formed rudimentary orbs and the four tiny chambers of her heart were taking shape. At this stage of development, the embryo’s heart is huge, like a dumpling squeezed inside the torso.

You can see this early human heart and what happens before and after it develops with a new tool, the 3-D Atlas of Human Embryology, published November 25 in Science. The atlas chronicles the very first stages of human development — when growth is literally exponential and an embryo is building bodily systems that will be in place for a lifetime.

Embryologist Bernadette de Bakker and colleagues at the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam created the atlas to help students, doctors and researchers better understand what goes on in those earliest weeks.

“We might know more about the moon than about our own development,” de Bakker says. Even today, human embryology textbooks often rely on pictures of chick or mouse embryos to describe how humans grow. Any human embryonic data used “is often based on just one or two specimens,” she says.
And that’s a problem because, as de Bakker has discovered, not all human embryos are the same.
Her team photographed nearly 15,000 cross sections of human embryos from the Carnegie Collection, a famous set of historical specimens collected from hysterectomies and abnormal pregnancies or miscarriages. De Bakker and colleagues uploaded the photos into a computer program, and then, using digital pencils and drawing pads, traced and labeled every organ and structure in every photo. It took some 75 people roughly 45,000 hours to complete.
What they (and we) have gained is a remarkable look at humans’ first metaphorical steps — the steady developmental march that, eventually, takes an embryo from a bundle of cells to babyhood.

Here are some landmarks in the first 60 days of development (links are to PDFs; save and open in Adobe Reader X or higher for interactive features):

Days 15-17: The embryo and all the membranes that surround it are no bigger than a speck of dust. The embryo itself is a speck within the speck, and consists of just three layers of cells. From these layers, all organs and body structures will form.

Days 19-21: What a difference a few days make. The embryo is now about the size of a pinhead and has laid the early groundwork for the heart, gut, skin, muscles, skeleton and brain.

Days 21-23: A furrow of tissue that gives rise to the brain and spinal cord has now begun to fold together, forming the neural tube. If the furrow doesn’t close properly, the spinal cord could protrude from the backbone, a birth defect called spina bifida.

Days 28-32: The embryo, now at the half mini-chocolate-chip size, starts to take on a textbook look, fledgling head and lower body curled toward each other — a rough draft of the classic fetal position.

Days 35-38: Short paddlelike arms and the first nubs of legs have emerged. The embryo is now almost the size of a ladybug.

Days 44-48: It’s now a slightly bigger ladybug, and leg bones and hand and finger bones have formed. The liver, suddenly, has ballooned in size, filling much of the lower half of the body cavity.

Days 51-53: Chubby fingers have sprouted from once clublike hands. Toes are not visible yet, but toe bones are in place. The embryo is roughly marble-sized.

Days 56-60: The embryonic brain is a giant bulbous globe now, more than a third of the entire body — which is about the size of a cherry tomato. Skinny arms and legs fold close, and a plate of skull has started to stretch across the back of the head.

Give it another 30 weeks or so and that tiny embryo will grow to the size of a bowling ball. Comparatively, a little chocolate chip doesn’t seem like much. But development-wise, it goes through something pretty huge.

Winter weather brings seismic tremors. A new study reveals how water buildup and runoff throughout the year can increase stress along faults in California, triggering small earthquakes.

“This kind of observation is extremely important to constrain our models of earthquakes,” says Jean-Philippe Avouac, a geologist at Caltech who was not involved in the study. Improved models could ultimately help scientists better forecast seismic activity.

Snow and rain compress mountain ranges in Northern California several millimeters during wet winter months. But with the weight of the water gone during the dry summers, the landscape lifts back up. This seasonal squeeze and release of the terrain puts stress on nearby faults, which can set off more small earthquakes.
Researchers compared observations of ground movement from 661 GPS stations in California with the state’s earthquake record from 2006 to 2014. The landscape’s seasonal, water-induced rise and fall corresponded to periodic increases in small quakes, scientists report in the June 16 Science. Most of the quakes were between magnitude 2 and 3 — so small that they wouldn’t have been widely felt, says study coauthor Christopher Johnson, a seismologist at the University of California, Berkeley.
“It’s not like there’s an earthquake season,” Johnson says. Some faults experience more significant stress increases when the land is compressed, others when the land rebounds, depending on the fault orientation. So different faults exhibit more small earthquakes at different times of year. For instance, faults along the Sierra Nevada’s eastern edge have more tremors in late winter and early spring. But the San Andreas Fault system to the west sees more quakes in late summer and early fall, when water levels have dropped and the land is rebounding.

“We’re not yet at the point where we could start applying this knowledge to the hazard forecast,” Johnson says. But the new findings are helping geologists better understand what forces can trigger rumbles under our feet.

We’re going through a comic book phase at my house. Since lucking into the comics stash at the library, my 4-year-old refuses any other literary offering. Try as I might to rekindle her love of Rosie Revere, my daughter shuns that scrappy little engineer for Superman every single night.

I know that comic fans abound, but I’ll admit that I get a little lost reading the books. The multi-paneled illustrations, the jumpy story lines and the fact that my daughter skips way ahead make it hard for me to engage. And I imagine that for a preliterate preschooler, that confusion is worse.

There’s evidence to this idea (although it won’t help me force my daughter to choose girl-power science lit over Superman). A recent study found that kids better learn new vocabulary from books when there’s just one picture to see at a time.

Psychologist Jessica Horst and colleague Zoe Flack, both of the University of Sussex in England, read stories to 36 3½-year-olds. These were specially designed storybooks, with pages as big as printer paper. And sprinkled into the text and reflected in the illustrations were a few nonsense words: An inverted, orange and yellow slingshot that mixed things, called a tannin, and a metal wheel used like a rolling pin, called a sprock.

The researchers wanted to know under which reading conditions kids would best pick up the meaning of the nonsense words. In some tests, a researcher read the storybook that showed two distinct pictures at a time. In other tests, only one picture was shown at a time. Later, the kids were asked to point to the “sprock,” which was shown in a separate booklet among other unfamiliar objects.

Kids who saw just one picture at a time were more likely to point to the sprock when they saw it again, the researchers found. The results, published June 30 in Infant and Child Development, show how important pictures can be for preliterate kids, says Horst.

“As parents, it’s easy to forget that children do not look at the written text until they themselves are learning to read,” she says. (This study shows how infrequently preschoolers look at the words.) That means that kids might focus on pictures that aren’t relevant to the words they’re hearing, a mismatch that makes it harder for them to absorb new vocabulary.
Does this mean parents ought to trash all books with multiple pictures on a page? Of course not. Horst and Flack found that for such books, gesturing toward the relevant picture got the word-learning rate back up. That means that parents ought to point at Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth or wave at the poor varlet that Shrek steals a lunch from. (Shrek!, the book by William Steig, contains delightful vocabulary lessons for children and adults alike.)

Those simple gestures, Horst says, will help you and your child “literally be on the same page.”