A recent public opinion survey conducted in Dubai targeting Arab youth revealed that eight out of 10 respondents consider China an ally, marking the highest number of respondents to hold this view in four years.

According to data from the United Nations Population Fund, the Arab region is characterized by a substantial youth population, with those under 30 years old constituting about 60 percent of the total population. As a result, numerous international media outlets have shown particular interest in this survey's results, which demonstrate an increasing trend of positive sentiments among Arab youth toward China.

The Global Times reporters found that with the advancement of internet technology and the expansion of avenues for people-to-people exchanges, Arab youth possess richer media exposure to China compared with previous generations. They also have more opportunities for face-to-face interactions with Chinese individuals, leading to a more diversified and contemporary understanding of China.

Moreover, Arab youth approaches the development of different nations worldwide with more pragmatic attitude and are eager to learn from the success stories of other countries.

Experts told the Global Times that further broadening the scope and depth of face-to-face exchanges between young people from China and Arab nations in technology, education, culture, and other domains should be a goal.
An urge to strive forward

Strolling through shops across various Middle Eastern countries, one can find an array of everyday consumer goods from China, such as data cables, power banks, and phone cases.

During the Qatar World Cup in 2022, Global Times reporters visited Doha and found that the backs of each World Cup souvenir item bore the familiar "Made in China" label. Ahmed, a shop assistant at a World Cup souvenir store in Doha, confirmed that many of their products were imported from China, as the wide variety and good quality of Chinese goods are favored by consumers.

Liu Zhongmin, Director of the Middle East Studies Institute at the Shanghai International Studies University, told the Global Times that the positive perception of China held by youth from Arab countries is largely influenced by the bilateral economic and trade exchanges, particularly since the cities of Guangzhou in South China's Guangdong Province, Yinchuan in Northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, and Yiwu in East China's Zhejiang Province, became windows connecting China and the Arab world.

China is the largest trading partner of Arab countries, with bilateral trade volume reaching around $430 billion in 2022, a historical record.

When asked about their impressions of Chinese people, 21-year-old Algerian Nura Omri revealed that she had previously held a rather stereotypical view, believing that the Chinese were subject to arduous labor and were uninterested in engaging with the outside world. However, Nura's perception of Chinese people has significantly changed as she got to know more Chinese friends through learning the Chinese language.

Nura, a master's student majoring in Media and Geopolitics at the University of Algiers 3, secured second place in the Chinese Bridge Competition in Algeria this year after studying Chinese for over a year. Nura stated, "The Chinese nation is a wise one; the Chinese people, just like us, are warm and hospitable, and delight in helping others."

Liu commented that in the realm of culture and society, the influence of Chinese TV dramas and films on the Arab region is gradually increasing. According to media reports, Arabic-dubbed versions of Chinese TV dramas have been aired in multiple Arab countries.

Abdel-Rahman, a 23-year-old graduate from Qatar University, specifically chose to get an internship at a construction project under a Chinese enterprise in Doha. He told the Global Times that he often saw videos on the internet showcasing China's rapid infrastructure development, and this time he finally had the opportunity to see it for himself.

The most profound impression left on him was the efficient project organization and management by Chinese companies, as well as the excellent work capability of his Chinese colleagues. "I feel like every Chinese colleague is an 'all-rounder'; whenever there is a shortage of staff due to vacation or other reasons, they can seamlessly take on other roles."

Similarly, in the job market, Ferial Hamdi from Algeria also favors Chinese companies. Born into a Berber family in the eastern Bouïra Province, Farida received a quality education and is fluent in English, French, Spanish, Arabic, and Berber. After graduating from university, she chose to work at a local Chinese company rather than a Western or an American one.

She told the Global Times that people often jest that the Chinese are like "robots," but she embraces this culture. She believes that it is this tenacious spirit that has enabled the Chinese nation to achieve remarkable feats in the world. Working with Chinese colleagues continually sparks her urge to strive for more.

