China's golfing prodigy Yin Ruoning has climbed to the top of the leader board as the world No.1 in ladies' professional golf on Sunday after finishing third at the LPGA Queen City Championship.
The 20-year-old became the second Chinese woman to claim the world No.1 ranking after Feng Shanshan, who held on to her top standing from November 2017 to April 2018.
"It means a lot. For me it's like a dream come true," Yin said. "I've got Goosebumps. World No.1 is the next big step on the way to living up to Shanshan's legacy."
Yin, who needed a top-four result to overtake American Lilia Vu for the LPGA top spot at the Queen City Championship, will play on the Chinese team coached by Feng at the Asian Games, which opens on September 23 in Hangzhou, East China's Zhejiang Province.
"I didn't get a lot of chance to chat with Shanshan," Yin said of her predecessor.
"But I'm looking forward to going back to China, playing at the Asian Games, spending more time with her, and learning from her."
Yin has said her greatest wish is to play for China in the Asian Games and Olympic Games.
When talking about her expectations for the upcoming Asian Games, Yin told the Global Times that she and her teammates only have one goal in the competition - to see "China's national flag raised" and hear "the national anthem played."
Speaking on Yin's achievement, Feng said she believes Yin could set more records.
"Behind [her] meteoric rise to the top is a decade of steady work," Feng wrote on Weibo after Yin's rise to world No.1. "The new generation will continue to set more and more records."
Feng retired from pro golfing in August 2022, leaving with a major, 10 LPGA Tour victories and the title of world No.1 ranking under her belt.
Yin won her first major title in June at the Women's PGA Championship, two months after collecting her first LPGA victory at the LA Open.
Yin had not yet started playing golf when Feng won the Women's PGA Championship in 2012 to become the first Chinese player to win a major.
From October 26 to 28, the British Council participated in the 24th China Annual Conference for International Education and Expo (CACIE 2023) as a CACIE Honorary Partner, and hosted two sub-forums on higher education: "From Study to Work: Global Talent Mobility and Development" and "English Teaching and Assessment to Enhance International Understanding Education in Secondary Schools."
The former focused on the current trends and challenges of talent cultivation and mobility in the context of international education, while the latter addressed the hot topic of international understanding education in the K12 sector.
"Through the two forums, we shared our insights on the mobility and development of Chinese students abroad, and introduced our comprehensive assessment solutions and ecosystem value chain from study to work, represented by the British Council's IELTS test. We were also honored to invite our partners, top universities and enterprises from home and abroad, to share their best practices and explore how to better support the lifelong growth and development of international education in China," said You Zhuoran, director of examinations at the British Council China.
Some of the most influential security discussion platforms in the world provide valuable insights into global events. The IISS Shangri-La Dialogue, jointly organized by the UK and Singapore, provides a chance for open debates between the US and China on the Asian agenda. The Munich Security Conference in Germany and the Halifax International Security Forum in Canada are renowned for their roles as weather vane for European security and US foreign policy. The Beijing Xiangshan Forum in China offers a unique opportunity to gain insights into China's security landscape.
The 10th Beijing Xiangshan Forum will be held in Beijing from October 29 to 31. It serves as a platform for the rising China to raise its voice, allowing the outside world to understand its global strategic direction and its strategic mentality.
In 2004, when I established a connection with the People's Liberation Army Academy of Military Science (AMS), I was working as a researcher at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses, focusing on Chinese military research and communication. My research has developed through academic exchanges with AMS. I attended the first Xiangshan Forum in 2006 and have not missed a single forum since then. I have also had the privilege of speaking at panel sessions of the Xiangshan Forum and writing commentaries on forum topics for Chinese and foreign newspapers and magazines. Even during the pandemic, I continued to participate in expert video conferences organized by the Xiangshan Forum. I have closely followed the forum's development and growth.
The Xiangshan Forum has significantly expanded the vision of China's defense diplomacy and has become a prominent symbol of its military diplomacy. The forum covers a wide range of topics, including cutting-edge subjects such as the application of artificial intelligence in defense, as well as addressing hot-spot and sensitive issues. Since the start of the forums, the level of attendees has steadily increased, and the scale of the forum has expanded over time. The organization of the event, including personnel, has also become more refined. Most importantly, the strategic significance of the Xiangshan Forum is increasingly prominent. China's willingness to contribute to regional peace and security is continuously transmitting positive influence to the world.
