2021魔都新茶论坛

As of March 18 this year, Boeing's stock price had fallen by 28 percent, while the international rating agency Fitch Ratings stated that Boeing's default risk is gradually approaching junk bond status.

The American news website Quartz recently sorted out "A timeline of Boeing's brutal 2024 (so far)." On January 5, a Boeing 737 Max jetliner's built-in emergency door fell off, starting Boeing's "chaotic year." Subsequently, from February 6 to March 15, there were at least five safety incidents, including a stuck rudder pedal, wheel detachment, rapid air descent, a tire explosion, and missing external panels. On March 9, the death of former Boeing employee John Barnett, who had previously exposed serious deficiencies in Boeing's oxygen system, also sparked media speculation.

Industry insiders and experts reached by the Global Times revealed that behind the frequent incidents is the American hegemony that has fallen apart like scattered nuts and bolts on the floor. The serious safety problems of the head of the US aerospace industry and the world's leading manufacturer of civil and military aircraft have also made the US media, scholars and the public think of the long-standing systemic problems in the country's manufacturing industry, and reflect on the entire trajectory of "deindustrialization" and "re-industrialization" in the US.
Competitive pressure

Chinese student Li Yu, who lives in St. Louis, Missouri, where Boeing has a factory and is one of the local pillar industries, told the Global Times that she often encounters Boeing employees attending advanced training classes at the university.

Although she has heard of the recent incidents, Li admitted that in the US, it is difficult to avoid Boeing planes for most people when traveling.

"When taking a plane, although I feel uneasy, I can only grit my teeth and go through with it," Li said.

A former airline employee from Georgia told the Global Times that the majority of the planes used by airlines in the US are Boeing planes, many of which are quite old. Airlines have detailed operating instructions for Boeing planes, and he guessed that the airlines involved in the recent incidents might not have maintained the Boeing planes as directed.

"It's as if I'm watching a troubled child," said Captain Dennis Tajer, the lead spokesman of the Allied Pilots Association, when describing flying a Boeing 737 Max, according to BBC.

Tajer stated that if the plane is not safe, he would never board it, and he can no longer assume that the planes he pilots are of good quality.

However, according to the American online media outlet Axios, US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has made continued attempts to assure the US public that flying is as safe as ever. In Buttigieg's view, the "real concerns" are Boeing's quality control, but he would still sit by the window on a Boeing plane.

According to the American Forbes magazine website, fortunately, there have been no fatalities due to Boeing plane malfunctions in recent weeks. However, five years ago, within nearly five months, two crashes involving Boeing 737 Max jets occurred in Indonesia and Ethiopia, killing 346 people.

In September 2021, PBS's Frontline channel and The New York Times co-produced a documentary titled "Boeing's Fatal Flaw," which, after an in-depth investigation, revealed the systemic causes behind the Boeing crash incidents - competitive pressure, inadequate pilot training, and regulatory absence.

According to the documentary, the 737 Max model was born under intense competitive pressure. In 2011, Airbus launched the new, more energy-efficient, and higher-efficiency model A320neo, and reached a preliminary agreement with a US airline, marking the airline's first order with Airbus in over a decade. Under this pressure, Boeing urgently initiated the design program for the 737 Max model.

Former employees involved in the work revealed that Boeing executives consistently pressured the staff to design the new model "faster, better, and cheaper," continually trying to reduce costs and minimize changes to the new plane to simplify pilot training differences, and to get the new model to market as quickly as possible.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which was supposed to regulate Boeing, authorized some of the safety inspection work to Boeing's own employees, leading to numerous cover-ups.

Increased risks

In this year's safety issues with Boeing, the far-reaching impact of the aforementioned systemic problems is still evident.

Analysts noted that Boeing's decline is the result of prioritizing profits over decades. Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, who influenced Boeing's culture with his "lean management" philosophy, focused on cutting manufacturing processes and workforce to boost stock prices.

Boeing's excessive reliance on outsourcing, as reported by The Wall Street Journal in January, has also led to safety issues and increased risks, with critical components being manufactured globally.
Moreover, interviews with industry executives revealed that production pressure and loss of experienced workers caused further problems. Boeing, needing to meet growing aircraft demand, reduced quality checks while prioritizing production speed, Reuters reported.