More diverse, positive attitude

Favorable sentiments expressed toward China by people in Arab countries began in the 1950s and 1960s when New China steadfastly and selflessly supported the national liberation efforts of Arab countries, generously providing assistance and winning the goodwill and appreciation of Arab nations.

Global Times reporters have visited with or interviewed a number of older scholars and statesmen from Arab countries, and found well-worn copies of Selected Works of Mao Zedong that bear the mark of time.

Al-Rawda, an 18-year-old freshman at Egypt's Suez Canal University, told the Global Times that "Since childhood, my elders have told me about China's achievements in various fields, as well as its history and culture. It is because of this understanding that I chose to study Chinese."

Zou Zhiqiang, a research fellow at Fudan University's Middle East Research Center, told the Global Times that while the older generation in the region holds a friendly attitude toward China, their knowledge of China is not comprehensive. In their impression, China is depicted as having a large population, relatively underdeveloped, and of average product quality.

"However, the younger generation is less influenced by traditional thinking and stereotypes, and holds fewer ideological burdens," Zou said. "Their views on China are more diverse and positive, impressed by China's economic achievements and advanced national development. They regard China as a global technological and economic leader, and view it as a valuable model for Arab countries to learn from."

Resentment against US' hegemony

Against the backdrop of the comprehensive strategic partnership relations established between China and Saudi Arabia, the Global Times public opinion center recently conducted an online survey titled "China-Arab Relationship in the Eyes of Saudi Arabian Youth," which was carried out through online questionnaires targeting young people aged between 18 and 35 in Saudi Arabia, from July 4 to 11. A total of 300 valid questionnaires were collected.

The data shows that over 70 percent of the respondents have a positive impression of China, while only 47 percent, that is, less than half of the respondents have a positive impression of the US. Additionally, more than 70 percent of the respondents were aware of the cooperation between China and Saudi Arabia in fields such as infrastructure, trade, and energy, and over two-thirds of the respondents stated that they personally felt the tangible improvements in people's lives brought about by this cooperation.

The US has had significant influence in Arab countries for quite a long time. Some governments in the region still harbor hopes of financial assistance from the US to drive their economic and social development, while some of their citizens have been greatly influenced by American culture and education. However, the US' hegemonic actions, including frequently interfering in other countries' internal affairs and meddling in Arab countries' affairs, have resulted in growing resentment among people in Arab countries, analysts said.

After the 9/11 attacks, the US accused Saudi Arabia of supporting terrorists, while continues to suppress Arab countries under the pretext of human rights violations and religious freedoms in these countries, which has led to a deteriorating impression of the US among many people in Arab countries.

This trend was reflected in a survey conducted by a Dubai-based public relations firm in July, which included face-to-face interviews with 3,600 youth aged 18 to 24 across 53 cities in 18 Arab countries, according to a report by CNN.

In the survey, 80 percent of respondents considered China to be an ally to their country, and the US ranks seventh among "friendly" nations, compared with China, which ranked second in the Arab Youth Survey.

Arab countries rely more heavily on US in military security, Liu told the Global Times. However, in a broader sense of partnership, the youth in these countries now see China as more of a partner and an "ally," as the US consistently places its own interests ahead of those of its allies, while China's cooperation with Arab countries in various fields is based on mutual respect and mutual benefit, Liu said.

"Unlike the US, which makes empty promises and attaches many stringent political conditions to its aid to Arab countries, China is the most trustworthy country in the world today. China keeps its promises and is a good friend, which has done many good things for Arab and African countries," AL-Labib, a young Egyptian, told the Global Times.

Face-to-face communication

China and the Arab world have a historical foundation of friendly exchanges, and the relationship is further supported by strong practical factors.

China emphasizes exchanges and mutual learning between different civilizations to promote people-to-people connectivity. Recent years have seen many achievements in youth exchanges between the two sides.

Among the eight major initiatives by China-Arab practical cooperation put forward at the first China-Arab States Summit in December, 2022, the seventh is the cooperation initiative on youth development.