The development of the Xiangshan Forum can be divided into three stages. The first stage, from 2006 to 2014, involved biennial dual-track expert-oriented conferences. The second stage, from 2015 to 2022, the forum was held annually and transformed to an annual "1.5-track" semi-public conference, starting from the sixth forum. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, several meetings were held virtually. Now, with the upcoming 10th forum in 2023, it is time to enter the third stage, establish a new position and explore new roles.
For the future development of the Xiangshan Forum, I would like to propose the following.
On a macro level, I hope that the forum can serve not only as a platform for dialogue and debate but also as a hub for value exchange. The Xiangshan Forum has now become the highest-level and largest-scale "1.5 track" security dialogue hosted by China, which also means that it has become a touchstone for the world to understand the breadth and depth of China's influence. Therefore, the Xiangshan Forum should provide opinions and solutions on regional hotspots and other issues through its own discourse, and contribute to the realization of a secure world. Additionally, by proactively discussing forward-looking topics, the Beijing Xiangshan Forum can foster a virtuous circle of regional security through healthy discourse competition.
In terms of format, special events can be organized to shed light on China's defense, such as introducing China's defense white paper, defense budget as well as the status quo and role of UN peacekeeping operations. Furthermore, more countries that have shown an interest in China's military transparency can be invited and high-level delegations should be encouraged to participate. Lastly, the forum could organize a foreign expert evaluation meeting at the conclusion of the event. Their evaluations and suggestions will enrich the content of future forums.
China is going global, from the economic realm to the security field. This naturally leads to a healthy competition for discourse dominance between major powers. Of course, it has not been smooth sailing for China to promote high-quality discourse competition. The more difficulties it faces, the more it needs a mature dialogue platform. The Beijing Xiangshan Forum can become a platform that utilizes international wisdom and capabilities to propose solutions. We anticipate its greater role in establishing predictable and sustainable trust. For the future development of the Xiangshan Forum, I hope its discourse fragrance remains neither overpowering nor weak, but rather lingers and extends into the distance.
Esports, or electronic sports, made an historic debut as medaled events at the Hangzhou Asian Games, and behind the games is a thriving billion-dollar industry.
As a newcomer to the Asian Games, esports competitions have become a blockbuster. Most of the esports match tickets were sold out instantly, and some people even took part in a ticket lottery to win a chance to watch the games live.
Teams from more than 30 countries and regions in Asia are participating in seven major esports competitions, including five videogames and two mobile games.
Of all the esports events at the Asian Games, League of Legends, run by China's tech giant Tencent, has the biggest crowd. The esports game has developed a sports league system globally, and in China, internet giants such as JD.com and Weibo.com have formed their own teams.
At the 2018 Asian Games in Jakarta, Indonesia, esports first stepped onto the stage as demonstration sports. The heat of the games already surpassed most of the traditional sports, and this year in Hangzhou, we could expect the games to have a World Cup level of attention, especially in the League of Legends event, Liu Dingding, a Beijing-based veteran tech analyst, told the Global Times on Tuesday.
A host of international brands including Mercedes-Benz, Coca-Cola and Puma have realized the commercial value of esports, and they have increased investment in this field and sponsored esports tournaments, including LPL.
China's esports industry is leading the world. In the gaming sector, games such as League of Legends, Genshin Impact and Honor of Kings are growing in both the domestic and overseas markets, bringing billions of profits to fuel the industry, said Liu.
Personal computer manufacturer Lenovo has provided the Asian Games with computers and developed a Lenovo esports operation and maintenance platform to support the event.
As a fledgling sport, esports has surpassed many of its predecessors commercially. In 2022, China's esports industry generated revenues of 144.5 billion yuan ($19.8 billion).
In the first half of 2023, the figure reached 76 billion yuan, with 487 million players and viewers, according to a report by the China Audio-video and Digital Publishing Association.
In the vast desert 45 kilometers east of Cairo, a modern skyscraper is rising from the ground, which is an iconic landmark building in the central business district(CBD) of Egypt's New Administrative Capital (NAC) built with the assistance of China State Construction Engineering Corporation (CSCEC) Egypt. A Global Times reporter visited the new CBD and the tower, which is known as the "tallest building in Africa," and discovered how Chinese contractors helped Egypt build its new landmark building. New landmark in desert
The tower sits at an imposing 385 meters high, 150 meters taller than The Leonardo in South Africa. A reporter from Al Akhbar in Egypt told the Global Times that "the tower is a symbol of the new Egypt… and it's all made possible by our Chinese brothers."
Chang Weicai, general manager of CSCEC Egypt, told the Global Times that the CBD project of Egypt's NAC, signed under the joint witness of the two heads of state on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Egypt, is a model of economic and technological cooperation be-tween the two countries, which successfully synergizes Egypt's Vision 2030 and China Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and will promote the rapid development of Egypt's economy and society."