The international logistics media site Polar Star reported that the US aviation industry has long been troubled by supply chain issues. Many parts are in short supply, with delivery times for some metal parts and windshields being 2 to 5 times longer than normal.

The shortage of aircraft mechanics and other aviation industry professionals also strains the supply chain. Media reports say that some machine shops have sophisticated equipment but lack the labor to operate it, making licensed aircraft mechanics "as rare as unicorns," citing local experts.

Similar dilemmas

Shen Yi, director of the Research Institution for Global Cyberspace Governance at Fudan University, told the Global Times that the frequent Boeing incidents actually manifest the falling of US hegemony.

Boeing, based on neoliberal business and management concepts, once enjoyed the dividends of the Cold War. Now the company has shifted its focus from quality control to cost control, Shen said.

He pointed out that additionally, the US government, driven by the so-called "identity politics" movements that emphasize diversity and equality, has made technical skills, capabilities, and experience secondary factors in personnel selection and appointment.

Therefore, after a period of sedimentation and accumulation, the lack of focus on the expertise has led to the increase in safety-related accidents this year, he noted.

Recently, the US magazine Foreign Affairs published an article pointing out the problem of the "privatization and the hollowing out of the US defense industry." In addition to the defense field, many other manufacturing sectors are reportedly facing similar troubles.

According to the Financial Times, the decline of the US shipbuilding industry is causing anxiety in the US. Industry insiders widely attribute this decline to several factors. First, in the 1980s, the Reagan administration pursued a free-market economy and thus eliminated most subsidies for the shipbuilding industry. US defense officials and unions have stated that due to the shrinking domestic manufacturing base and outsourcing, a significant portion of the materials and components needed to produce new ships are no longer available domestically. And this is also happening in other manufacturing sectors.

In addition, due to the "just-in-time" production methods adopted in recent decades, US contractors are reluctant to maintain redundant capacity. Furthermore, industry consolidation and the rise of shipbuilding industries in Japan, South Korea, and China have led to reduced investment in technology, factory equipment, and worker training in the US, according to the article.

Analysts pointed out that the real issue with US labor is its low productivity as workers have long demanded high wages and work-life balance. Moreover, the infrastructure conditions in the US are not promising.

Reports showed that much of the existing infrastructure in the US was built in the 1960s. Therefore, much of it is virtually defunct.

While the US Congress passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal (Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act) in 2021, the real process of upgrading the infrastructure is slow as there is no consensus on funding and building.
Misplaced obsession

According to the 2024 manufacturing industry outlook issued by Deloitte, the manufacturing sector in the US will continue to face challenges this year. However, several US media outlets and think tanks are optimistic about the country's manufacturing industry.

In October 2023, the Cato Institute, a US think tank, published an analysis titled "The Reality of American Deindustrialization," arguing that "American manufacturing has not disappeared but has undergone a transformation instead."

While US politicians have been actively advocating for the reviving of manufacturing, an article published by The Hill pointed out that "unfortunately, this obsession with manufacturing is misplaced."

"This manufacturing subsidy war will be expensive and will support inefficient sectors, raising costs for households and firms. For example, most estimates of semiconductor chip fabrication in the US are that it costs up to 50 percent more than fabrication elsewhere. American taxpayers will eventually bear the cost of subsidizing this kind of relative inefficiency," it said.

Several experts told the Global Times that reviving the manufacturing industry requires good infrastructure, research and development investment, industrial support, a continuous supply of adaptable labor, as well as a global network supporting the supply chain and trade value chain.

Even the US, once known as the "world's factory," would find it difficult to fill the gap and revive its manufacturing sector, Zhang Yugui, dean of School of Economics and Finance in Shanghai International Studies University, told the Global Times.

"If the US tries to revitalize its manufacturing industry, it must abandon the zero-sum game mentality and instead form an effective division of labor and cooperation with major manufacturing powers such as China, Europe, Japan, and emerging economies. It should not continue to artificially build 'small yard and high fence'. However, even if some advanced manufacturing industries are lured back to the US, it would be a short-sighted strategy that is unlikely to succeed, Zhang noted.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock's ongoing visit to Australia, New Zealand and Fiji in the South Pacific is a way of balancing the impact of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz's China trip, which exposed deep political divisions within the German government, said Chinese analysts when commenting on Baerbock's recent remarks in which she warned against becoming too reliant on China.

