China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has released the country's first national standard for blockchain technology, aiming to accelerate development of the emerging industry, according to media reports on Thursday.   

This offers a basic and universal standard to guide the application and industrial development of the country's blockchain technology, and it standardizes the functional architecture and core elements of the blockchain system, according to the MIIT. 

The newly released standard also provides a reference guide for the industry to unify the understanding of the concept of blockchain, build and improve the blockchain system, and choose and use blockchain services. The standard has been applied in more than a hundred blockchain companies.

The move further accelerates the standardization of China's blockchain industry and paves the way for its high-quality development, said an official at the MIIT, according to Xinhua.

The official said that the MIIT will continue to study and formulate standards for blockchain and deepen adoption of the standards so as to continuously improve the services level of the blockchain industry. 

China has been making efforts to boost the development of blockchain technology, which is deemed crucial for the development of the country's digital economy. 

In February, the Ministry of Science and Technology approved the establishment of the National Blockchain Technology Innovation Center in Beijing, which will focus on areas such as basic theory, software and hardware, according to Beijing Daily. The center was launched in Beijing's Zhongguancun area, dubbed "China's silicon valley," on May 10. 

Also, on Sunday at the ZGC Forum, a state-level platform for scientific and technological exchanges and cooperation, the Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Commission issued a white paper on Web 3.0, which covers a wide range of technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence. 

Application of blockchain in China has been rising rapidly in recent years, with the market size rising to 8.46 billion yuan in 2022, according to data provider Statista. 

A Chinese experimental team released a video on social media on Tuesday, saying that they successfully verified the synthesis of LK-99 crystal that can be magnetically levitate for the first time, with larger levitated angle than that of the previous sample obtained by a South Korean team, which is expected to realize the true significance of non-contact superconducting magnetic levitation.

The video was released by a team led by Chang Haixin, a professor at the School of Materials Science and Technology of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, with postdoctoral researcher Wu Hao and doctoral student Yang Li.

However, the video  also stated that they have currently only verified the Meissner effect. Although this crystal exhibits diamagnetism, it is relatively weak and does not possess "zero resistance," and its overall behavior is similar to that of a semiconductor curve. The publisher believes that even if LK-99 has superconducting properties, they are only in trace amounts of superconducting impurities, unable to form a continuous superconducting path.

Previously, a research team from South Korea uploaded two papers on arXiv claiming to have discovered the "world's first room-temperature superconducting material," attracting attention from the globe. It is reported that this material is mainly a modified perovskite crystal structure (referred to as LK-99), a type of lead phosphate with copper doping.

However, the team has faced skepticism due to the insufficient experimental data they have currently provided to prove LK-99 is  a superconductor. Multiple research teams worldwide are attempting to synthesize LK-99 to verify the experimental results at the moment.

After the two papers on LK-99 from South Korean scientists were made public, researchers from the School of Materials Science and Engineering at Beihang University and the Shenyang National Research Center for Materials Science also released their relevant research findings.

Researchers Sun Yan and Liu Peitao from the Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, stated that they primarily conducted theoretical calculations. According to the computational results, there is a possibility of room-temperature superconductivity using  LK-99. The results also provided some explanations from the perspective of energy bands, but this does not serve as definitive proof.

The research team from Beihang University conducted tests on the synthesized LK-99 and found that its room-temperature resistance is not zero, and no magnetic levitation was observed. The paper states that the material exhibits characteristics similar to a semiconductor rather than a superconductor.

Room-temperature superconductivity would enable long-distance lossless power transmission, leading to a new wave of global infrastructure development in the electricity network. Additionally, breakthroughs are expected in areas such as superconducting magnets, superconducting cables, and superconducting maglev trains, according to  media reports.

The breakthrough in room-temperature and atmospheric pressure superconducting materials would undoubtedly bring about revolutionary changes in various fields, including energy, transportation, computing, and medical diagnostics.