In July, the China-Arab youth friendship ambassadors 2023 program was inaugurated, with nearly 100 young representatives from Arab countries coming to China for exchanges. The China-Arab Cultural and Tourism Cooperation Research Center was also established on August 1. The training and exchange program for young sinologists initiated by the Chinese government has also attracted active participation from many students from Arab countries. This series of projects helps enhance mutual understanding and consolidate goodwill between China and Arab countries.

Compared with government-level cooperation, Zou believes that face-to-face exchanges among young people are more direct, emotional, and free. When young people from China and Arab countries travel or study in each other's countries, they can make local friends and engage in in-depth conversations, which will help to enhance mutual understanding and deepen friendships between the people of the two sides in a subtler and more impactful ways.

Zou believes that in the future, deeper and wider youth exchanges between China and Arab countries should be increased in fields of science and technology, education, and culture. Youth from Arab countries have a strong interest in China's emerging technologies, and this group is also a key force for government-level technological cooperation. Chinese technology and gaming companies can expand into the Arab market and increase their popularity among youth from Arab countries, which in turn can also help Arab countries cultivate young scientists and innovative talents.

"For this surgery, we have prepared for more than half a year," Xiao Yuehai told the Global Times when talking about the first laparoscopic surgery carried out in Solomon Islands.

Xiao is an urologist from the Affiliated Hospital of Guizhou Medical University (AHGMU) and a member of the second group of Chinese medical workers dispatched to the Solomon Islands.

We reused the laparoscope machines and organized a new one. This helped us save at least 4 million yuan ($548,320), Xiao said proudly.  

The first laparoscopic surgery was conducted by Solomon Islands doctors under the guidance of Chinese medical staff. As of August 22, two such surgeries had been conducted.

"In the past, local doctors had to make an opening of 15-20 centimeters on the patient's torso when they conducted the surgery. The patient would lose a large amount of blood and have to be hospitalized for about one week before leaving the hospital. But now, they can leave the hospital two days after the surgery is completed," Xiao said. 

Meaningful exchanges

This is not just happening in the Solomon Islands, but the whole South Pacific Islands region. 

According to a fact sheet on cooperation between China and Pacific Island Countries (PICs) the Chinese Foreign Ministry released in May 2022, China has sent a total of 600 medical workers to PICs, who have treated 260,000 local patients, provided free medical services on over 100 occasions, and donated a significant amount of both medical machines and medicines. They have helped improve local residents' health and local medical service capacity.

In 2014, the China-assisted Navua Hospital opened to the public in Fiji, bringing benefits to over 30,000 local residents, according to the sheet.

In January 2016, the China-Australia-PNG Malaria Prevention Program was officially launched in Papua New Guinea (PNG), effectively enhancing the ability of malaria prevention and treatment. In October 2017, the Shenzhen municipal government helped launch malaria elimination program in the Kirivina Islands of PNG, reducing the local community's vulnerability to?malaria, the sheet noted.

After the start of COVID-19, the two sides have been helping each other combat the disease. China has held more than 10 bilateral or multilateral public health expert meetings via video link with PICs, which have established diplomatic relations with China, to share experience covering disease prevention, control, treatment and diagnosis. China has actively provided vaccines, supplies and financial assistance to PICs, helping the latter build quarantine cubicles and other facilities. As of May 2022, China had provided PICs with 590,000 doses of vaccines and over 100 tons of supplies, according to the sheet. 

Restricted by their geographic location, medical standards across Pacific Islands Countries and the connectivity between the countries remains low, meaning local residents have difficulty in accessing treatment when faced with serious health issues. 

China's medical support not only brings medicines and equipment to the region, but also advanced technologies, which have helped improve the development of local medical care and bolster the development of the friendship between China and the entire region. 

The Chinese medical team also helps the Solomon Islands to organize an emergency medical team for the upcoming 2023 Pacific Games that is scheduled to be held in Honiara, Solomon Islands, between November 19 and December 2.  

