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Chinese authorities on Thursday summoned three express courier companies, including YTO Express (Logistics) Co and Yunda Holding Co in Shanghai and Beijing-based JD Logistics, for administrative talks, which are suspected of providing consignment of firecrackers that breach government rules.

According to the official WeChat account of the State Post Bureau (SPB), the enterprises subject to inspection were suspected of posing serious security threats to both individuals and the public by delivering parcels of fireworks and firecrackers inappropriately.

In addition, some employees were found to be lacking in workplace discipline and safety awareness when collecting, receiving and inspecting the parcels.

The companies were required to fully and faithfully put the safety of the delivery process as  their first priority, uphold and act on the principle of seeking development in a safe manner, and putting the interests of the people above all else.

In the face of concerns over air pollution and out of other safety concerns, firework bans have been imposed by many local governments in China, and holiday fireworks activities have therefore been strictly restricted before the New Year’s Eve in 2023, according to thePaper.com.

The authorities include Department of Market Supervision & Inspection of the State Post Bureau (SPB), the Ministry of Emergency Management (MEM) and relevant department of the Ministry of Public Security (MPS).

Editor's Note:

The Yiwu International Trade City Import Commodity Pavilion is a new benchmark set up by Yiwu to transform the Yiwu market from one-way export trade to multi-directional trade. The import commodity pavilion has a business area of 100,000 square meters, gathering products from more than 100 countries, including food, health products, clothing, shoes, hats, daily necessities, household items, kitchenware, daily chemical products, maternity and baby products, jewelry and accessories, and other 8 major categories of source goods. As the end of the year approaches, citizens come to purchase New Year goods and gifts. Photos: Li Hao/GT

Almost half of Australia's koala habitats will be under high bushfire threat by 2070 as a result of climate change, a study has warned.

In a research published on Monday, a team led by researchers from Flinders University in South Australia generated fire susceptibility maps for the current day and for the year 2070.

They found that the proportion of the habitat of Australia's iconic koalas that is highly susceptible to fires will rise from 39.5 percent currently to 44.6 percent by 2070 as the frequency and severity of bushfires rise due to climate change.

"Wildfires will increasingly impact koala populations in the future. If this iconic and vulnerable marsupial is to be protected, conservation strategies need to be adapted to deal with this threat," Farzin Shabani, who led the research at Flinders University before moving to Qatar University, said in a media release.

"It is crucial to strike a balance between ensuring that koala habitats and populations are not completely destroyed by fire while also allowing for forest rejuvenation and regeneration through periodic burns."

On a state-by-state basis, the research projected that 89.1 percent of the total koala habitat in South Australia and 65.2 percent in Queensland in northeast Australia will have high or very high fire susceptibility by 2070.

Koalas, also known as koala bears, was declared an endangered species under national environmental law in February 2022 after population decline due to land-clearing, drought and disease was exacerbated by the 2019/20 Black Summer bushfires.

A report published by the World Wide Fund for Nature Australia in December 2020 estimated that more than 61,000 koalas perished in the fires, which burned more than 240,000 square kilometers of land across the country.

John Llewelyn, co-author of the study from the Global Ecology Lab at Flinders University, said in Monday's media release that the increasing severity of bushfires, which has been attributed to climate change, is making recovery from those events more difficult.

"Koalas may still be able to survive in areas highly susceptible to bushfires if their food sources can also withstand the fire-prone conditions, and if koalas can re-populate previously burnt-out areas from neighboring habitat, but this task is becoming more difficult due to habitat fragmentation and the increasingly large areas being burnt," he said.

Experts have warned that most of Australia is facing a severe 2023/2024 summer bushfire threat.

In its spring outlook published earlier in September, the Bureau of Meteorology forecast that hot, dry conditions would continue across most of the country following a dry winter.

DNA might reveal how dogs became man’s best friend.

A new study shows that some of the same genes linked to the behavior of extremely social people can also make dogs friendlier. The result, published July 19 in Science Advances, suggests that dogs’ domestication may be the result of just a few genetic changes rather than hundreds or thousands of them.

