While terrorist attacks and violence linked to racial division continue to increase in Europe and the US, Chinese experts warned on Tuesday that the Israel-Palestine conflict has brought to light the deep-rooted divisions within Western societies, as well as the contradictions of ethnic antagonism, and the Western countries should reflect on this, rather than evade the problem.

Two Swedish nationals were shot to death and a third one was wounded in central Brussels on Monday night, and a man who identified himself as a member of the Islamic State claimed responsibility in a video posted online, Reuters reported.

The suspected assailant fled the scene after the shooting spree as a soccer match between Belgium and Sweden was about to start, prompting Belgium to raise its terror alert to the highest level. Hours later on Tuesday, Belgian police said that the suspected gunman was shot dead by police in a cafe, Reuters reported.

The shooting comes at a time of heightened security concerns in some European countries linked to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

A man of Chechen origin stabbed to death a teacher and severely wounded two other adults on Friday at a school in northeastern France, an act that President Emmanuel Macron denounced as "Islamist terror," said AFP.

What's more, an Illinois landlord accused of fatally stabbing a 6-year-old Muslim boy and seriously wounding his mother was charged with a hate crime after police and relatives said he singled out the victims because of their faith and as a response to the war between Israel and Hamas. 

"Detectives were able to determine that both victims in this brutal attack were targeted by the suspect due to them being Muslim and the on-going Middle Eastern conflict involving Hamas and the Israelis," the sheriff's statement said.

Experts believed that the Israel-Palestine conflict is the trigger, but the deep divisions in the societies of the US and Europe are the source of increased ethnic hatred. Such a division will inevitably affect the strategic coordination and strategic autonomy between the US and Europe.

In recent days, police in US cities and federal authorities have been on high alert for violence driven by anti-semitic or Islamophobic sentiments. FBI officials, along with Jewish and Muslim groups, have reported an increase of hateful and threatening rhetoric. 

Because Western societies have maintained an attitude of taking sides concerning the issue of the Israel-Palestine conflict, the existing disputes between the two countries have intensified, Li Haidong, a professor at the China Foreign Affairs University, told the Global Times on Tuesday. 

The US and Europe are most affected because the problem was actually created by the two, Li noted. "The US and Europe need to face up to and resolve their own divisions first, rather than evading problems and stirring up conflict elsewhere."

The 8th Contemporary Mexican Film Cycle will kick off in several Chinese cities, brining filmgoers and Mexican cultural enthusiasts in China six classic Mexican movies, the Global Times learned from Mexican Consulate General in Shanghai.

Started in 2013, the film cycle China is held to celebrate Día del Cine Mexicano, or the National Mexican Cinema Day, which falls on August 15 each year.

The film cycle presents audiences in China with the latest Mexican film productions by some of Mexico's most outstanding directors. They are committed to exploring various forms of film expression, showcasing to the world the colorful and infinite possibilities of today's Mexican film industry, said the Mexican Consulate General in Shanghai

The film cycle will be held in Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou. In Shanghai, the first film - Alamar (To the Sea) directed by Pedro González-Rubio - will be screened on Saturday afternoon at The Miguel de Cervantes Library.

Alamar was shot at Banco Chinchorro, which was listed as a biosphere reserve by the UNESCO in 2004. It tells the story of a five-year-old Italian-Mexican boy reuniting and going sea fishing with his fisherman father during holidays.

The other five movies scheduled to be screened are: Noche de fuego (Prayers for the Stolen), El camino de Xico (Xico's Journey), Güeros, Post Tenebras Lux (Light after Darkness), and A morir a los desiertos (To Die in the Desert).

El camino de Xico will be screened with a Chinese dubbing track. The remaining films will be screened in Spanish with Chinese subtitles.

The film cycle is jointly being held by the representative office of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in China, the Mexican Embassy in China, as well as the Mexican consulates general in Shanghai and Guangzhou.

The public can register to the screenings in Shanghai through the WeChat account of the Miguel de Cervantes Library

A giant engraved "Great Stone" stands at the entrance of the China-Belarus Industrial Park in Minsk, capital of Belarus. Advertisements for "Great Stone" can also be seen on highways linking the city center to the park. The name "Great Stone" was given by Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko to the park as it embodies "the cornerstone of the friendship between the peoples of China and Belarus." Nobody could ever have imagined the forest would one day turn into a shining pearl of the Belt and Road Initiative.
From a "piece of white paper" to "a shining new city," what has made the industrial park what it is today? What difficulties did the park weather to keep thriving amid today's complicated geopolitical atmosphere? Reporters from the Global Times entered the largest foreign investment project in Belarus to find out the secret of its prosperity. 