While Scholz recently visited China and reached many positive agreements, Germany's foreign and economic departments, controlled by the far-right Greens, have been at odds with the Social Democratic Party led by Scholz, especially on China policy, which could affect China-Germany cooperation and hinder Germany's own economic and social recovery, analysts warned. At the same time, they believe sustainable cooperation remains the dominant factor in China-Germany relations.

According to a report by the German Press Agency (DPA), Baerbock is setting off on a week-long visit to Australia, New Zealand and Fiji, and is using the trip to send a message to China, the report said.

During her visit to Australia, which was her first to the country, Baerbock said Germany has overhauled its strategic approach to China to avoid a repeat of the past when the NATO member failed to realize the extent of its economic dependence on Russia, Australian media outlet ABC reported on Sunday.

Baerbock, who is a Greens politician within Chancellor Scholz's coalition, said Germany has now developed a comprehensive China policy to diversify its supply chains, while maintaining a strong trade relationship with Beijing, ABC reported.

Baerbock set off on the South Pacific trip just weeks after Scholz concluded his China trip in April. Analysts said Scholz's "high-profile" visit to China was a return to the normalcy of bilateral relations.

It is clear that Baerbock rushed to visit the South Pacific in order to strike a "diplomatic balance" on China policy, Liu Zuokui, a research fellow on European studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Monday.

Now, more and more people and corporations in the international community are increasingly focusing on and optimistic about China's market and economic potential, a sentiment shared by Scholz, who aims to lead Germany in developing close cooperation with China, Liu said.

However, Baerbock and her far-right party are heavily biased in ideology, prioritizing values and security risks over economic cooperation, conflicting with Scholz's advocacy for pragmatic cooperation with China, Liu noted.

As a result, cooperation between Germany and China could face various disruptions, something that is supported and welcomed by the US, Liu warned. He noted that the German federal elections next year will be crucial in determining whether the German government can effectively manage these internal political struggles and contradictions.

"However, we believe that the closeness of business and economic cooperation will always remain the mainstream in China-Germany relations," Liu stressed.

Germany has been China's largest trading partner in Europe for 49 consecutive years, while China has been Germany's largest global trading partner for eight consecutive years. The facts show that practical cooperation is not just an option, but a necessity.

Also during Baerbock's visit to New Zealand on Saturday, the foreign minister did not rule out the possibility of a German frigate crossing the Taiwan Straits, DPA reported.

According to DPA, German frigate Baden-Württemberg and a supply ship will set off on Tuesday on a training mission to the Pacific lasting several months. The vessels will enter the Pacific Ocean through the Panama Canal and later also cross the South China Sea.

In 2021, German frigate Bayern took part in maneuvers with allies at the time, but avoided Taiwan during its voyage to the Pacific, DPA reported.

If the German frigate crosses the Taiwan Straits, it would be a very dangerous and irrational move for China-Germany relations, Chinese analysts warned. They said hyping the Taiwan question will not bring any benefits to Germany, but will only disrupt the normal development of its ties with China and affect Germany's national interests.

Politicians like Baerbock are trying to gain domestic votes by hyping up the Taiwan question, as those politicians' considerations are more focused on personal and party interests rather than their country's interests, Liu believes.

If German frigates were to cross the Taiwan Straits, China would likely respond resolutely and forcefully, Liu said.

China's central bank and top financial regulator on Friday issued a guideline on stepping up financial support for the housing rental market, vowing to offer more innovative credit products and services for housing rentals and to expand financing channels for the housing rental market.

The guideline from the People's Bank of China (PBC) and the National Administration of Financial Regulation (NAFR) is the latest effort by Chinese policymakers to stabilize the real estate market, by both defusing risks and meeting housing needs for key population groups such as young workers.

The guideline contains a total of 17 measures in four areas. Financial support will focus on key areas and weak links in the housing rental market, mainly in large cities, and will focus on addressing housing difficulties for groups such as new urban residents and young workers.

The guideline aims to offer financial support for various entities to build, renovate and operate long-term rental housing, revitalize exiting housing inventory, and increase the supply of affordable and commercial rental housing.

Among the main measures, the guideline, which was sent to the PBC and the NAFR's local branches and various types of banks, calls for an increase in credit support for housing rental development and construction. Commercial banks are being encouraged to extend loans for entities, including real estate developers, for developing and constructing rental housing projects. The standard loan term would be three years and will not exceed five years.