“It is great to see initial genetic evidence supporting the self-domestication hypothesis or ‘survival of the friendliest,’” says evolutionary anthropologist Brian Hare of Duke University, who studies how dogs think and learn. “This is another piece of the puzzle suggesting that humans did not create dogs intentionally, but instead wolves that were friendliest toward humans were at an evolutionary advantage as our two species began to interact.”

Not much is known about the underlying genetics of how dogs became domesticated. In 2010, evolutionary geneticist Bridgett vonHoldt of Princeton University and colleagues published a study comparing dogs’ and wolves’ DNA. The biggest genetic differences gave clues to why dogs and wolves don’t look the same. But major differences were also found in WBSCR17, a gene linked to Williams-Beuren syndrome in humans.
Williams-Beuren syndrome leads to delayed development, impaired thinking ability and hypersociability. VonHoldt and colleagues wondered if changes to the same gene in dogs would make the animals more social than wolves, and whether that might have influenced dogs’ domestication.

In the new study, vonHoldt and colleagues compared the sociability of domestic dogs with that of wolves raised by humans. Dogs typically spent more time than wolves staring at and interacting with a human stranger nearby, showing the dogs were more social than the wolves. Analyzing the genetic blueprint of those dogs and wolves, along with DNA data of other wolves and dogs, showed variations in three genes associated with the social behaviors directed at humans: WBSCR17, GTF2I and GTF2IRD1. All three are tied to Williams-Beuren syndrome in humans.
“It’s fascinating that a handful of genetic changes could be so influential on social behavior,” vonHoldt says.

She and colleagues propose that such changes may be closely intertwined with dog domestication. Previous hypotheses have suggested that domestication was linked dogs’ development of advanced ways of analyzing and applying information about social situations, a way of thinking assumed to be unique to humans. “Instead of developing a more complex form of cognition, dogs appear to be engaging in excessively friendly behavior that increases the amount of time they spend near us and watching us,” says study coauthor Monique Udell, who studies animal behavior at Oregon State University in Corvallis. In turn, she says, that gives dogs “the opportunities necessary for them to learn about our behavior and what maximizes their success when living with us.”

The team notes, for instance, that in addition to contributing to sociability, the variations in WBSCR17 may represent an adaptation in dogs to living with humans. A previous study revealed that variations in WBSCR17 were tied to the ability to digest carbohydrates — a source of energy wolves would have rarely consumed. Yet, the variations in domestic dogs suggest those changes would help them thrive on the starch-rich diets of humans. Links between another gene related to starch digestion in dogs and domestication, however, have recently been called into question (SN Online: 7/18/17).

The other variations, the team argues, would have predisposed the dogs to be hypersocial with humans, a trait that humans would then have selected for as dogs were bred over generations.

Robots are branching out. A new prototype soft robot takes inspiration from plants by growing to explore its environment.

Vines and some fungi extend from their tips to explore their surroundings. Elliot Hawkes of the University of California in Santa Barbara and his colleagues designed a bot that works on similar principles. Its mechanical body sits inside a plastic tube reel that extends through pressurized inflation, a method that some invertebrates like peanut worms (Sipunculus nudus) also use to extend their appendages. The plastic tubing has two compartments, and inflating one side or the other changes the extension direction. A camera sensor at the tip alerts the bot when it’s about to run into something.

In the lab, Hawkes and his colleagues programmed the robot to form 3-D structures such as a radio antenna, turn off a valve, navigate a maze, swim through glue, act as a fire extinguisher, squeeze through tight gaps, shimmy through fly paper and slither across a bed of nails. The soft bot can extend up to 72 meters, and unlike plants, it can grow at a speed of 10 meters per second, the team reports July 19 in Science Robotics. The design could serve as a model for building robots that can traverse constrained environments.

This isn’t the first robot to take inspiration from plants. One plantlike predecessor was a robot modeled on roots.

Alien megastructures are out. The unusual fading of an oddball star is more likely caused by either clouds of dust or an abnormal cycle of brightening and dimming, two new papers suggest.

Huan Meng of the University of Arizona in Tucson and his colleagues suggest that KIC 8462852, known as Tabby’s star, is dimming thanks to an orbiting cloud of fine dust particles. The team observed the star with the infrared Spitzer and ultraviolet Swift space telescopes from October 2015 to December 2016 — the first observations in multiple wavelengths of light. They found that the star is dimming faster in short blue wavelengths than longer infrared ones, suggesting smaller particles.
“That almost absolutely ruled out the alien megastructure scenario, unless it’s an alien microstructure,” Meng says.