Chinese doctors' selfless contribution has won respect and recognition of local governments and residents. 

In July, as Vanuatu celebrated the 43rd anniversary of its independence, Vanuatu President Nikenike Vurobaravu awarded nine members of the first Chinese medical team with state medals in recognition of their significant contribution to improving local medical standards and consolidating the China-Vanuatu cooperation in medical treatment and public health.

Teaching a man to fish

Apart from providing medical services directly to local residents, Chinese medical teams also train local medical staff "how to fish" through lectures, clinical practice and training sessions, which serve to enhance local medical capacity. 

According to the Xinhua News Agency, from 2002 to July 2023, Chinese medical teams to Papua New Guinea held more than 11,000 training courses and held at least 70 lectures to local medical workers. They also provided training for the use of 240 technologies that had never been available in the country.

Medical teams in the Solomon Islands are delivering similar outcomes, despite only being active in the country for two years. 

On August 14, AHGMU and the Ministry of Health and Medical Services of the Solomon Islands signed an MOU on medical cooperation. The two sides agreed on support and assistance in upgrading tertiary hospital care at the National Referral Hospital (NRH) in the Solomon Islands as the center of teaching, treatment of complicated cases and major referral center.

According to the MOU, the AHGMU will select senior doctors to be part of the China Medical Team in Solomon Islands, providing medical services to local communities. The Traditional Chinese Medicine and Acupuncture Center and Minimally Invasive Urological Surgery Center will be established at NRH in the near future, in which both sides will work closely on medical equipment and instruments donated to NRH. Doctors, nurses, and administrative personnel will have opportunities to receive training and postgraduate education at AHGMU and related medical technology supports will be provided to the centers to assist NRH medical staff master specialized skills.

Growth in TCM

The arrival of Chinese medical teams also generated new awareness over traditional Chinese medicine in the South Pacific region.

"Thank you, China Medical Team, especially Doctor Jack Lei for giving much of your time with your experiences and techniques in delivering acupuncture treatment to me as one of your patients," commented a local resident on the Facebook page of the Chinese medical team.

In less than half a year, Lei, an expert in traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture from the medical team, has changed the local people's attitude toward acupuncture from "never heard of" to "pure magic."

Now the Chinese medial team is also teaching acupuncture and other TCM knowledge to local doctors and nurses and the team also hopes to send some local doctors to China to study acupuncture in the future.

Chinese naval hospital ship Peace Ark also visited the Solomon Islands in August during its "Harmonious Mission 2023."

During its visit to the Solomon Islands, Peace Ark provided free medical service to local people and overseas Chinese. It also dispatched multiple medical teams to deliver medical care, critical disease consultation and academic exchange. 

In addition to the TCM consultation room's seven beds, some patients were seen with "cups" on their backs, or needles inserted in various acupuncture points on their legs, while other received moxibustion treatment on their feet. A local woman told the Global Times that she came to the hospital ship for treatment because she heard that Chinese medicine is famous and effective for foot pain. 

"I feel very good. Chinese doctors are very good!" she said.

The first convertor transformer using China-made on-load tap changers have successfully been put into operation on Sunday at a crucial west-to-east power transmission project located in South China's Guangdong Province, according to a report published by xinhuanet.com. 

Feng Dong, a senior executive at a subsidiary of the China Southern Power Grid, was quoted by the report as saying that China had completed the technological breakthrough from scratch in field of convertor transformer on-load tap changers, and has achieved full localization of components and other products' industrial chains.

This marks the fact that China has officially broken through the restrictions of this core technology in high-end electric equipment, Feng said.

Previously, long-distance, large capacity and high voltage direct current facilities are required for the transmission of electricity from western to eastern areas in China, and both terminals for transmitting and receiving power need to use the equipment of converter transformer that weighs more than 300 tons.

On-load tap changers of a convertor transformer are used to adjust the voltage, power load and current, similar to the function of a gearbox in a car. 