On the purchasing side, the guideline also encouraged commercial banks to extend loans for entities that purchase housing rental for employees. The term for such loans cannot exceed 30 years and the amount should not exceed 80 percent of the property value.

China has made stabilizing the real estate market a top priority for economic work in 2024. The tone-setting Central Economic Work Conference held in December called for active and prudent efforts to defuse risks in the property sector, address the reasonable financing needs of real estate enterprises, and accelerate the development of a new model for the real estate sector.

Also on Friday, following a national central bank meeting, the PBC vowed to actively support the stable and sound development of the real estate market, strengthen monitoring, and take various credit policies to meet the reasonable financial needs of various types of real estate companies.

The China Academy of Art has welcomed the celebration of its 95th anniversary since its ­establishment in the recently inaugurated Liangzhu campus in East ­China's Zhejiang Province. As the nation's first comprehensive national institution for higher artistic education, the art academy mirrors the evolution of contemporary Chinese art and artistic education over the last century.

Gao Shiming, president of the academy, told the Global Times that Chinese President Xi Jinping's emphasis on the need to combine fine traditional culture with the Marxist stand, viewpoint and approach, also known as the "second integration," holds significant implications for art education. In addition, humanity is entering the "second Renaissance," to which China is making global contributions. 

At a meeting on cultural inheritance and development in June, Xi called for the integration of the basic tenets of Marxism with traditional Chinese culture, known as the "second integration," which builds on the Communist Party of China's "first integration" of theoretical synthesis - the integration of the basic tenets of Marxism with China's specific reality, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

Ma Yifu, a renowned Chinese scholar, once asserted that Marxism has reactivated a socialist gene that exists in Chinese traditional cultural thought and social history, Gao said. 

Common core values

Traditional Chinese culture and Marxism share common core values, such as the concept of equality. Chinese philosopher Wang Yangming's proposal of "cultivating moral consciousness, envisioning every individual as a saint," aligns with Marx's perspective on equality.

Similarly, the integration of Marxism and China's fine traditional culture has been vividly manifested in Chinese art, placing the people at the center and elevating them as the social subjects.

For instance, in the 1950s and 1950s, the Zhejiang school of figure painting, led by Fang Zengxian, employed techniques traditionally used for emperors, bodhisattvas and flora to portray ordinary farmers. This marked a significant period in China's millennia-old art history.

From its inception, the China Academy of Art envisioned an academic mission of "introducing Western art, organizing Chinese art, reconciling Eastern and Western art, and creating contemporary art." Over the last 95 years, the institution has walked alongside the history of modern Chinese art, responding to national crises and reinventing itself in the face of contemporary challenges.

During this period, two scholarly ideas have consistently unfolded: One represented by the inaugural dean, Lin Fengmian, which embodies the "integration of Chinese and Western styles." The other school of thought, pioneered by figures like Huang Binhong and Zhao Wuji, follows the path of "innovation within tradition." Zhao created a form of modern painting from within the folds of Chinese tradition. He activated certain elements of Chinese tradition by using modern art, creating an alternative, distinct and unique form of modern painting that gained global recognition.

"The last 95 years have seen the China Academy of Art charting a path in modern art education deeply rooted in the Chinese soil, reflecting a journey of artistic revival that is both grounded in tradition and independently innovative," Gao said. 

What does a Renaissance require? "Prosperous technology, flourishing arts, developed commerce and a gathering of talents - we have all these elements now," Gao said.

'Second Renaissance'

He explained that the first Renaissance was catalyzed by an external factor - the Age of Discovery. Today, the internet serves as the great navigation of the 21st century. People in the world are not just witnessing a Renaissance in China but a global Renaissance in which China has started contributing to the world. 

In the 21st century, art education in China has taken on a more significant role, serving as a catalyst for societal innovation. The current Chinese society craves innovation, creativity and self-transcendence. Igniting the primitive innovative capabilities of the entire nation is crucial. 

"I often tell students not to confine themselves to being artists within the art realm but to become artists of the world," Gao said, adding that contemporary society demands the need for not just traditional artists but countless art professionals with the ability to innovate and imagine, solving real-world problems. This is the fundamental goal of the China Academy of Art - to foster a culture in which the entire art community contributes to the construction of a beautiful China and the high-quality development of the nation.

