The discovery of a new species of gammaridea in the Irtysh River of Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region proves that Tianshan Mountains and the surrounding areas are the world's origin of cold-water organisms, according to a press conference held by the information office of the region on Tuesday.

The person in charge of the scientific research department announced the initial results of the third comprehensive scientific investigation in the Xinjiang region during the conference.

According to Zhang Yuanming, director of the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography under the Chinese Academy of Sciences and head of the leading unit of the expedition, the third comprehensive scientific expedition in Xinjiang, conducted in 2022, has yielded significant achievements.

In the wild fruit forest of Tianshan Mountains, the expedition discovered two new species of moss, 39 new species of parasitic natural enemies, and a new species of gammaridea.

New discoveries have been made in the study of the formation and evolution of the Taklimakan Desert, and a new understanding has been proposed that the Taklimakan Desert may have been formed 300,000 years ago.

Furthermore, the expedition clarified the superimposed effects of wind dynamics, underlying surface, and sand sources on aeolian sand geomorphology, and confirmed that the Tarim Basin dust can affect North China and the Qinghai-Xizang Plateau.

In addition, researchers participating in the expedition built 26 automatic monitoring stations for ecosystems in no man's land by integrating drones, satellites and the Internet of Things.

The databases of the first and second comprehensive scientific expeditions in Xinjiang were rebuilt, and the data sharing service for scientific expeditions in Xinjiang was established.

Moreover, the expedition's researchers determined the overall water flow status of many important rivers and provided decision-making suggestions for regional water resource development.

According to open date, the third comprehensive scientific expedition to Xinjiang was officially launched in December 2021. The scientific research was designed to focus on the green and sustainable development of Xinjiang, get a comprehensive picture of Xinjiang's resources and environment, scientifically evaluate the carrying capacity of Xinjiang's resources, propose strategies and road maps for Xinjiang's future ecological construction and green development and cultivate a strategic scientific team rooted in Xinjiang and engaged in resources and environment research in arid areas.

China's top anti-corruption watchdog has stepped up its anti-corruption efforts in the medical and pharmaceutical industry with the release of a public education animation on anti-corruption efforts in the industry. 

The release of the short film comes as market watchdogs in multiple places have joined in the nationwide campaign to crack down on corruption in the industry.

In the short film released by the Communist Party of China Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), pharmaceutical salespersons offer rebates to medical personnel based on the number of drugs prescribed by doctors, while some Party members and officials take advantage of their positions to illegally collect and sell prescription data and accept illegal benefits from pharmaceutical salespersons.  

The CCDI warns that such behavior will eventually face serious investigation and punishment and urges local discipline inspection and supervision organs to strengthen the daily supervision of personnel in key positions to ensure their proper conduct.

Recently, the market supervision bureaus in localities including Northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, North China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Nanchang in East China's Jiangxi Province and Datong in North China's Shanxi Province have recently started to solicit tip-offs on bribery in the pharmaceutical industry.

These tips include people giving kickbacks to medical practitioners in the form of consulting fees, lecture fees, promotion fees, the illegal act of transferring benefits in the name of academic conferences and benefits in other non-monetary forms such as domestic and overseas travel.

Fighting against corruption is a comprehensive process which requires the coordination of multiple supervision and regulation departments to address both the symptoms and the root causes of the problem, a Beijing-based anti-corruption expert who requested anonymity told the Global Times on Sunday.

Together with other nine departments, the National Health Commission (NHC) has launched a one-year campaign to crack down on corruption in the healthcare sector across the country to ensure high-quality development of the medical and healthcare sector, the NHC announced on Tuesday.

Since China started the anti-corruption drive in the public health sector in mid-July, at least 184 Party chiefs or heads of hospitals had been put under investigation as of Thursday, according to media estimates.

These officials in the healthcare sector come from 24 provinces and regions with the most personnel in question from South China's Guangdong Province, Southwest China's Sichuan and Yunnan provinces, according to chinanews.com.cn.