Deng Jun, a senior technical expert at the aforementioned company, also said that an on-load tap changer of a convertor transformer has about 1,000 components, and is a highly complex and sophisticated piece of equipment.

According to the Xinhua report, this technology used to be grasped by only a few overseas companies, and when technical fault took place previously, Chinese companies had no choice but to replace the products with imported goods of the same model, whose ordering cycle took about three to four months, thus posing challenges to the safety of power operation in the country. 

The report also cited a deputy general manager of the company as saying that the company has established a team in partnership with upper stream and downstream companies along the industrial chains. 

After more than two years' of efforts, the team has broken through vacuum switch tubes and other technical bottlenecks to successfully research the large capacity convertor transformer on-load tap changer with rated capacity of 6,000 kilovolt-ampere, maximum voltage of 6,000 volt and maximum rated current of 1,300 ampere.

Using the domestically made on-load tap changers could save nearly 40 million yuan ($5.56 million) In the building of ultra-high voltage direct current power transmission projects, the manager said. 

Three men from Southwest China’s Guizhou Province who attempted to illegally cross the border into Myanmar to engage in telecom fraud have been handed prison sentences ranging from four to six months, a local intermediate people’s court announced on Monday. 

Before the three men surnamed Wu, Huang and Yang were apprehended by police in Southwest China’s Yunnan Province when they attempted to illegally cross the border into Myanmar this February, it was discovered that the group had already crossed the border and entered Myanmar on multiple occasions.  

Wu had successfully illegally crossed the border between China and Myanmar in July of 2019, October of 2019, March of 2020 and October of 2020. He was rejected by the local crime syndicates there because he could not type and was unable to be part of the syndicate’s local telecom fraud operations. 

Huang also illegally crossed the border between China and Myanmar in January of 2019, July of 2019 before being apprehended when he attempted to cross the border in August of 2020. 

Yang illegally crossed the border in March of 2019. He illegally crossed the border again in May of 2020 but turned himself in December of 2020 upon returning to China. 

The three defendants had planned to travel to Myanmar together in February but were discovered on route in Yunnan. 

Their behaviors violated the laws and regulations governing border management and committed the crime of illegal border crossing. 

According to China’s Criminal Law, Wu was sentenced to six months in prison and was fined 7,000 yuan ($965). Huang was handed five months in detention and was fined 6,800 yuan while Yang was sentenced to four months detention and fined 6,800 yuan. 

The local judge noted in the decision that the public must remain vigilant to the pitfalls of high-paying jobs abroad and that overseas jobs should be sought through normal employment channels.

A wandering baby Jupiter could help explain why there are no planets closer to the sun than Mercury and why the innermost planet is so tiny, a new study suggests.

Jupiter’s core might have formed close to the sun and then meandered through the rocky planet construction zone. As the infant Jupiter moved, it would have absorbed some planet-building material while kicking out the rest. This would have starved the inner planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars — of raw materials, keeping them small and preventing any other planets from forming close to the sun, say planetary scientist Sean Raymond and colleagues online March 5 in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
“When I first came up with it, I thought it was ridiculous,” says Raymond, of the Laboratory of Astrophysics of Bordeaux in Floirac, France. “This model is kind of crazy, but it holds up.”

Rocky planets snuggled up to their suns are common in our galaxy. Many systems discovered by NASA’s Kepler space telescope have multiple planets — several larger than Earth — crammed into orbits smaller than Mercury’s. Though Kepler is biased toward finding scrunched-up solar systems, researchers wonder why there is a large gap between the sun and Mercury.

Scientists suspect that the inner planets of our solar system formed 4.6 billion years ago from a belt of debris that stretched between the current orbits of Venus and Earth. Mercury and Mars were built out of material along the edges of this belt, which explains why they are relatively small. Jupiter, traditionally thought to have formed much farther out, gets the blame for creating the belt’s outer edge. What shaped the inner edge has remained difficult to explain (SN Online: 3/23/15).