South China's Guangdong Province to subsidize 1,000 yuan ($137) to companies that hire young people aged 16 to 24 after January 1, 2023, until December 31, in an effort to encourage the employment of young people, local authorities said in a statement on Wednesday.

Enterprises that recruit unemployed college graduates and registered unemployed youth aged 16-24, sign labor contracts and pay insurance for them will have the chance to receive subsidies, read the statement.

China announced to suspend releasing jobless data for the youth starting from August, as labor market statistics work needs improvement amid economic and social development, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said on Tuesday.

The number of students in China continues to expand. In 2022, the country's population of young people aged between 16 and 24 exceeded 96 million, and over 65 million were students.

Since the main task of young people aged 16 to 24 is mastering knowledge, there are different views on whether students starting to look for jobs before graduation should be included in the labor force survey, said Fu Linghui, spokesperson of the NBS, adding that the country's statistics work and the survey and statistics of labor force need to undergo continuous improvement along with social and economic development.

Besides, China will have more than 11 million university graduates in 2023, most of whom already found jobs before graduation, Fu said citing figures from the education department, noting the rate and number of job settlements among graduates had both seen year-on-year increases.

"19 policy employment campaigns were commenced across China's state-owned enterprises and made significant progress. A series of subsidies targeting social insurance and jobs were granted to private-sector enterprises, which created 670,000 jobs for graduates," said Fu.

In addition to graduates, local authorities in Guangdong also encourage employers to actively set up positions for women with children, providing them with flexible employment options, and said that the government would provide subsidies for such enterprises.

At the same time, many places in the country, including Guangdong, are also actively supporting the development of small and micro enterprises. Guangdong said in the statement that it would encourage financial institutions to increase lending and simplify procedures for promising small and micro businesses.

According to the data from the Guangdong Provincial Taxation Bureau of the State Administration of Taxation, in the first half of 2023, Guangdong added 66.8 billion yuan in tax reduction and fee reduction and tax refund delay, of which 43.3 billion yuan was set aside for tax refund by two batches of continuous optimization and innovation preferential tax policies.

Because it plays an important role in developing the economy, expanding employment, invigorating the market, and improving people's livelihood, as the main beneficiaries of preferential tax and fee policies, micro, small and medium-sized enterprises have benefited the most, with an additional tax reduction and fee reduction and tax refund delay of 45 billion yuan, accounting for 67.37 percent.

China's urban surveyed unemployment rate stood at 5.3 percent in July, up 0.1 percentage points from June, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said on Tuesday, adding that the general employment situation is stable.

Fu said unemployment issues related to university graduates will be rectified as more support measures take effect gradually, and pledged that the NBS will carry out an in-depth study and further improve labor surveys to better reflect the country's employment situation.

Private Chinese aerospace firm Galactic Energy launched its eighth Ceres 1 rocket on Friday, the latest effort by a private Chinese firm to expand its capabilities in rocket research and development (R&D) and launches.

It was the third launch within 35 days by Galactic Energy and the eighth successful flight for the rocket model.

The launch successfully sent the Jilin-1 Kuanfu 02A satellite, self-developed by Chang Guang Satellite Technology Corp, to its preset orbit.

Following the launch, it will further accelerate the networking process of the Jilin-1 satellite constellation, and expand the large-scale, high-resolution remote sensing information resources of Jilin-1, which can provide richer remote sensing data and product services for land and resources censuses, smart city, agriculture and forestry development and other fields.

Jilin-1 is China's first self-developed commercial remote sensing satellite system. The satellites are operated by Chang Guang Satellite Technology Corp based in Northeast China's Jilin Province, after which the satellite is named.

So far, the Ceres 1 rocket has served 15 commercial satellite clients, sending 29 satellites into orbit that offer support for Earth observation, meteorological monitoring, popular science education and others, according to a statement the company sent to the Global Times.

Having kicked off its high-density delivery and launch cycle for the second half of the year, Galactic Energy aims to complete one land-based launch and one sea-based launch in the near future, a PR representative from the firm told the Global Times.