In the era of the first ­Renaissance, the world was not peaceful. Today, the world faces constant conflicts, making culture and art even more crucial as forces of reflection and reconciliation, guiding people into a more essential and expansive realm, allowing humanity a sense of transcendence.

The great French writer Flaubert once said, "Art and science met at the foot of the mountain and parted ways at the summit." The difficulty lies in people's journey not yet "reaching the summit," as people have technologized science and turned tools into technology. 

Gao believes there's no need to rush; scientists and artists can engage in more philosophical exchanges. Simultaneously, people can start with specific initiatives, such as promoting a course called "illusion." 

Scientists delve into the internal and physiological mechanisms of illusions, while artists design various illusions. This is a tangible course ­illustrating the fusion of science and art. 

From another perspective, in the era of general artificial intelligence, people might leverage AI to become individuals with more extensive space and creative capabilities, akin to Da Vinci's versatility. 

"As artificial intelligence advances, human artistic intelligence also grows," he said.

Frog brains get busy long before they’re fully formed. Just a day after fertilization, embryonic brains begin sending signals to far-off places in the body, helping oversee the layout of complex patterns of muscles and nerve fibers. And when the brain is missing, bodily chaos ensues, researchers report online September 25 in Nature Communications.

The results, from brainless embryos and tadpoles, broaden scientists’ understanding of the types of signals involved in making sure bodies develop correctly, says developmental biologist Catherine McCusker of the University of Massachusetts Boston. Scientists are familiar with short-range signals among nearby cells that help pattern bodies. But because these newly described missives travel all the way from the brain to the far reaches of the body, they are “the first example of really long-range signals,” she says.
Celia Herrera-Rincon of Tufts University in Medford, Mass., and colleagues came up with a simple approach to tease out the brain’s influence on the growing body. Just one day after fertilization, the scientists lopped off the still-forming brains of African clawed frog embryos. These embryos survive to become tadpoles even without brains, a quirk of biology that allowed the researchers to see whether the brain is required for the body’s development.
The answer was a definite — and surprising — yes, Herrera-Rincon says. Long before the brain is mature, it’s already organizing and guiding organ behavior, she says. Brainless tadpoles had bungled patterns of muscles. Normally, muscle fibers form a stacked chevron pattern. But in tadpoles lacking a brain, this pattern didn’t form correctly. “The borders between segments are all wonky,” says study coauthor Michael Levin, also of Tufts University. “They can’t keep a straight line.”
Nerve fibers that crisscross tadpoles’ bodies also grew in an abnormal pattern. Levin and colleagues noticed extra nerve fibers snaking across the brainless tadpoles in a chaotic pattern, “a nerve network that shouldn’t be there,” he says.

Muscle and nerve abnormalities are the most obvious differences. But brainless tadpoles probably have more subtle defects in other parts of their bodies, such as the heart. The search for those defects is the subject of ongoing experiments, Levin says.
In addition to keeping patterns on point, the young frog brain may protect its body from chemical assaults. A molecule that binds to certain proteins on cells in the body had no effect on normal embryos. But when given to brainless embryos, the same molecule caused their spinal cords and tails to grow crooked. These results suggest that early in development, brains keep embryos safe from agents that would otherwise cause harm.

“The brain is instructing cells that are really a long way away from it,” Levin says. While the precise identities of these long-range signals aren’t known, the researchers have some ideas. When brainless embryos were dosed with a drug that targets cells that typically respond to the chemical messenger acetylcholine, the muscle pattern improved. Similarly, the addition of a protein called HCN2 that can tweak the activity of cells also seemed to improve muscle development. More work is needed before scientists know whether these interventions are actually mimicking messaging from the early brain, and if so, how.

Frog development isn’t the same as mammalian development, but frog development “is pretty applicable to human biology,” McCusker says. In fundamental ways, humans and frogs are built from the same molecular toolbox, she says. So the results hint that a growing human brain might also interact similarly with a growing human body.

The weird glowing blob of gas known as Hanny’s Voorwerp was a 10-year-old mystery. Now, Lia Sartori of ETH Zurich and colleagues have come to a two-pronged solution.

Hanny van Arkel, then a teacher in the Netherlands, discovered the strange bluish-green voorwerp, Dutch for “object,” in 2008 as she was categorizing pictures of galaxies as part of the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project.