Raymond and colleagues ran computer simulations to see what would happen to the inner solar system if a body with three times the mass of Earth started inside Mercury’s orbit and then migrated away from the sun. They found that if the interloper didn’t move too fast or too slow, it would sweep clean the innermost parts of the disk of gas and dust that encircled the young sun and leave just enough material to form the rocky planets.

Raymond and colleagues also discovered that young Jupiter could have corralled enough debris to form a second core — one that got nudged away from the sun as Jupiter migrated. This second core could be the seed from which Saturn grew, the researchers suggest. Jupiter’s gravity could have dragged debris to the asteroid belt, too. Raymond says that might explain the origin of iron meteorites, which some researchers argue should have formed relatively close to the sun.
Jupiter plowing through the inner solar system sounds plausible, says Sourav Chatterjee, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. “But there are several ways this can go wrong.”

Building a giant planet core inside the orbit of Mercury is not hard, he says. Pebbles and boulders in the nascent solar system probably drifted inward. They could have piled up close to the sun where solar magnetic fields created turbulence that trapped infalling material. If just a fraction of this debris stuck together, a rocky orb a few times as massive as Earth could form.

Having proto-Jupiter wander to the outer solar system, however, is asking a lot, says Chatterjee. Gravitational interactions with spiral waves in the disk that surrounded the sun can propel a newborn planet either inward or outward. But how fast, how far and in which direction the planet travels depends on properties such as disk temperature and density, which Raymond and colleagues readily acknowledge. Their simulations assume and simplify disk characteristics to see if building the solar system inside-out is even plausible.

“We’re building up a logical chain that shows [this idea] is not completely crazy,” Raymond says. “We’re not saying it happened. Just if it happened, what would it do?”

Thousands of national parks have been established around the world to preserve wildlife. But towns, farms, ranches and roads have grown up around many of these parks, creating islands of wilderness in a sea of humanity. If the creatures inside are to thrive, they need ways to travel between the islands, contends “Wild Ways,” a new documentary from the TV series NOVA.

Isolation can be especially troublesome for large predators, such as lions, that live alone or in small groups. In some areas of Africa, lions can move between populations to avoid inbreeding. But some lions, such as the few in Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Crater, are cut off from other groups. In such populations, cubs are born smaller, die younger and are more susceptible to disease. And drought or overhunting could easily wipe them out, the show notes.
To connect these smaller populations, conservationists are now building wildlife corridors between parks. One of the most ambitious projects is the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, which aims to create connections between grizzly bears in the Canadian Arctic and the western United States. Other large wildlife corridors are being planned in Central America, eastern Australia and the Himalayas. But there are often roadblocks. It can be difficult to persuade people to spend money on wildlife, and it can be even harder when those animals kill livestock or humans.

“It is important that we provide incentives for local communities, in particular, who should now look at wildlife as some form of economic asset to themselves,” says Simon Munthali of the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, which is attempting to connect parks in five countries across southern Africa. With the right incentives, people will be more accepting of wildlife moving across land and may even benefit from it, he says in the documentary. Botswana, for instance, has developed a large ecotourism industry that provides jobs and money for local people, motivating animal protection.

The documentary is a bit too optimistic about the removal of hurdles that stand in the path of wildlife corridors, especially in the American West, where there is ongoing debate about how to manage public lands. And then there is the question of whether these corridors can be created fast enough to save the world’s dwindling animal populations. But, as Michael Soulé, one of the founders of the field of conservation biology, says: “It’s our last chance to protect the diversity of life on Earth.” “Wild Ways” makes a convincing case that we should be willing to try.

Before anybody even had a computer, Claude Shannon figured out how to make computers worth having.

As an electrical engineering graduate student at MIT, Shannon played around with a “differential analyzer,” a crude forerunner to computers. But for his master’s thesis, he was more concerned with relays and switches in electrical circuits, the sorts of things found in telephone exchange networks. In 1937 he produced, in the words of mathematician Solomon Golomb, “one of the greatest master’s theses ever,” establishing the connection between symbolic logic and the math for describing such circuitry. Shannon’s math worked not just for telephone exchanges or other electrical devices, but for any circuits, including the electronic circuitry that in subsequent decades would make digital computers so powerful.