Miraculous development 

At the entrance of the park, there's a giant display board that says "time is money, efficiency is life" in both Chinese and Russian. In Belarus, local people, amazed by the speed of construction of the industrial park, developed an idiom that says, "You will never step into the same China-Belarus Industrial Park."

The park is located near the center of Belarus and sits on transport links within easy reach of the Moscow-Berlin international highway to Russia and Central Europe. The Belarus government set up a customs office inside of the park, to speed up customs clearance and provide quick service for commerce, bonded warehouse storage and others.

Foundation of the park was laid in 2014. Since the second half of 2015, the China-Belarus Industrial Park has developed rapidly. Developed within the framework of the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the park has witnessed rapid expansion.

In an exclusive interview with the Xinhua News Agency earlier this year,  Lukashenko noted it is the largest project attracting investment in Belarus and a landmark cooperation project within the BRI framework as it was promoted by the two heads of state personally and prized by the two governments.

As of August, a total of 114 enterprises had settled in the China-Belarus Industrial Park, involving various fields such as machinery manufacturing, e-commerce, new materials, traditional Chinese medicine, artificial intelligence and 5G network development. Intended investment exceeds $1.3 billion.

If there's any secret behind the park's rapid development, it is the high-quality coordination between China and Belarus, as well as support from leaders from both countries, head of the park's administration Alexander Yaroshenko told the Global Times. 

Yaroshenko once served as deputy minister of the Ministry of Economy of Belarus and was appointed as head of the park's administration in 2016. 
"When President Lukashenko handed me this job, he told me, 'We have a bunch of deputy ministers, but we have only one China-Belarus Industrial Park, so your job as head of the park's administration is very important.' So you can see how much importance he attached to the industrial park and his high expectations," said Yaroshenko.

Rapid development of the park also mirrored the elevation of bilateral ties. According to statistics, the bilateral trade volume between China and Belarus in 2022 reached $5.08 billion, setting a new record. On a diplomatic level, the two countries established an all-weather comprehensive strategic partnership in 2022.

Special appeal 

Enterprise in the park come from 16 countries. Apart from China and Belarus, there are companies from the US, EU, Switzerland and Singapore, Yaroshenko, standing in front of a world map, introduced to the Global Times reporters. "Our industrial park is very international."

One of Yaroshenko's favorite stories when it comes to attracting investment goes like this. "Six years ago, owners of a US company came to the industrial park by private jet. Said he wanted to see the park with his own eyes. Later he told me he made a huge mistake, for he bought too little land in the park. 'I should have bought land twice as big here!'" 

Apart from the advanced infrastructure, the park's considerate policy services are also what makes it so appealing to companies. The park has a "one-stop" efficient service system for enterprises. All approvals involving enterprises are completed in the park, providing full-process services such as investment negotiation, company registration, project access and land transfer.  

"In the one-stop service hall, companies can complete all procedures within one or two hours. Yet in other places, it may take seven hours to a month," Deputy Director General of the Industrial Park Development Company Ren Fei told the Global Times. The one-stop service hall is a lesson learned from China's Suzhou Industrial Park. Moreover, companies who settle in the China-Belarus Industrial Park can enjoy preferential policies on visas, customs clearance and taxes. 

The Belarusian company Human Craft, which manufactures medical prostheses, settled in the park at the end of 2022. Anton Naczyński, general manager of the company, told the Global Times that the reason the company chose this park is because the park's management helps every company develop and expand into the overseas market. He hopes that within such an environment, his company and Belarus' medical prostheses can reach the world's advanced level.

New Silicon Valley 

However, the park has encountered challenges from COVID-19 and the Russia-Ukraine crisis in recent years. Yet Ren brushed off the impact of those events on its development.

"In 2017, there were 10 companies in the park. Since 2018, the number of companies settled in the park stayed at 18 to 20 annually. Despite the impact of COVID-19, 20 new companies chose our park in 2021, and the number in 2022 was 19," said Ren. He expects a record 23 or 24 new companies will be landing in the park this year. 

The reason for such growth is the park's timely adjusting of measures to weather the impact of geopolitical shock and Western countries' sanctions. Ren said since the Russia-Ukraine crisis, the park has adjusted the source structure for attracting investment. 

"Previously, many enterprises that came here were oriented toward the European and US markets. Now, the focus is mainly on the Eurasian Economic Union market, as well as investments from member countries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization," said Ren. 