Also, 53 among the 184 come from the third-tier (top level) hospitals.

The anonymous expert stressed that the investigation of the officials in the healthcare sector shows the Party's resolution to combat graft since high officials shoulder the core responsibility to prevent corruption as well as the Party's strict attitude toward solving this issue related to people's livelihood.

Doubt cast on quasars — Quasars are considered the brightest and most puzzling objects in the universe. They are also believed to be the most distant, some 10 billion light-years away. However, doubt was thrown on this picture of quasars by Dr. Halton C. Arp…. He reported that some quasars are not at the far reaches of the universe but are relatively close, astronomically speaking. — Science News, April 2, 1966

Update
Quasars are luminous disks of gas and dust swirling around supermassive black holes. Quasar light is redshifted, stretched toward the red part of the spectrum, which astronomers now attribute to the expansion of the universe. High redshifts imply that quasars are billions of light-years away. Light from the farthest known quasar, which pumps out as much power as 63 trillion suns, takes about 13 billion years to reach Earth. Arp was a celebrated astrophysicist at California’s Mount Wilson and Palomar observatories when he suggested that quasars are local. He remained a prominent critic of quasar distances and the Big Bang theory until his death in 2013.

Someone new has entered my life — a tiny, ear-splitting maniac who inchworms across the entire living room on her arched, furious back. My 3-year-old daughter hasn’t thrown temper tantrums, but to our surprise, her 1½-year-old sister is happy to fill that void.

Last week, my pleasant yet firm, “No, you can’t eat the stick of butter,” sent my toddler down to the floor, where she shrieked and writhed for what felt like an eternity. I’ve learned that talking to her or even looking at her added fuel to her fiery fit, so there’s not much to do other than ride out the storm.

It’s awful, of course, to see how miserable a kid is in the throes of a tantrum. And the fact that she can’t fully express her little heart with words just makes it worse. Adults, with our decades of practice, have trouble wrangling big emotions, so it’s no surprise that children can be easily overcome.

Because tantrums offer glimpses into the expression of strong emotions, they are a “compelling phenomenon for scientific study,” psychologist James Green of the University of Connecticut and colleagues wrote in a 2011 paper in the journal Emotion. I agree, by the way, but I am also supremely relieved that I am not the one studying them. To catch tantrums in their native habitat, the scientists outfitted 13 preschoolers with special onesies with microphones sewn into the front, and waited for the kids to lose their minds.

This masochistic experiment caught 24 emotional tsunamis in 2- to 3-year olds. By analyzing the sounds contained in them, the researchers could deconstruct tantrums into five types of noises, each with its own with distinct auditory quality. At the most intense end of the acoustic spectrum was the screams. The acoustical assault slowly eased as sounds became less energetic yells, cries, whines and fusses.

Screams and yells are more similar to each other, forming a group of sounds that often mean anger, the authors suggest. Cries, fusses and whines also group together, representing sadness. This excruciatingly detailed breakdown hints that tantrums have underlying structures. Sadly, the results do not tell us parents how to head off tantrums in the first place.

Simple preventives like keeping kids well-fed, rested and comfortable can stave off some meltdowns, but beyond those basics, we may be out of luck. My somewhat fatalistic view is that when faced with unruly emotions, some kids just can’t help themselves. After all, my older daughter doesn’t throw tantrums, at least not yet.
Yet I do suspect that my own behavior is involved. An illuminating study in the August 2013 Journal of Behavioral Medicine hints that parents of tantrum-prone kids can curb tantrums (or at least their perceptions of tantrums) by somehow changing their own behavior. After eight days of giving their kids “flower essence,” an inert substance sold as a tantrum reducer, parents reported fewer outbursts from their kids. The effect was “placebo by proxy,” meaning that the parents’ beliefs in the product — and possibly their subsequent behavior — may have transferred to their kids. So just believing that their kid is going to throw fewer tantrums led the parents to believe that their kid threw fewer tantrums.