It’s now conveniently a good time to celebrate Shannon’s achievements, on the occasion of the centennial of his birth (April 30) in Petoskey, Michigan, in 1916. Based on the pervasive importance of computing in society today, it wouldn’t be crazy to call the time since then “Shannon’s Century.”

“It is no exaggeration,” wrote Golomb, “to refer to Claude Shannon as the ‘father of the information age,’ and his intellectual achievement as one of the greatest of the twentieth century.”

Shannon is most well-known for creating an entirely new scientific field — information theory — in a pair of papers published in 1948. His foundation for that work, though, was built a decade earlier, in his thesis. There he devised equations that represented the behavior of electrical circuitry. How a circuit behaves depends on the interactions of relays and switches that can connect (or not) one terminal to another. Shannon sought a “calculus” for mathematically representing a circuit’s connections, allowing scientists to be able to design circuits effectively for various tasks. (He provided examples of the circuit math for an electronic combination lock and some other devices.)

“Any circuit is represented by a set of equations, the terms of the equations corresponding to the various relays and switches in the circuit,” Shannon wrote. His calculus for manipulating those equations, he showed, “is exactly analogous to the calculus of propositions used in the symbolic study of logic.”

As an undergraduate math (and electrical engineering) major at the University of Michigan, Shannon had learned of 19th century mathematician George Boole’s work on representing logical statements by algebraic symbols. Boole devised a way to calculate logical conclusions about propositions using binary numbers; 1 represented a true proposition and 0 a false proposition. Shannon perceived an analogy between Boole’s logical propositions and the flow of current in electrical circuits. If the circuit plays the role of the proposition, then a false proposition (0) corresponds to a closed circuit; a true proposition (1) corresponds to an open circuit. More elaborate math showed how different circuit designs would correspond to addition or multiplication and other features, the basis of the “logic gates” designed into modern computer chips.

For his Ph.D. dissertation, Shannon analyzed the mathematics of genetics in populations, but that work wasn’t published. In 1941 he began working at Bell Labs; during World War II, he wrote an important (at the time secret) paper on cryptography, which required deeper consideration of how to quantify information. After the war he developed those ideas more fully, focusing on using his 1s and 0s, or bits, to show how much information could be sent through a communications channel and how to communicate it most efficiently and accurately.

In 1948, his two papers on those issues appeared in the Bell System Technical Journal. They soon were published, with an introductory chapter by Warren Weaver, in a book titled The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Today that book is regarded as the founding document of information theory.

For Shannon, communication was not about the message, or its meaning, but about how much information could be communicated in a message (through a given channel). At its most basic, communication is simply the reproduction of a message at some point remote from its point of origin. Such a message might have a “meaning,” but such meaning “is irrelevant to the engineering problem” of transferring the message from one point to another, Shannon asserted. “The significant aspect is that that actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages.” Information, Shannon decided, is a measure of how much a communication reduces the ignorance about which of those possible messages has been transmitted.

In a very simple communication system, if the only possible messages are “yes” and “no,” then each message (1 for yes, 0 for no) reduces your ignorance by half. By Shannon’s math, that corresponds to one bit of information. (He didn’t coin the term “bit” — short for binary digit — but his work established its meaning.) Now consider a more complicated situation — an unabridged English dictionary, which should contain roughly half a million words. One bit would correspond to a yes-or-no that the word is in the first half of the dictionary. That reduces ignorance, but not very much. Each additional bit would reduce the number of possible words by half. Specifying a single word from the dictionary (eliminating all the ignorance) would take about 19 bits. (This fact is useful for playing the game of 20 Questions — just keep asking about the secret word’s location in the dictionary.)