Meanwhile, when facing sanctions from the West, several banks in Belarus have also received assistance from the park in accessing the Chinese yuan payment system. This has helped resolve many payment difficulties for enterprises through bilateral currency settlements, said Ren.

He also told the Global Times that they are intensifying efforts to address transportation issues through the China-Europe Railway Express, partially offsetting the impact of disrupted maritime shipping in Belarus following the Russia-Ukraine crisis. 

In the eyes of many, the park is not only an industrial park, it is also an "intelligence new city" that is endowed with a beautiful and pleasant environment.

In the medium to long term, the park aims to attract more than 100,000 industrial population and become an international comprehensive development zone.

Shymanovich Aliaksandr, an employee from the China National Machinery Industry Corporation (Sinomach)'s Belarus branch, told the Global Times that the park is full of happiness because there are many green trees here, and one can breathe the freshest air at any time. The production space, living space, and natural space are also all well integrated.

Alexey Kliuchnikov, chief of the R&D department of YTO Technology, a leading agricultural machinery supplier in China that also opened an office in the industrial park, said that working in the company not only offers a significantly higher income compared to the average level in Minsk, but also provides many opportunities to exchange ideas with Chinese counterparts and learn the latest technologies.

"Our goal is to make this place a 'new Silicon Valley in Central and Eastern Europe,'" Ren said proudly. In his eyes, the park is not just a project, but a manifestation of the passion and ideals of a group of people.

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.

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.

Growth hormone mapped — Discovery of the complete chemical structure of the human growth hormone has been reported…. The discovery marks a major advance toward understanding how the powerful growth-promoting substance works and increases the chances for its eventual synthesis in the laboratory…. Some 5,000 fresh human pituitary glands were required to achieve the results.
— Science News, May 21, 1966

Update
In 1979, researchers produced a synthetic human growth hormone in the lab, using bacteria equipped with human hormone genes. Six years later, the synthetic growth hormone was approved for medical use; distribution of growth hormone collected from human pituitary glands had been halted after infected product was linked to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a fatal brain-wasting disorder. Today, doctors use synthetic growth hormone to treat growth hormone deficiency, which can stunt growth in children. Because synthetic growth hormone can build muscle and trim body fat, it is prohibited as a doping agent by many sports organizations.

Nearly 300 pregnant women in the United States show laboratory evidence of Zika virus infection.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is monitoring 279 pregnant women, including 122 in U.S. territories, the government agency reported at a news conference May 20.

Those numbers are way up compared with previous counts: Last week, the CDC tallied 47 cases in the states and 65 in the territories. The increase reflects a change in reporting, rather than a spike in new cases, said CDC epidemiologist Margaret Honein, who heads the agency’s birth defects branch.

Before today, the CDC report included only pregnant women who had both positive lab test results and either symptoms or pregnancy complications linked to Zika. The new tally includes women without symptoms of infection.

“We’ve learned a lot in the past four months,” Honein said. Scientists have reported that asymptomatic mothers have given birth to Zika-infected babies with microcephaly or other birth defects, she said.

So far, less than a dozen of the 279 U.S. pregnancies have had adverse outcomes, but the agency wouldn’t specify what those outcomes were, or how many women have given birth, miscarried or terminated their pregnancies.

In the United States, Honein said, microcephaly typically affects six per 10,000 infants.

Scientists have found one of the youngest exoplanets ever, huddling close to a star that is just 2 million years old. Located 450 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus, the star is so young that it still has its baby fat — it is surrounded by the disk of gas and dust from which it formed.

The planet, CI Tau b, is hefty for an infant — tipping the scales at 11 times the mass of Jupiter, say astronomer Christopher Johns-Krull of Rice University in Houston and colleagues in a paper posted May 25 on arXiv.org. It’s surprising, the researchers say, that such a large planet could have formed in just 2 million years — peanuts on cosmic timescales.
Such baby-faced exoplanets have been spotted before (SN: 12/26/15, p. 14), but they’ve lingered farther from their stars. This fledgling planet shows that such behemoths can form quickly and snuggle close to their stars. Scientists still don’t know whether star-hugging planets form far away and migrate inwards, or whether they are birthed close to their stars. The new planet could shed light on that process.

The scientists used a variety of optical and infrared telescopes to reveal periodic variations in the frequency of the star’s light, caused by the planet’s gravitational pull. CI Tau b tugs its star back and forth as it swings around in a tight orbit that it completes every nine days, the researchers determined. Hints of the planet showed up in both optical and infrared light, ruling out spurious signals caused by sunspots or other variability within the young and active star.