Tabby’s star is most famous for suddenly dropping in brightness by up to 22 percent over the course of a few days (SN Online: 2/2/16). Later observations suggested the star is also fading by about 4 percent per year (SN: 9/17/16, p. 12), which Meng’s team confirmed in a paper posted online August 24 at arXiv.org.

Joshua Simon of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Pasadena, Calif., found a similar dimming in data on Tabby’s star from the All Sky Automated Survey going back to 2006. Simon and colleagues also found for the first time that the star grew brighter in 2014, and possibly in 2006, they reported in a paper August 25 at arXiv.org.

“That’s fascinating,” says astrophysicist Tabetha Boyajian of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. She first reported the star’s flickers in 2015 (the star is nicknamed for her) and is a coauthor on Meng’s paper. “We always speculated that it would brighten sometime. It can’t just get fainter all the time — otherwise it would disappear. This shows that it does brighten.”

The brightening could be due to a magnetic cycle like the sun’s, Simon suggests. But no known cycle makes a star brighten and dim by quite so much, so the star would still be odd.
Brian Metzger of Columbia University previously suggested that a ripped-up planet falling in pieces into the star could explain both the long-term and short-term dimming. He thinks that model still works, although it needs some tweaks.

“This adds some intrigue to what’s going on, but I don’t think it really changes the landscape,” says Metzger, who was not involved in the new studies. And newer observations could complicate things further: The star went through another bout of dimming between May and July. “I’m waiting to see the papers analyzing this recent event,” Metzger says.

The only lemurs so dependent on bamboo that they gnaw on hardened, nutrient-poor stems during the dry season might dwindle away as those seasons grow longer.

Reconstructing the history of the greater bamboo lemur (Prolemur simus) in Madagascar suggests that drier areas over thousands of years already have lost their populations. As the region dries further due to climate change and the bad-bamboo months in the last holdouts lengthen, remaining populations of these critically endangered lemurs might go hungry and fade away too, an international research team warns online October 26 in Current Biology.

Other animals, even another lemur species, will eat lots of bamboo shoots and leaves. But the greater bamboo lemur is the only mammal besides the giant panda that sticks with bamboo during the dry season. That’s when the plants stop sprouting and offer only culm, the tough, old, yellowing stems poor in nutrients. Culm hasn’t reached the hard stage of bamboo that’s used as a building material. “Nobody wants to eat that,” says study coauthor Alistair Evans, an evolutionary morphologist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

This lemur species with its extreme diet had already been feared extinct once, around the middle of the last century, but relic populations turned up. Current survivors remain more toward the eastern part of the island, where dry seasons are apparently survivable, at least for now.

Kyle Rittenhouse has been found not guilty.

A jury in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Friday found Rittenhouse not guilty of homicide and other charges.
On Aug. 25, 2020, Rittenhouse shot at four men, killing two and wounding a third, with a semiautomatic rifle. Rittenhouse was in downtown Kenosha to protect a car dealership during unrest following the police shooting of Jacob Blake.
Blake, a Black man, had been shot multiple times by Rusten Sheskey, a white police officer, in Kenosha, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. Sheskey was ultimately not charged by state or federal prosecutors.

Rittenhouse, then a 17-year-old from Antioch, Ill., joined a group of other armed people in downtown Kenosha. He shot Joseph Rosenbaum, Anthony Huber and Gaige Grosskreutz, the latter of whom survived. Rittenhouse turned himself in to police in Antioch on Aug. 26, and was extradited to Kenosha, where he was charged with the following:

First-degree reckless homicide, use of a dangerous weapon
First-degree recklessly endangering safety, use of a dangerous weapon
First-degree intentional homicide, use of a dangerous weapon
Attempted first-degree intentional homicide, use of a dangerous weapon
First-degree recklessly endangering safety, use of a dangerous weapon
Possession of a dangerous weapon by a person under 18 (later dismissed)
Failure to comply with an emergency order from state or local government (later dismissed)
Most of the incident was captured on video, and the subsequent trial became heavily polarized. The prosecution in the case argued that Rittenhouse provoked protesters before shooting at them, while the defense argued that Rittenhouse acted in self defense.