A high-density launch is the path a rocket firm has to take for its products to mature from the lab to large-scale production.

Prior to Friday's launch, the Beijing-based start-up had accomplished seven consecutive launches after making its debut flight in November 2020 from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Northwest China.

Ceres 1 is a four-stage launch vehicle independently designed by Galactic Energy. Solid engines are used in the first, second and third stages, while advanced liquid upper stage is the fourth one.

The company is also conducting R&D into liquid rocket technology.

In June, it announced that the Pallas 1, a larger, reusable liquid-propellant rocket model, had completed the inter-stage separation test, verifying the correctness of the separation scheme.

Private firms, a rising force in propelling China's space industry, are ramping up efforts to foster capabilities to meet market demand. With consecutive successful launches, they are entering a new R&D cycle and accelerating the pace of shaping their commercialization loop, experts said.

"Private Chinese firms, especially those established as the first-generation launch start-ups in 2015, are now in the ascending period," Lan Tianyi, founder of Beijing-based Ultimate Blue Nebula Co, a space industry consultancy, told the Global Times Friday.

They have demonstrated robust innovation capabilities and potential over the past few years, and have become an important force in promoting China's commercial space sector, he noted.

The year 2023 is also anticipated to witness more milestone launch events in the commercial space sector compared with the past few years.

In July, LandSpace, another private rocket start-up, launched the world's first liquid oxygen, liquid methane carrier rocket from Jiuquan, a milestone move that has put China in the front of the global space race for methane-based rockets.

A mite and a virus are in cahoots in an attack on honeybee health.

The parasitic mite Varroa destructor feasts on bees of all ages and reproduces on pupae. As the mite travels through bee colonies, it can spread deformed wing virus, which can cause crippled wings and death in extreme cases. By suppressing a bee’s immunity, the virus may improve a mite’s ability to feed and breed on baby bees, researchers in Italy report March 7 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Mites were more likely to become mothers on Italian honeybee larvae with higher levels of viral infection, the team found. The number of mites that successfully laid eggs soared from 22 percent on bee larvae that developed normally to 40 percent on bees with infections severe enough to cause crippled wings. Still, mite fertility decreased again on bees with very high levels of viral infection. Understanding the complexities of this mite-virus collusion could help explain the factors leading to colony losses and protect honeybees in the future, the researchers say.

Guns, drugs, cars. Sounds like a formula for an action movie, but the list may explain why American men don’t live as long as men in other high-income countries.

In the United States, average life expectancy among men is 76.4 years — about two years shorter than men who live in Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom and nine other countries. Deaths due to injuries are the reason for much of the gap, researchers report in the Feb. 9 JAMA.

An analysis of U.S. and World Health Organization data revealed that deaths from injuries due to firearms, drug poisonings and auto crashes account for 48 percent of the difference in men’s life expectancies. These causes of death are less of a problem for American women, the researchers found.

In the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, an overzealous set of proteins and cells begins to chew away at the brain’s nerve cell connections, a study in mice suggests.

That finding, described March 31 in Science, adds to a growing body of research that implicates excessive synaptic pruning, a process that shapes the young brain by culling unused connections, with disorders later in life. The new work pins the loss of nerve cell–connecting synapses on particular immune system molecules and a notorious Alzheimer’s-linked protein.
By uniting these multiple strands of evidence, the study may help explain the earliest steps in Alzheimer’s march of neural destruction. “No one has put it together in quite this way,” says neuropathologist John Trojanowski. If the same process happens in humans, the new results may point to ways to slow or stop Alzheimer’s, says Trojanowski, of the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school.

A curious observation led to this new view of neural whittling. A protein called C1q was packed around synapses in the brains of young mice genetically engineered to show signs of Alzheimer’s. And C1q was most abundant in brain areas known to suffer synapse losses as Alzheimer’s takes hold.