Further observations showed that the voorwerp was a glowing cloud of gas that stretched some 100,000 light-years from the core of a massive nearby galaxy called IC 2497. The glow came from radiation emitted by an actively feeding black hole in the galaxy.
To excite the voorwerp’s glow, the black hole and its surrounding accretion disk, the active galactic nucleus, or AGN, should have had the brightness of about 2.5 trillion suns; its radio emission, however, suggested the AGN emitted the equivalent of a relatively paltry 25,000 suns. Either the AGN was obscured by dust, or the black hole slowed its eating around 100,000 years ago, causing its brightness to plunge.

Sartori and colleagues made the first direct measurement of the AGN’s intrinsic brightness using NASA’s NuSTAR telescope, which observed IC 2497 in high-energy X-rays that cut through the dust.

They found that the AGN is obscured by dust and it is dimmer than expected; the feeding has slowed way down. The team reported on arXiv.org on November 20 that IC 2497’s heart is as bright as 50 billion to 100 billion suns, meaning it dropped in brightness by a factor of 50 in the past 100,000 years — a less dramatic drop than previously thought.
“Both hypotheses that we thought before are true,” Sartori says.

Sartori plans to analyze NuSTAR observations of other voorwerpjes to see if their galaxies’ black holes are also in the process of shutting down — or even booting up.

“If you look at these clouds, you get information on how the black hole was in the past,” she says. “So we have a way to study how the activity of supermassive black holes varies on superhuman time scales.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated December 5, 2017, to clarify that the brightness measured by the researchers came from the accretion disk around an actively eating black hole, not the black hole itself.

Out of the hundreds of species of carnivorous plants found across the planet, none attract quite as much fascination as the Venus flytrap. The plants are native to just a small section of North Carolina and South Carolina, but these tiny plants can now be found around the world. They’re a favorite among gardeners, who grow them in homes and greenhouses.

Scientists, too, have long been intrigued by the plants and have extensively studied the famous trap. But far less is known about the flower that blooms on a stalk 15 to 35 centimeters above — including what pollinates that flower.
“The rest of the plant is so incredibly cool that most folks don’t get past looking at the active trap leaves,” says Clyde Sorenson, an entomologist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Plus, notes Sorenson’s NCSU colleague Elsa Youngsteadt, an insect ecologist, because flytraps are native to just a small part of North and South Carolina, field studies can be difficult. And most people who raise flytraps cut off the flowers so the plant can put more energy into making traps.

Sorenson and Youngsteadt realized that the mystery of flytrap pollination was sitting almost literally in their backyard. So they and their colleagues set out to solve it. They collected flytrap flower visitors and prey from three sites in Pender County, North Carolina, on four days in May and June 2016, being careful not to damage the plants.

“This is one of the prettiest places where you could work,” Youngsteadt says. Venus flytraps are habitat specialists, found only in certain spots of longleaf pine savannas in the Carolinas. “They need plenty of sunlight but like their feet to be wet,” says Sorenson. In May and June, the spots of savanna where the flytraps grow are “just delightful,” he says. And other carnivorous plants can be found there, too, including pitcher plants and sundews.
The researchers brought their finds back to the lab for identification. They also cataloged what kind of pollen was on flower visitors, and how much.
Nearly 100 species of arthropods visited the flowers, the team reports February 5 in American Naturalist. “The diversity of visitors on those flowers was surprising,” says Youngsteadt. However, only three species — a sweat bee and two beetles — appeared to be the most important, as they were either the most frequent visitors or carriers of the most pollen.
The study also found little overlap between pollinators and prey. Only 13 species were found both in a trap and on a flower, and of the nine potential pollinators in that group, none were found in high numbers.

For a carnivorous plant, “you don’t want to eat your pollinators,” Sorenson says. Flytraps appear to be doing a good job at that.

There are three ways that a plant can keep those groups separate, the researchers note. Flowers and traps could exist at different times of the year. However, that’s not the case with Venus flytraps. The plants produce the two structures at separate times, but traps stick around and are active during plant flowering.

Another possibility is the spatial separation of the two structures. Pollinators tend to be fliers while prey were more often crawling arthropods, such as spiders and ants. This matches up with the high flowers and low traps. But the researchers would like to do some experiments that manipulate the heights of the structures to see just how much that separation matters, Youngsteadt says.