According to Egyptian media, the country has set high expectations on the construction of the new capital to ease the population pressure on the capital - Cairo, im-prove transport, create jobs, attract foreign investment and enhance the image of the country.
Data shows that the CBD project of the new administrative capital covers a total area of about 600,000 square meters, with a total construction area of about 1.92 million square meters, including 10 high-grade office towers, five luxury residential towers and four large hotels. The main structure of the CBD project has been completed, and it has entered the stage of interior decoration and mechanical and electrical construction.
Green and advanced
The Global Times learnt that the Egyptian government initially considered cooperating with Arab companies with strong financial backing in view of the project's huge demand for funds. But in September 2015, the Egyptian side cancelled the cooperation, because "the project did not make any progress." At this time, Chinese companies entered the Egyptian government's consideration.
According to local media reports, during the construction of the building, the Chinese company has introduced many advanced concepts, such as the underground gar-age designed with electric vehicle charging piles, to create a truly "green intelligent building." According to the project's chief mechanical engineer, in the CBD project, the Chinese company has integrated the concept of sustainable development from the selection of materials to the use of new technologies, which has benefited the Egyptian side.
Based on the design, the roofs of buildings in the CBD of the new administrative capital will be covered with solar panels in order to gradually increase the propor-tion of clean energy applications. In the future, 60 percent of the energy used in the city will come from renewable sources such as solar energy, with sewage utilization rate expected to reach 100 percent.
At the same time, residents will have access to a certain amount of green space, with a landscaping project in the center of the city, which is expected to be twice the size of New York's Central Park.
The Global Times also learnt that the basalt geology of the new administrative capital area is the biggest challenge in construction. Chinese technicians adopted a com-posite steel construction method, and the "iconic tower" sits on a reinforced concrete raft foundation poured on the rocky surface.
"With a total of 4,600 tons of high-strength steel supporting the full weight of the 78-story building, the foundations of this new tower are rock-solid," Egyptian media glowingly reported.
Win-win cooperation
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi once said that the construction of the new administrative capital will be a new point of economic growth, creating a large number of jobs, and all-round lifting and boosting the development of the Egyptian economy.
According to Chang, CSCEC Egypt has always adhered to the strategy of localized development, pursuing mutual benefits and win-win cooperation with local companies in Egypt, and committed to deepening the traditional friendship between China and Egypt.
In terms of cooperation, CSCEC Egypt and the Egyptian government have jointly built a platform for joint discussion, joint construction and resource sharing. This project is led by CSCEC, with the participation of hundreds of local companies, including material suppliers, equipment suppliers and construction companies, which truly achieved the sharing of opportunities and win-win cooperation, Chang said.
According to Egyptian media, the CBD project constructed by CSCEC has made maximum use of local resources during the construction process, cooperated with more than 300 local enterprises, and directly or indirectly helped nearly 30,000 laborers to be employed. And the CSCEC has actively shared its mature technology, and drove the upgrading of the local industrial structure.
In January 2020, a "Luban Workshop" was established as part of the new CBD project. It is a public educational institution specialized in training Egyptian employees in construction skills.
Chang said that the inauguration of "Luban Workshop" marks a new chapter in the development of localization of CSCEC Egypt. "The workshop will help the development of Egypt's construction industry through the training of local staff and the better use of Chinese technology."
The "Luban Workshop" offers both practical training and theory, which can meet the needs of internship teaching, skills training and pre-employment training. The first training terms offer 12 courses in three major disciplines: civil construction, installation and decoration.
Egyptian media said the Chinese company has cultivated a large number of professional and technical talents for Egypt by not only "giving people fish" but also "teaching people to fish."
An Egyptian engineer told the Global Times that from his Chinese teachers, he learned many professional skills that he had never used in Egypt before, such as ultra-highrise pumped concrete, movable jib tower cranes, and steel structure welding.
The Culture and Tourism Department of Northwest China's Qinghai Province issued an announcement on Monday, strictly prohibiting tourists from entering unmanned scenic areas for activities such as exploration and tourism, adding that the full cost of rescue operations will be borne entirely by the involved individuals and groups as the rescue work is extremely challenging, in the event of getting stranded.
With the increasing popularity and fervor of self-driving tours and adventure sports in recent years, a growing number of tourists and adventurers are opting to venture into uninhabited areas. Consequently, a series of incidents involving missing people and fatalities have unfolded in tandem.
Located within the heart of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, Qinghai Province is situated in a cold and high-altitude region. In certain areas, communication signals can be weak or nonexistent. The region features numerous "dangerous zones" and "uninhabited areas," with complex terrain and environmental conditions.