C1q is a member of the complement cascade, a group of immune system proteins that calls in microglia cells to gobble up synapses or cells. This pruning is essential as the brain develops. But these neural gardeners seem to spring back into action in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, neuroscientist Beth Stevens of Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard University and colleagues found. And that reactivation seems to be helped along by the Alzheimer’s-related protein amyloid-beta.

In the brains of mice that weren’t genetically engineered, injections of oligomeric A-beta, the form thought to be the most dangerous, caused C1q levels to rise. Along with this increase, synapses got destroyed, the team found. But A-beta injections didn’t harm synapses in mice lacking C1q, showing that C1q and A-beta are both needed for excessive pruning. How the two proteins exactly work together isn’t clear, Stevens says, but “they are definitely there at the right time and the right place.”

Complement proteins and microglia are known to be active in late-stage Alzheimer’s, when the inflamed brain is packed with sticky gobs of A-beta. But the new results suggest that the synapse-pruning pathway is active much earlier in the disease process, long before A-beta plaques form. “The story is extremely compelling and tight in Alzheimer’s mouse models,” says neurologist Scott Small of Columbia University.
There are reasons to think that a similar process happens in people. Autopsy studies by neurobiologist Stephen Scheff of the University of Kentucky in Lexington and colleagues, for instance, have turned up fewer synapses in the brains of people with mild cognitive impairment — thought to be an early stage of Alzheimer’s. The cause of that synapse loss could certainly be explained by changes in complement proteins or microglia, Scheff says.

Any therapy that would target this pruning process would first depend on identifying people at risk. And so far, there are no good tests to spot excessive oligomeric A-beta in the brain, says neurologist Sam Gandy of Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City. “Oligomers are invisible,” he says.

But if screening methods are developed, then the prospect of stopping Alzheimer’s by stopping synapse loss is appealing, Small says. A drug that could prevent C1q or its conspirators from targeting synapses for destruction might halt the damage, for instance. “It’s easier to cure a sick cell than a dead cell,” he says.

Overactive synaptic pruning may be behind other brain disorders, Stevens suspects. She and her colleagues recently implicated a different complement cascade protein in schizophrenia (SN: 2/20/16, p. 7). “This may be a pathway that is dysregulated and playing a role in synapse loss in a host of neurological diseases, not just one,” she says. Stevens and several coauthors are involved with a company that is developing a drug to block C1q.

The humble tumbleweed — that icon of the American West, blowing across the dusty, dry landscape of every old Western movie — is an immigrant.

And it isn’t a single species, but several. The first known tumbleweed species to arrive in the United States, Salsola tragus, or Russian thistle, is thought to have hitched a ride in a package of flax seed that some Russian immigrants brought with them to South Dakota in 1873. Over the years, other tumbleweed species arrived, including S. australis, which is thought to be a native of Australia or South Africa, though their paths into the country are less well known.

The species all look pretty similar, though despite the name, they don’t all tumble. They are all weeds, and ones that can pose a fire hazard during drought — a flaming ball of dry plant material that can be blown from place to place. It’s such a serious problem that scientists have even suggested importing fungi from Russia to control the plants.

So scientists have incentive to keep track of the tumbleweed invasion. In 2002, researchers reported that there was a new tumbleweed on the scene in California, S. ryanii. The new species was truly new; it combined the 36 chromosomes of S. tragus with the 18 chromosomes of S. australis to form a hybrid species with 54 chromosomes. S. ryanii was an intermediate of its two parents, with traits like fruit size and tumbling behavior falling square in the middle of the two others. And in 2008, scientists predicted that this made it likely that S. ryanii wouldn’t be as much of a problem as its parent species because it wouldn’t be as well adapted to the landscape.

