Baotou, North China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, which holds over 80 percent of the nation's rare-earth reserves, aims to accelerate rare-earth new material industry and application during 2024. 

According to guidelines issued by the municipal government, Baotou aims to expand the rare-earth industrial scale to 100 billion yuan ($14.08 billion) and establish itself as China's largest rare-earth new material base and the world's leading rare-earth application center, media outlet thepaper.cn reported on Thursday.  

Baotou possesses 83.7 percent of China's rare-earth reserves, accounting for 37.8 percent of the global reserves, according to the report.

According to the guidelines, Baotou will increase the production capacity of rare-earth raw materials, consolidating the city’s position as the world's largest supplier. 

It also emphasizes the need to expand Baotou’s rare-earth magnetic materials industry with increased research and development efforts for high-performance magnetic materials. 

The application of rare earths in various industries should be expanded and deepened, including the development of permanent magnet motors for industrial energy efficient motors, wind power generators, electric motors for new energy vehicles, and specialized motors for robots. 

The city will also step up efforts to accelerate the construction of a rare-earth industry intellectual property operation center and a rare-earth product testing center. The goal is to add 150 new rare-earth patents within the year and lead or participate in the development of three national standards and four industry standards, according to the report, citing the guideline. 

The issuance of the guidelines comes as China’s State Council, the country’s cabinet, in October issued a document to develop Baotou into the largest rare-earth new materials base in China and a globally leading rare-earth application base. 

The document proposed strengthening the development and utilization of strategic resources such as rare earths in North China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. This includes supporting systematic exploration and evaluation, protective development, high-quality utilization, and standardized management of strategic mineral resources in Inner Mongolia.

China has been placing increased importance on the high-quality development of the rare-earth sector.

The State Council stressed at an executive meeting in November that rare earths are strategic mineral resources. It called for enhanced efforts to coordinate the exploration, development, utilization and standardized management of rare earths, to promote the development and application of a new generation of green, efficient mining and related technologies.

Efforts should also be made to crack down on illegal mining and environmental damage, while promoting intelligent and green development of the country's rare earths, according to the meeting.

Editor's Note:

With the onset of the cold winter weather, the "warm economy" in Yiwu is thriving. There has been a significant rise in demand for winter products from both domestic and international buyers, resulting in a surge of orders for gloves, hats, scarves, and other winter accessories. Photos: Li Hao/GT

Thousands of Cambodians on Wednesday evening celebrated the inscription of the country's Koh Ker archaeological site on the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)'s World Heritage List.

Built in the 10th century by Jayavarman IV, the Koh Ker archaeological site was listed as a world heritage site during the 45th session of the World Heritage Committee in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Sunday.

It became Cambodia's fourth tangible cultural property that has been inscribed on the World Heritage List. "This archaeological marvel offers a profound insight into its era's well-organized projects of regional, social, economic, and architectural development, town planning, and rural infrastructure," the UN cultural agency said.

Speaking to the revelers at the event held at the Olympic Stadium in Phnom Penh, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet said it was a new historic event for Cambodia in safeguarding, preserving and developing cultural properties.

Koh Ker had suffered widespread looting during civil conflicts between the 1960s and 1990s, and the Cambodian government has since sought to repatriate stolen antiquities exhibited or sold on the international market.

"As a Cambodian citizen, I'm thrilled to hear that the Koh Ker temple has been included in the world heritage list," Em Sreysros, a 55-year-old reveler, told Xinhua.

She said the inscription truly reflected the government's strong efforts to protect and conserve the country's cultural heritage sites.

"I would like to urge international tourists and overseas Cambodians to come and visit Cambodia, and please come to see our ancient Koh Ker temple," Sreysros said.

Located in Preah Vihear province's Kulen district, roughly 370 km northwest of the capital Phnom Penh, Koh Ker was the capital of the Khmer Empire for a brief period between 928-941 C.E., according to UNESCO.

The 87.8-square-km ancient site boasts several archaeological remains, including unique-in-style temples, sculptures, inscriptions, wall paintings, and impressive Shiva-lingas sanctuaries, as well as civil structures, ponds, dykes, reservoirs, and ancient roads that reflect the influence and grandeur of the Khmer Empire.

To date, four tangible cultural properties in the Southeast Asian country have been placed on the world heritage list. The first three listed properties are the Angkor Archaeological Park inscribed in 1992, the Temple of Preah Vihear in 2008, and the Temple Zone of Sambor Prei Kuk in 2017.