The announcement issued by local authorities highlighted that individuals venturing into uninhabited, unreleased, and undeveloped scenic areas, whether on foot or by vehicle, will face unpredictable risks. Travelers might encounter life-threatening situations such as dehydration, oxygen deficiency, getting lost, vehicle breakdowns, and communication loss at any time.
The latest case is that one of the vehicles carrying four people on a driving holiday has gone missing while crossing the Xinjiang Lop Nur Wild Camel National Nature Reserve without authorization, resulting in four deaths, according to media reports and local police from Ruoqiang County in Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region on July 28.
Following extensive search and rescue operations, the missing vehicle was located, with four individuals found dead. The rest of the convoy members have safely returned to Dunhuang in neighboring Gansu Province.
Industry experts said on Saturday that entering the Lop Nur in summer is very risky, as surface temperatures in the area would reach as high as 70 C. Vehicle breakdowns, communication malfunctions, and the lack of adequate logistical support can all lead to adventurers being unable to safely exit unpopulated areas.
The local government emphasized in the statement that tourists should further enhance their self-protection awareness. They should refrain from leaving designated roads and venturing deep into dangerous areas such as uninhabited, unopened, and undeveloped scenic spots for adventure, tourism, and crossings.
Furthermore, the statement particularly underscores that without proper authorization or reporting to relevant authorities, no individual or organization shall organize tourist groups under the pretext of exploration, crossing, or scientific research to venture deep into natural conservation areas. In the event of getting stranded, the full cost of rescue operations will be borne entirely by the involved individuals and groups.
Travelers should carefully assess their routes, and pay attention to weather forecasts, geological hazards, and traffic conditions while also maintaining ample reserves of supplies and ensuring vehicle maintenance, which is essential to ensure the safety of the journey, said the statement.
A small device with a heart of crystal can eavesdrop on muscles and nerves, scientists report August 3 in Neuron. Called neural dust, the device is wireless and needs no batteries, appealing attributes for scientists seeking better ways to monitor and influence the body and brain.
“It’s certainly promising,” says electrical engineer Khalil Najafi of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “They have a system that operates, and operates well.”
Michel Maharbiz of the University of California, Berkeley and colleagues presented their neural dust idea in 2013. But the paper in Neuron represents the first time the system has been used in animals. Neural dust detected activity when researchers artificially stimulated rats’ sciatic nerves and muscles. Unlike other devices that rely on electromagnetic waves, neural dust is powered by ultrasound. When hit with ultrasound generated by a source outside the body, a specialized crystal begins to vibrate. This mechanical motion powers the system, allowing electrodes to pick up electrical activity. This activity can then change ultrasound signals that travel back to the source, offering a readout in a way that’s similar to a sonar measurement.
Neural dust devices may help scientists avoid some of the problems with current implants, such as a limited life span. Implantable devices can falter in the brain’s hostile environment. “It’s like throwing a piece of electronics in the ocean and wanting it to run for 20 years,” Maharbiz says. “Eventually things start to degrade and break down.” But having a simple, small device may increase the life span of such implants — although Maharbiz and colleagues don’t yet know how long their system could last.
What’s more, the brain can mount a defense against the foreign object, which can result in thick tissue surrounding the implant. Smaller systems damage the brain less. At over 2 millimeters long and just under 1 millimeter wide, a particle of the neural dust described in the paper is larger than most actual specks of dust. But the system is still shrinking. “There’s a lot of room here to just really push it, and that’s what excites us,” Maharbiz says. “You can keep getting smaller and smaller and smaller.”
Neural dust could ultimately be used to detect different sorts of data in the body, not just electrical activity, Maharbiz says. The device could be tweaked to sense temperature, pressure, oxygen or pH.
Najafi cautions that it remains to be seen whether the system will prove useful for listening to nerve cell behavior inside the brain. The system would need to include many different pieces of neural dust, and it’s not clear how effective that would be. “It’s a lot harder than the notion of dust implies,” he says.
A star that mysteriously disappeared might be the first confirmed case of a failed supernova, a star that tried to explode but couldn’t finish the job. A newborn black hole appears to have been left behind to snack on the star’s remains.