It appears that isn’t the case. Shana Welles, now at the University of Arizona, and Norman Ellstrand of the University of California, Riverside surveyed tumbleweeds at 53 sites across California. In 2002, S. ryanii had been found in just two places in the San Joaquin Valley, but in 2012, the researchers found the plant in nine. In addition, the species also showed up at six other sites, including in coastal areas near San Francisco and Ventura. Clearly, the weed is spreading, Welles and Ellstrand report March 29 in the American Journal of Botany.

“It seems likely that the range of S. ryanii will continue to expand and [the species] is likely to become an important invasive species,” the team writes. It’s now another lookalike invader that can cause problems in the drought-prone West.

It’s even possible that S. ryanii could become an invasive species in other countries, the scientists say, should its seeds find a way to hitchhike across international borders, just like its great-great-great-great-great-grandparents did.

As Earth whips around the sun, it casts a shadow into the galaxy. If that shadow passes over cosmic neighbors that host reasonably intelligent aliens, they would see Earth the same way NASA’s Kepler space telescope sees some of them: as a periodic dip in the light from our sun. If we want to listen for alien radio broadcasts, those are the parts of the sky we should tune into, argue astronomers René Heller of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany, and Ralph Pudritz of McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada.

Within 3,500 light-years of Earth, there are 82 known stars that might host curious extraterrestrials who could detect Earth’s shadow, the researchers report in the April Astrobiology. The stars, roughly similar to or a bit cooler than the sun, encircle the solar system in nearly the same plane as Earth’s orbit — a narrow band that’s home to the 12 zodiac constellations. And these are just the stars that astronomers know about. Heller and Pudritz calculate that there could be 300,000 stars hosting 30,000 rocky habitable worlds in this sliver of the galaxy.

Since there’s a chance that the inhabitants of those worlds know about us, they might already be trying to get in touch, the researchers suggest. Even if we have no interest in an interstellar palaver, they say, we can’t hide from aliens that might see Earth silhouetted against the sun.

Where it rains, it rumbles. Rainwater and snowmelt help fuel intense earthquakes along a New Zealand tectonic fault, new research suggests.

Tracing the source of water flowing through New Zealand’s Alpine Fault shows that more than 99 percent of it originated from precipitation, researchers report April 19 in Earth and Planetary Science Letters. Scientists knew that underground fluids help trigger quakes, but the origins of these fluids have been uncertain. In this case, the nearby Southern Alps concentrate rainfall and meltwater on top of the Alpine Fault while the fault itself serves as an impermeable dam that traps the water.
The fault “essentially [is] promoting its own large fluid pressures that can lead to earthquakes,” says study coauthor Catriona Menzies, a geologist at the University of Southampton in England. Identifying the fluid source will help scientists better predict the fault’s seismic cycle, she says.

New Zealand sits on the boundary where the Australian and Pacific tectonic plates collide. This collision generates a powerful earthquake along the Alpine Fault around once every 330 years, with the most recent temblor in 1717; it also gradually formed the Southern Alps as the two plates scrunched upward. Moist air condenses on its way up and over the mountains, causing torrential rainfall that typically exceeds 10 meters annually. Menzies and colleagues wondered how much rainwater makes its way to the fault. Fluids within a fault help induce quakes by altering the strength of rock and by counteracting the forces that hold two sides of a fault together (SN: 7/11/15, p. 10).
Water divulges its origins in several ways. The researchers looked at water-deposited minerals in rocks, the relative abundance of helium in nearby hot springs and the various oxygen and hydrogen isotopes that made up the water — all fingerprints of the water’s source. Even though only about 0.02 to 0.05 percent of rainwater makes it to the fault’s depth, the work revealed that more water came from precipitation than from all other sources, such as water released from surrounding rocks and the underlying mantle. The 3-kilometer-tall Southern Alps may even serve as a water tower that boosts water pressure by heightening the stack of groundwater that sits on top of the fault.

While local geography makes the Alpine Fault unique, the new work provides a template for studying fluids in other earthquake-prone areas such as the recently active Japanese fault, says Patrick Fulton, a geophysicist at Texas A&M University in College Station.