The third option is that different scents or colors produced by flowers and traps might lure in different species to each structure. That’s another area for future study, Youngsteadt says. While attraction to scent and color are well documented for traps, little is now known about those factors for the flowers.

Venus flytraps are considered vulnerable to extinction, threatened by humans, Sorenson notes. The plant’s habitat is being destroyed as the population of the Carolinas grows. What is left of the habitat is being degraded as fires are suppressed (fires help clear vegetation and keep sunlight shining on the flytraps). And people steal flytraps from the wild by the thousands.

While research into their pollinators won’t help with any of those threats, it could aid in future conservation efforts. “Anything we can do to better understand how this plant reproduces will be of use down the road,” Sorenson says.

But what really excites the scientists is that they discovered something new so close to home. “One of the most thrilling parts of all this,” Sorenson says, “is that this plant has been known to science for [so long], everyone knows it, but there’s still a whole lot of things to discover.”

Inspired by how ants move through narrow spaces by shortening their legs, scientists have built a robot that draws in its limbs to navigate constricted passages.

The robot was able to hunch down and walk quickly through passages that were narrower and shorter than itself, researchers report January 20 in Advanced Intelligent Systems. It could also climb over steps and move on grass, loose rock, mulch and crushed granite.

Such generality and adaptability are the main challenges of legged robot locomotion, says robotics engineer Feifei Qian, who was not involved in the study. Some robots have specialized limbs to move over a particular terrain, but they cannot squeeze into small spaces (SN: 1/16/19).
“A design that can adapt to a variety of environments with varying scales or stiffness is a lot more challenging, as trade-offs between the different environments need to be considered,” says Qian, of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

For inspiration, researchers in the new study turned to ants. “Insects are really a neat inspiration for designing robot systems that have minimal actuation but can perform a multitude of locomotion behaviors,” says Nick Gravish, a roboticist at the University of California, San Diego (SN: 8/16/18). Ants adapt their posture to crawl through tiny spaces. And they aren’t perturbed by uneven terrain or small obstacles. For example, their legs collapse a bit when they hit an object, Gravish says, and the ants continue to move forward quickly.

Gravish and colleagues built a short, stocky robot — about 30 centimeters wide and 20 centimeters long — with four wavy, telescoping limbs. Each limb consists of six nested concentric tubes that can draw into each other. What’s more, the limbs do not need to be actively powered or adjusted to change their overall length. Instead, springs that connect the leg segments automatically allow the legs to contract when the robot navigates a narrow space and stretch back out in an open space. The goal was to build mechanically intelligent structures rather than algorithmically intelligent robots.

“It’s likely faster than active control, [which] requires the robot to first sense the contact with the environment, compute the suitable action and then send the command to its motors,” Qian says, about these legs. Removing the sensing and computing components can also make the robots small, cheap and less power hungry.

The robot could modify its body width and height to achieve a larger range of body sizes than other similar robots. The leg segments contracted into themselves to let the robot wiggle through small tunnels and sprawled out when under low ceilings. This adaptability let the robot squeeze into spaces as small as 72 percent its full width and 68 percent its full height.
Next, the researchers plan to actively control the stiffness of the springs that connect the leg segments to tune the motion to terrain type without consuming too much power. “That way, you can keep your leg long when you are moving on open ground or over tall objects, but then collapse down to the smallest possible shape in confined spaces,” Gravish says.
Such small-scale, minimal robots are easy to produce and can be quickly tweaked to explore complex environments. However, despite being able to walk across different terrains, these robots are, for now, too fragile for search-and-rescue, exploration or biological monitoring, Gravish says.

The new robot takes a step closer to those goals, but getting there will take more than just robotics, Qian says. “To actually achieve these applications would require an integration of design, control, sensing, planning and hardware advancement.”

But that’s not Gravish’s interest. Instead, he wants to connect these experiments back to what was observed in the ants originally and use the robots to ask more questions about the rules of locomotion in nature (SN: 1/16/20).

“I really would like to understand how small insects are able to move so rapidly across certain unpredictable terrain,” he says. “What is special about their limbs that enables them to move so quickly?”

The dwarf planet Quaoar has a ring that is too big for its metaphorical fingers. While all other rings in the solar system lie within or near a mathematically determined distance of their parent bodies, Quaoar’s ring is much farther out.