Editor’s note: Science News astronomy writer Christopher Crockett is a coauthor on the paper, which incorporates work he did as an astronomer at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., prior to joining Science News.

The brains of human ancestors didn’t just grow bigger over evolutionary time. They also amped up their metabolism, demanding more energy for a given volume, a new study suggests.

Those increased energy demands might reflect changes in brain structure and organization as cognitive abilities increased, says physiologist Roger Seymour of the University of Adelaide in Australia, a coauthor of the report, published online August 31 in Royal Society Open Science.

Blood vessels passing through bones leave behind holes in skulls; bigger holes correspond to bigger blood vessels. And since larger vessels carry more blood, scientists can use hole size to estimate blood flow in extinct hominids’ brains. Blood flow in turn indicates how much energy the brain consumed. (In modern humans, the brain eats up 20 to 25 percent of the energy the body generates when at rest.)
Seymour and colleagues focused on the carotid arteries, the vessels that deliver the bulk of the brain’s blood. The team looked at nearly three dozen skulls from 12 hominid species from the last 3 million years, including Australopithecus africanus, Homo neanderthalensis and Homo erectus. In each, the researchers compared the brain’s overall volume with the diameter of the carotid artery’s tiny entrance hole at the base of the skull.
“We expected to find that the rate of blood flow was proportional to the brain size,” Seymour says. “But we found that wasn’t the case.” Instead, bigger brains required more blood flow per unit volume than smaller brains.
The boost in blood flow, and therefore metabolism, suggests two possible conclusions, Seymour says. As hominid brains got bigger, they might have packed in more nerve cells, or their nerve cells might have fired more frequently. Either way, he argues, the increased blood flow suggests greater brainpower, perhaps reflecting reorganization of the brain over the course of evolution.

But not all of the blood coming into the brain through the carotid arteries directly supports mental prowess. “You need more complicated wiring for bigger and more cognitively advanced brains,” says Dean Falk, an evolutionary anthropologist at Florida State University in Tallahassee. “But those brains have more advanced cooling requirements.”

Some of the blood coming in through the carotid arteries absorbs heat generated by the brain’s activity and then drains away, helping to keep the brain cool, Falk says. So while the study is a scientifically rigorous look at metabolism and blood flow toward the brain, she says, a follow-up study is needed to account for the blood moving away from the brain.

Lawrence David’s gut check gets personalA Jim Carrey movie inspired computational biologist Lawrence David to change the course of his research. As a graduate student, David saw Yes Man, a 2008 film in which Carrey’s character is forced to say yes to all propositions.

David thought the movie’s message about opening yourself to new experiences, even uncomfortable ones, might make science more exciting than it already was. “Only good things would happen if I loosened up and said yes to everything,” he says.

The next day, his graduate mentor at MIT, Eric Alm, was talking about the brand-new science of the human microbiome, the collection of bacteria, viruses and other microscopic organisms inhabiting the human body. What someone ought to do, Alm suggested, is sample a person’s feces every day for a year to see whether the microbiome changes. “I had just seen the movie, so I said, ‘Well, I guess I have to say yes now,’ ” David recalls.
David took Alm’s suggestion a step further by chronicling his own microbiome, collecting his feces every day in “plastic hats that look like something the Flying Nun would wear.” He washed his mouth with a chemical solution and spit into a tube to harvest mouth bacteria, popping all the samples into his refrigerator or freezer until he could get them to the lab. He customized an iPhone diary app so he and Alm, who joined the study, could track 349 different health and lifestyle measures, which included the timing and consistency of bowel movements, sleep quality and duration, blood pressure, weight, vitamin use and mood. They noted, in detail, the foods they ate, symptoms of any illnesses and medications used to treat those illnesses. By the end of the year, David had “10,000 measurements of how two people lived their lives.”
David, now 33 and at Duke University, regularly opens himself to new scientific challenges, though they aren’t always quite so personal. Before finishing his degree at MIT, he had already initiated one new field of research and delved into several others outside his expertise.

Awards committees and granting organizations have taken note. David has won the Beckman Young Investigator award and the Searle Scholars award, which support cutting-edge work by young scientists. Fresh out of graduate school, he became a junior fellow at Harvard, where he led his own research.