A genetic-engineering tool designed to spread through a population like wildfire — eradicating disease and even whole invasive species — might be more easily thwarted than thought.

Resistance to the tools, called CRISPR gene drives, arose at high rates in experiments with Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies, researchers at Cornell University report July 20 in PLOS Genetics. Rates of resistance varied among strains of fruit flies collected around the world, from a low of about 4 percent in embryos from an Ithaca, N.Y., strain to a high of about 56 percent in Tasmanian fruit fly embryos.
“At these rates, the constructs would not start spreading in the population,” says coauthor Philipp Messer, a population geneticist. “It might require quite a bit more work to get a gene drive that works at all.”

Gene drives are basically genetic copy-and-paste machines. These self-perpetuating machines are inherited by more than 50 percent of offspring of an individual carrying a gene drive. Working perfectly, they could transmit to 100 percent of offspring.

In its simplest form, a CRISPR gene drive consists of a piece of DNA that encodes both an enzyme called Cas9, which acts as molecular scissors, and a guide RNA that tells the Cas9 enzyme where to cut. That cutting may disrupt important genes. Researchers are experimenting with this as a way to sterilize malaria-carrying mosquitoes (SN Online: 12/7/15).

Some gene drives also carry a genetic payload. For instance, another approach to fighting malaria is to develop drives that carry genes to “vaccinate” mosquitoes against the disease (SN: 12/26/15, p. 6). Other drives might carry genes that make fluorescent proteins to indicate the gene drive’s presence; Messer and colleagues used such markers to follow two gene drives in fruit flies bred in the lab.
When an organism carrying the tool mates with one that doesn’t, gene drives go to work. Inside the fertilized egg, guide RNAs shepherd Cas9 produced by the engineered mate to a spot where it cuts the other mate’s chromosome.

If everything works correctly, cells repair that break by copying the gene drive onto the cut chromosome. But the slice can also be fixed by gluing the cut ends back together. That regluing sometimes leads to mistakes that destroy Cas9’s cutting site, creating a chromosome that is resistant to the gene drive’s insertion.

In the fruit fly experiments, some mistakes created resistance during or before fertilization. Others took place in early embryos because cells produced Cas9 for too long, allowing the enzyme to chop chromosomes again and again, Messer and colleagues discovered. That was especially a problem when females produced Cas9, they found.

Some uses of gene drives, such as those that would sterilize or kill mosquitoes, can’t tolerate any amount of resistance no matter when it arises, Messer says. Because those types of gene drives damage the organism’s fertility or viability, mosquitoes carrying resistance would have an advantage and quickly outcompete insects vulnerable to the drives.

In a separate study posted June 14 at BioRxiv.org, Messer and colleagues tested several approaches to overcoming gene drive resistance. They found that using multiple guide RNAs and turning on Cas9 only in males could reduce resistance rates.

“This is a very important and elegant set of experiments,” says MIT evolutionary engineer Kevin Esvelt.

But the conclusions aren’t news to most gene drive researchers.

“We’re aware of all these problems, and the essence of how to deal with them hasn’t been changed by these studies,” says geneticist Ethan Bier of the University of California, San Diego. Bier and lab colleague Valentino Gantz created the first gene drive in fruit flies in 2015, and have worked with other researchers to develop gene drives that would prevent mosquitoes from carrying malaria (SN: 12/12/15, p. 16).

Messer’s group is, however, the first to experimentally confirm predictions about resistance and how to avoid it, Esvelt says. “They show what’s been apparent to some people in the field for a very long time.”

Some people might think that high rates of resistance mean that gene drives are safe to release because they won’t spread easily in the wild. But that notion is misguided, says Bier. Even if a gene drive is able to affect only a small percentage of a local pest population, it could still spread around the world, Esvelt adds. “It could still screw us all over in the current form.”

Researchers should continue to conduct gene drive experiments under tight containment, he and Bier caution.

A tiny, shimmying cantilever wiggles a bit more than expected in a new experiment. The excess jiggling of the miniature, diving board–like structure might hint at why the strange rules of quantum mechanics don’t apply in the familiar, “classical” world. But that potential hint is still a long shot: Other sources of vibration are yet to be fully ruled out, so more experiments are needed.