Shannon investigated much more complicated situations and devised theorems for calculating information quantity and how to communicate it efficiently in the presence of noise. His math remains central to almost all of modern digital technology. As electrical engineer Andrew Viterbi wrote in a Shannon eulogy, Shannon’s 1948 papers “established all the key parameters and limits for optimal compression and transmission of digital information.”

Beyond its practical uses, Shannon’s work later proved to have profound scientific significance. His math quantifying information in bits borrowed the equations expressing the second law of thermodynamics, in which the concept of entropy describes the probability of a system’s state. Probability applied to the ways in which a system’s parts could be arranged, it seemed, mirrored the probabilities involved in reducing ignorance about a possible message. Shannon, well aware of this connection, called his measure entropy as well. Eventually questions arose about whether Shannon’s entropy and thermodynamic entropy shared more than a name.

Shannon apparently wasn’t sure. He told one writer in 1979 that he thought the connection between his entropy and thermodynamics would “hold up in the long run” but hadn’t been sufficiently explored. But nowadays a deep conceptual link shows up not only between Shannon’s information theory and thermodynamics, but in fields as diverse as quantum mechanics, molecular biology and the physics of black holes.
Shannon’s understanding of information plays a central role, for instance, in explaining how the notorious Maxwell’s demon can’t violate thermodynamics’ second law. Much of that work is based on Landauer’s principle, the requirement that energy is expended when information is erased. In developing that principle, Rolf Landauer (an IBM physicist) was himself influenced both by Shannon’s work and the work of Sadi Carnot in discerning the second law in the early 19th century.

Something Shannon and Carnot had in common, Landauer once emphasized to me, was that both discovered mathematical restrictions on physical systems that were independent of the details of the system. In other words, Carnot’s limit on the efficiency of steam engines applied to any sort of engine, no matter what it was made of or how it was designed. Shannon’s principles specifying the limits on information compression and transmission apply no matter what technology is used to do the compressing or sending. (Although in Shannon’s case, Landauer added, certain conditions must be met.)

“They both find limits for what you can do which are independent of future inventions,” Landauer told me. That is, they have grasped something profound about reality that is not limited to a specific place or time or thing.

So it seems that Shannon saw deeply not only into the mathematics of circuits, but also into the workings of nature. Information theorist Thomas Cover once wrote that Shannon belongs “in the top handful of creative minds of the century.” Some of Shannon’s original theorems, Cover noted, were not actually proved rigorously. But over time, details in the sketchy proofs have been filled in and Shannon’s intuitive insights stand confirmed. “Shannon’s intuition,” Cover concluded, “must have been anchored in a deep and natural theoretical understanding.” And it seems likely that Shannon’s intuition will provide even more insights into nature in the century ahead.

A decent office scanner has beaten X-ray blasts from multimillion-dollar synchrotron setups in revealing how air bubbles kill plant leaves during drought.

Intricate fans and meshes of plant veins carrying water are “among the most important networks in biology,” says Timothy Brodribb of the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia. When drought weakens the water tension in veins, air from plant tissues bubbles in, killing leaves much as bubble embolisms and clots in blood vessels can kill human tissue. As climate change and population growth increase risks of water shortage, Brodribb and other researchers are delving into the details of what makes some plants more resistant than others to drought.
The high energy of X-rays destroys delicate leaf tissue. So, based on a chat with microfluidics specialist Philippe Marmottant of the French National Center for Scientific Research, Brodribb tried repeatedly scanning a leaf with a light source below it to reveal darkening lines as air bubbles shot through the veins. A microscope or scanner proved perfect. Tracked this way, an invasion of killer bubbles “looks like a lightning storm,” he says.

He was surprised to see that bigger veins, despite their robust looks, fail before tiny ones (blue indicates earliest failures; red, the latest), as seen in an oak leaf (lower right) and Pteris fern (top). And networks in ferns with simpler branching patterns, as in the Adiantum ferns at bottom left, crash quickly.

This system of visualizing plant plumbing gave better resolution than expensive and elaborate X-ray techniques had, Brodribb, Marmottant and Diane Bienaimé report online April 11 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.