“He has an ability to see what the problem is and just get it done in the most straightforward way possible,” Alm says.
David spent most of his graduate student years in Alm’s lab writing and running computer code that calculated the ancient birth dates of genes, reproducing the most likely evolutionary histories of gene families and predicting capabilities of ancient microbes. Alone that would have been a nice contribution; many researchers thought untangling those relationships would be too computationally complex, Alm says.

But to get the full picture, David had to expand into other fields, working with geologists and geochemists to determine whether his predictions made sense in light of Earth’s geologic history. In a study that birthed a new field by marrying geochemistry and genetics, he and colleagues discovered that genes encoding oxygen-producing proteins appeared hundreds of thousands of years before oxygen began accumulating in early Earth’s atmosphere (SN Online: 12/21/10). For a study published in Science in 2008, he also delved into ecology, investigating how ocean microbes evolve into separate species without the physical boundaries that would keep them from mixing.

Population flux
The personal microbiome challenge was an unprecedented look at how friendly bacteria change over time and with lifestyle and dietary choices. Long known to play an important role in digestion, the gut microbiome has recently been implicated in health conditions including heart disease, obesity and asthma, and may even influence behavior (SN: 4/2/16, p. 23). Many people have suggested that humans and their microbes are so interdependent, they should be considered composite organisms (SN: 1/11/14, p. 14).

David, Alm and colleagues presented the results of their study in 2014 in Genome Biology. They found that the gut microbiome remains stable for months, but some events, such as travel, illness or changing the fiber content of the diet, can rapidly change the mix of gut microbes. Only a handful of studies have ever been done on this fine of a timescale, Alm says.

A project that would have made others hold their noses “might have been the most enjoyable thing I’ve done in science,” David says. The microbiome analysis relied on computer tools similar to ones he had used as an undergraduate researcher at Columbia University, making it intellectually satisfying.

But the real appeal was how others responded to the work. “People were immediately captivated by the work, and would start to tell me about their own gastrointestinal histories, odd things they had eaten and how that affected the bacteria in their gut,” David says. People sometimes asked his advice on what to eat to keep their gut microbiomes healthy, a question for which he didn’t have a clear answer. “There’s an irony to this,” he says. His voice drops to a whisper as he confesses: “I love junk food…. I shouldn’t be a poster child.”

Hooked on the microbiome, David began studying other people’s bacteria with the help of Peter Turnbaugh, a microbiologist then at Harvard and now at the University of California, San Francisco. By intentionally manipulating people’s diets, the researchers found that it takes only a day for a major dietary change, such as a meat-eater going vegetarian, to shift the composition of gut bacteria. The results, which surprised researchers who had thought such shifts would be more gradual, were reported in Nature in 2013 (SN Online: 12/11/13).

When he arrived at Duke in 2013 to start his own lab, David had a strong track record of developing computational tools to analyze complex datasets, says John Rawls, a microbiome researcher at Duke. But what makes David special isn’t just that he’s a good computer coder. “What sets him apart is his ability to incorporate technology and concepts from engineering into his work,” Rawls says.

Most labs that study the microbiome start with animal studies. But David began with a machine — an artificial gut for growing and manipulating intestinal microbes donated by human volunteers. The contraption consists of multiple growth chambers bristling with plastic tubes. Inside, what David has called “the world’s nastiest slurry” (a fecal sample from a donor) ferments in conditions similar to those in the intestines. One tube feeds into what looks like a dome hair dryer from a beauty salon. That’s a concession to neighboring researchers who complained about the pungent smell.

When graduate student Rachael Bloom joined the lab, David persuaded her to try a completely different way of growing bacteria from feces, designing chips with channels that separate out bacteria into microscopic drops of liquid. In just a few minutes, Bloom can create what are essentially thousands of tiny petri dishes, each with a single bacterium. Neither student nor mentor had any experience with the “microfluidics” technique, but David encouraged Bloom to try, and even be open to failure. “In retrospect, that could be really dangerous,” says Bloom, “but I have learned so much.”

David’s aptitude for engineering shows up at home, too. To keep his two preschool children from getting up too early, David rigged LED lights on a timer. The kids have to wait for the lights to go off before getting out of bed. His wife, a psychiatrist, reinforces the good behavior with a treat.

David says he “tends to be an optimist,” and just assumes his team will find a way over or around any hurdle. “He’s very adventurous. He’s very creative,” says Turnbaugh. “He’s one of the great people in microbiome research who is thinking outside the box and not just following a template.”

David has a simple explanation for why he continues to say yes to projects outside his comfort zone: “I’m easily fascinated.”