“For Quaoar, for the ring to be outside this limit is very, very strange,” says astronomer Bruno Morgado of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. The finding may force a rethink of the rules governing planetary rings, Morgado and colleagues say in a study published February 8 in Nature.
Quaoar is an icy body about half the size of Pluto that’s located in the Kuiper Belt at the solar system’s edge (SN: 8/23/22). At such a great distance from Earth, it’s hard to get a clear picture of the world.

So Morgado and colleagues watched Quaoar block the light from a distant star, a phenomenon called a stellar occultation. The timing of the star winking in and out of view can reveal details about Quaoar, like its size and whether it has an atmosphere.

The researchers took data from occultations from 2018 to 2020, observed from all over the world, including Namibia, Australia and Grenada, as well as space. There was no sign that Quaoar had an atmosphere. But surprisingly, there was a ring. The finding makes Quaoar just the third dwarf planet or asteroid in the solar system known to have a ring, after the asteroid Chariklo and the dwarf planet Haumea (SN: 3/26/14; SN: 10/11/17).

Even more surprisingly, “the ring is not where we expect,” Morgado says.
Known rings around other objects lie within or near what’s called the Roche limit, an invisible line where the gravitational force of the main body peters out. Inside the limit, that force can rip a moon to shreds, turning it into a ring. Outside, the gravity between smaller particles is stronger than that from the main body, and rings will coalesce into one or several moons.

“We always think of [the Roche limit] as straightforward,” Morgado says. “One side is a moon forming, the other side is a ring stable. And now this limit is not a limit.”

For Quaoar’s far-out ring, there are a few possible explanations, Morgado says. Maybe the observers caught the ring at just the right moment, right before it turns into a moon. But that lucky timing seems unlikely, he notes.

Maybe Quaoar’s known moon, Weywot, or some other unseen moon contributes gravity that holds the ring stable somehow. Or maybe the ring’s particles are colliding in such a way that they avoid sticking together and clumping into moons.

The particles would have to be particularly bouncy for that to work, “like a ring of those bouncy balls from toy stores,” says planetary scientist David Jewitt of UCLA, who was not involved in the new work.

The observation is solid, says Jewitt, who helped discover the first objects in the Kuiper Belt in the 1990s. But there’s no way to know yet which of the explanations is correct, if any, in part because there are no theoretical predictions for such far-out rings to compare with Quaoar’s situation.

That’s par for the course when it comes to the Kuiper Belt. “Everything in the Kuiper Belt, basically, has been discovered, not predicted,” Jewitt says. “It’s the opposite of the classical model of science where people predict things and then confirm or reject them. People discover stuff by surprise, and everyone scrambles to explain it.”

More observations of Quaoar, or more discoveries of seemingly misplaced rings elsewhere in the solar system, could help reveal what’s going on.

“I have no doubt that in the near future a lot of people will start working with Quaoar to try to get this answer,” Morgado says.

For nearly 650 years, the fortress walls in the Chinese city of Xi’an have served as a formidable barrier around the central city. At 12 meters high and up to 18 meters thick, they are impervious to almost everything — except subatomic particles called muons.

Now, thanks to their penetrating abilities, muons may be key to ensuring that the walls that once protected the treasures of the first Ming Dynasty — and are now a national architectural treasure in their own right — stand for centuries more.

A refined detection method has provided the highest-resolution muon scans yet produced of any archaeological structure, researchers report in the Jan. 7 Journal of Applied Physics. The scans revealed interior density fluctuations as small as a meter across inside one section of the Xi’an ramparts. The fluctuations could be signs of dangerous flaws or “hidden structures archaeologically interesting for discovery and investigation,” says nuclear physicist Zhiyi Liu of Lanzhou University in China.
Muons are like electrons, only heavier. They rain down all over the planet, produced when charged particles called cosmic rays hit the atmosphere. Although muons can travel deep into earth and stone, they are scattered or absorbed depending on the material they encounter. Counting the ones that pass through makes them useful for studying volcano interiors, scanning pyramids for hidden chambers and even searching for contraband stashed in containers impervious to X-rays (SN: 4/22/22).

Though muons stream down continuously, their numbers are small enough that the researchers had to deploy six detectors for a week at a time to collect enough data for 3-D scans of the rampart.

It’s now up to conservationists to determine how to address any density fluctuations that might indicate dangerous flaws, or historical surprises, inside the Xi’an walls.