The Milwaukee Bucks are scheduled to play at home tonight at 8 p.m. ET/7 p.m. CT. The Bucks, who play 40 miles from Kenosha, were the first NBA team to boycott following the protests in the summer of 2020.

Following the verdict in the case that captured national attention, the sports world responded to the news that Rittenhouse was ruled not guilty.
Sporting News will continue to monitor and update news from around the sports world as it unfolds.

Prior to the 2021-22 season, the NBA's historic 75th season, Stephen Curry was hot on the heels of Hall of Famer Ray Allen to become the all-time leader for most 3-pointers made.

Entering the season, Curry needed 142 3-pointers needed to surpass Allen, and 12 games into the season, he's knocked off 76 of the latter's lead.
It's still early but Curry is averaging a career-high 5.4 makes per game, a shade above his previous career-high of 5.3 which he set last year in 63 games. During the 2015-16 season in which he set the all-time single-season record with 402 en route to winning his second straight MVP award, Curry averaged 5.1 makes in 79 games.
Top 10 players on the all-time leader for most made 3-pointers
Curry is one of three active players in the Top 10 with James Harden and Damian Lillard being the other two players.

 Player  3-pointers

1. Ray Allen 2,973
2. Stephen Curry 2,908
3. Reggie Miller 2,560
4. James Harden 2,489
5. Kyle Korver 2,450
6. Vince Carter 2,290
7. Jason Terry 2,282
8. Jamal Crawford 2,221
9. Paul Pierce 2,143
10. Damian Lillard 2,087
    LeBron James, who ranks 11th, could break into the Top 10 and increase the list to four active players later this season.

When will Stephen Curry surpass Ray Allen?
Curry has hit 42 of the 76 3-pointers in just five games including a red-hot shooting game against the LA Clippers, where he erupted for 45 points that started with a perfect 25-point first quarter and an overall 8-of-13 efficiency from beyond the arc and a 50-piece against the Atlanta Hawks.

As of Nov. 16, the baby-faced assassin, who is considered to be the greatest 3-pointer shooter in NBA history, needs 76 more 3-pointers to overtake Allen.
Going by his season average of 5.4 3-pointers per game, Curry would take anywhere around 14 games to jump to the No. 1 spot on the all-time charts.

That many games mean Curry could make NBA history in mid-December, provided of course that he misses no games moving forward.

Warriors upcoming 2021-22 schedule
With that projection, Curry would likely make NBA history on the road as Golden State would be on a five-game Eastern Conference road trip in mid-December.

14 games ahead on the Warriors schedule will see the team in Indiana, the birthplace of basketball. 15 games ahead will see the Warriors at the iconic Madison Square Garden playing the Knicks.

In case Curry takes a couple more games to surpass Allen, he has a couple of more iconic locations awaiting him in Boston - home of one of the oldest franchises which is tied for the most champions in NBA history - and Toronto - the capital of the birth country of James Naismith, the sport's inventor.

Warriors upcoming schedule
Date Opponent Time (ET)
Nov. 10 vs. Timberwolves 10:00 pm
Nov. 12 vs. Bulls 10:00 pm
Nov. 14 at Hornets 7:00 pm
Nov. 16 at Nets 7:30 pm
Nov. 18 at Cavaliers 7:30 pm
Nov. 19 at Pistons 7:00 pm
Nov. 21 vs. Raptors 8:30 pm
Nov. 24 vs. 76ers 10:00 pm
Nov. 26 vs. Trail Blazers 10:00 pm
Nov. 28 at LA Clippers 3:30 pm
Nov. 30 at Suns 10:00 pm
Dec. 3 vs. Suns 10:00 pm
Dec. 4 vs. Spurs 8:30 pm
Dec. 6 vs. Magic 10:00 pm
Dec. 8 vs. Trail Blazers 10:00 pm
Dec. 11 at 76ers 8:30 pm
Dec. 13 at Pacers 7:00 pm
Dec. 14 at Knicks 7:30 pm
Dec. 17 at Celtics 7:30 pm