In 2009, a star in the galaxy NGC 6946 flared up over several months to become over 1 million times as bright as the sun. Then, it seemed to vanish. While the star could just be hiding behind a wall of dust, new observations with the Hubble Space Telescope, reported online September 6 at arXiv.org, strongly suggest that the star did not survive. A faint trickle of infrared light, however, emanates from where the star used to be. The remnant glow probably comes from debris falling onto a black hole that formed when the star died, write Caltech astronomer Scott Adams and colleagues. Black holes are typically thought to form in the aftermath of a supernova, the explosive death of a massive star. But multiple lines of evidence have recently hinted that not all heavyweights go out with a bang. Some stars might skip the supernova and collapse into a black hole. Until now, though, evidence that this happens has been either spotty or indirect.
“This is the first really solid observational evidence for a failed supernova,” says Elizabeth Lovegrove, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “Some supernovas really do fail and this is what they look like.”
This attempt at a supernova, first observed with the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona, occurred about 19 million light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. Only one other known star — a yellow supergiant that faded away in 2010 — is suspected to be a failed supernova, though there’s not enough data to say for certain.
When a star at least eight times as heavy as the sun runs out of thermonuclear fuel, it can no longer support its own weight. Gas crashes down on the star’s core, bounces and sends a shock wave racing back toward the surface that tears the star apart. Some stars might be so massive that the shock wave doesn’t have enough oomph to push against the onrush of collapsing star stuff. The shock fizzles, the supernova fails and the core gathers enough mass to collapse into a black hole, possibly taking the rest of the star down with it.
If the dying star is a red supergiant — a ruddy orb that can be over 1,000 times as wide as the sun — it might give a signal before vanishing. As the core collapses, it releases an enormous amount of gravitational energy. A second shock wave ripples up through the star — not powerful enough for an explosion, but enough to burp off the loosely held outer layers of the supergiant and expose the feeding black hole. That’s exactly what Adams and colleagues think they saw. Hubble images from before 2009 reveal a star about 25 to 30 times as massive as the sun sitting where the flash of light came from. The star doesn’t show up in images taken since the eruption. Neither the brightness of the flash, the rate at which the brightness evolved nor the amount of light coming from there now fully matches other types of stellar incidents, such as a collision between a pair of stars or the violent outbursts that accompany some aging supermassive stars.
If the star did give birth to a black hole, X-rays may be radiating from debris spiraling down its gravitational throat. Adams and collaborators are waiting on observations from the space-based Chandra X-ray Observatory to check that idea. They also continue to monitor what’s left of the star. The star might still be there, hiding within a shell of dust expelled during the 2009 eruption. If that’s the case, it should become visible again in the coming years as the cloak dissipates.
A satellite of Saturn joins the club of moons with possible oceans. A subsurface sea of water might hide beneath the icy crust of Dione, one of Saturn’s moons, researchers report online October 9 in Geophysical Research Letters. That puts Dione in good company alongside Enceladus (another moon of Saturn) and several moons of Jupiter, as well as possibly Pluto (SN Online: 9/23/16).
Dione’s ocean is about 100 kilometers below the surface and roughly 65 kilometers deep, Mikael Beuthe, a planetary scientist at the Royal Observatory of Belgium in Brussels, and colleagues report. They inferred the ocean’s presence from measurements of Dione’s gravity made by the Cassini spacecraft.
A child mummy buried in a church crypt in Lithuania could hold the oldest genetic evidence of smallpox.
Traces of the disease-causing variola virus linger in the mummy, which dates to about 1654, evolutionary geneticist Ana Duggan and colleagues report December 8 in Current Biology. Previously, a team of researchers had reported variola DNA in a roughly 300-year-old Siberian mummy.
Some Egyptian mummies, dating back more than 3,000 years, have pockmarks that scientists have interpreted as signs of smallpox, indicating the disease may have tormented humans for millennia. “The definitive feature of smallpox is a pustular rash,” says Duggan of McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. “But it isn’t easy to say whether a rash comes from smallpox or chicken pox or measles.” Duggan’s team analyzed skin from the mummy, believed to be a boy who died between ages 2 and 4. They found DNA from an ancient strain of variola, and compared it with dozens of strains from the 20th century. The ancient and modern strains weren’t all that different, the researchers found. They shared a common ancestor that dates to around the late 16th century, not long before the boy died.
“It’s a little bit curious,” Duggan says. More diversity might be expected of a virus that had been kicking around since ancient Egyptian times. The find could suggest that “the timeline of smallpox existing in humans isn’t that deep at all.”
In fact, historical mortality records suggest that around the late 16th century, smallpox seemed to go “from something that occasionally caused infection to more of an epidemic disease,” Duggan says.
But researchers can’t say for sure when smallpox started affecting humans on a large-scale, she cautions. Whether or not those ancient Egyptian mummies had smallpox is still an open question, she says. “We haven’t closed it.”