Quantum particles can occupy more than one place at the same time, a condition known as a superposition (SN: 11/20/10, p. 15). Only once a particle’s position is measured does its location become definite. In quantum terminology, the particle’s wave function, which characterizes the spreading of the particle, collapses to a single location (SN Online: 5/26/14).
In contrast, larger objects are always found in one place. “We never see a table or chair in a quantum superposition,” says theoretical physicist Angelo Bassi of the University of Trieste in Italy, a coauthor of the study, to appear in Physical Review Letters. But standard quantum mechanics doesn’t fully explain why large objects don’t exist in superpositions, or how and why wave functions collapse.

Extensions to standard quantum theory can alleviate these conundrums by assuming that wave functions collapse spontaneously, at random intervals. For larger objects, that collapse happens more quickly, meaning that on human scales objects don’t show up in two places at once.

Now, scientists have tested one such theory by looking for one of its predictions: a minuscule jitter, or “noise,” imparted by the random nature of wave function collapse. The scientists looked for this jitter in a miniature cantilever, half a millimeter long. After cooling the cantilever and isolating it to reduce external sources of vibration, the researchers found that an unexplained trembling still remained.

In 2007, physicist Stephen Adler of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., predicted that the level of jitter from wave function collapse would be large enough to spot in experiments like this one. The new measurement is consistent with Adler’s prediction. “That’s the interesting fact, that the noise matches these predictions,” says study coauthor Andrea Vinante, formerly of the Institute for Photonics and Nanotechnologies in Trento, Italy. But, he says, he wouldn’t bet on the source being wave function collapse. “It is much more likely that it’s some not very well understood effect in the experiment.” In future experiments, the scientists plan to change the design of the cantilever to attempt to isolate the vibration’s source.

The result follows similar tests performed with the LISA Pathfinder spacecraft, which was built as a test-bed for gravitational wave detection techniques. Two different studies found no excess jiggling of free-falling weights within the spacecraft. But the new cantilever experiment tests for wave function collapse occurring at different rate and length scales than those previous studies.
Theories that include spontaneous wave function collapse are not yet accepted by most physicists. But interest in them has recently become more widespread, says physicist David Vitali of the University of Camerino in Italy, “sparked by the fact that technological advances now make fundamental tests of quantum mechanics much easier to conceive.” Focusing on a simple system like the cantilever is the right approach, says Vitali, who was not involved with the research. Still, “a lot of things can go wrong or can be not fully controlled.”

To conclude that wave function collapse is the cause of the excess vibrations, every other possible source will have to be ruled out. So, Adler says, “it’s going to take a lot of confirmation to check that this is a real effect.”

Jellyfish have gotten a bad rap. In recent years, concerns about rising jellyfish populations in some parts of the world have mushroomed into headlines like “Meet your new jellyfish overlords.” These floating menaces are taking over the world’s oceans thanks to climate change and ocean acidification, the thinking goes, and soon waters will be filled with little more than the animals’ pulsating goo.

It’s a vivid and frightening image, but researchers aren’t at all certain that it’s true. In her new book, Spineless, former marine scientist Juli Berwald sets out to find the truth about the jellyfish take-over. In the process, she shares much more about these fascinating creatures than merely their numbers.
Among a few of the amazing jellyfish facts and tales throughout the book: Jellyfish have astoundingly complex vision for animals without a brain. They are also the most efficient swimmers ever studied, among the most ancient animals surviving on Earth today and some of the most toxic sea creatures (SN: 9/6/14, p. 16).

Rather than merely reciting these facts, Berwald takes readers on a personal journey, tracing how life pulled her away from science after she earned her Ph.D. — and how jellies brought her back. Through the tale of her experiments with a home jellyfish aquarium, she explains jelly biology, from the amazing shape-shifting properties of the mesoglea that forms a jellyfish’s bulk to why so many species are transparent. As she juggles family life with interviews with the world’s leading jellyfish researchers, Berwald also documents her travels to places around the globe where jellyfish and humans intersect, such as Israel’s coral reefs and Japan’s fisheries.
The answer to the question of whether jellyfish populations are on the rise ultimately lies at this intersection, Berwald finds. Marine scientists are split on whether populations are increasing globally. It depends on which data you include, and it’s possible that jellyfish numbers fluctuate naturally on a 20-year cycle. What is clear is that in coastal areas around the world, people have unwittingly created spawning grounds for huge numbers of jellyfish simply by building docks and other structures that quickly multiplying jellyfish polyps can attach to.

In the end, Berwald says, jellyfish became a “vehicle for me to explore the threats to the ocean’s future. They’re a way to start a conversation about things that can seem boring and abstract — acidification, warming, overfishing and coastal development — but that are changing our oceans in fundamental ways.” And that’s more interesting than an ocean full of goo.