The study couldn’t say whether tantrums actually decreased or parents just perceived fewer of them. But really, either one would be an improvement in our house. Either that or my toddler is going to eat a lot of butter.

Arabian camels (Camelus dromedarius) have trekked across ancient caravan routes in Asia and Africa for 3,000 years. But it’s unclear how camels’ domestication has affected their genetic blueprints.

To find out, Faisal Almathen of King Faisal University in Saudi Arabia and his colleagues combed through the DNA of 1,083 modern camels and ancient remains of wild and domesticated camels found at archaeological sites going back to 5000 B.C.

Camels run high on genetic diversity thanks to periodic restocking from now-extinct wild populations in the centuries after their domestication, the team reports May 9 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Travel on human caravan routes also created a steady flow of genes between different domesticated populations, except in a geographically isolated group in East Africa. That diversity may give some camel populations a leg up in adapting to future changes in climate, the authors suggest.

Zapping Zika
As Zika virus spreads, researchers are racing to find Zika-carrying mosquitoes’ Achilles’ heel, Susan Milius reported in “Science versus mosquito” (SN: 4/2/16, p. 30). Some approaches include genetic sterilization so mosquitoes can’t reproduce and infecting them with bacteria to decrease their disease-spreading power.

One reader had another suggestion. “Maybe we could just secure some wilderness areas for birds and bats,” Kurt Feierabend wrote on Facebook. “Let the feasting begin.”

“Some bats and birds do eat mosquitoes, but Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which are Zika carriers, typically dwell in or around people’s houses — not an easy hunting ground for predators,” says Meghan Rosen, who also reported on the virus for this special report (SN: 4/2/16, p. 26). The mosquitoes lay eggs in water though, so predatory fish and crustaceans could serve as a type of biological control. But, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that option may not be practical. Ae. aegypti larvae can also develop in dog bowls, plant saucers and rain splash left in crumpled plastic bags, Milius notes.
Wandering baby Jupiter
As proto-Jupiter moved through the solar system, it may have absorbed so much planet-building material that it reduced the number of planets that could form near the sun, Christopher Crockett reported in “Jupiter could have formed near sun,” (SN: 4/2/16, p. 7).

“Over what time span would this have occurred, and are any of our planets currently moving in or out?” asked online reader Mark S.

If Jupiter formed close to the sun, it spent only about 100,000 years in the inner solar system, well before the rocky planets started to form, Crockett says. “Researchers suspect that the outer planets danced around quite a bit during their formative years. All the sun’s worlds are now, fortunately, staying put for the foreseeable future,” he says.

Addicted to microbes
In “Microbes and the mind” (SN: 4/2/16, p. 22), Laura Sanders reported on the surprising ways in which gut microbes influence depression, anxiety and other mental disorders. But it’s not a one-way street. “Our behavior can influence the microbiome right back,” she wrote.

Reader George Szynal wondered how addiction to drugs, alcohol and other substances may influence microbes and vice versa. “Can treatments of microbiome enhance and aid the recovery of addicted persons?” he asked.

“That’s a fascinating idea, but so far, little research has been done on this question,” Sanders says. “Alcohol disorders have been linked to changes in the gut microbiome, and smoking has been linked to differences in mouth bacteria. But until scientists figure out whether those microbe changes are consequences or causes of the addictions, we won’t know whether changing the microbes could help people kick the habits,” she says.

Water rising
Without a sharp decrease in carbon dioxide emissions, rapid melting of the Antarctic ice sheet could raise sea levels by 60 meters by the end of the century, Thomas Sumner reported in “Tipping point for ice sheet looms” (SN: 4/2/16, p. 10).

In addition to melting ice sheets, reader Carolyn Lawson asked if human depletion of groundwater also contributes to sea level rise.

About 80 percent of groundwater losses end up in the oceans, according to a recent study in Nature Climate Change. Simulations showed that groundwater contributed about 0.02 millimeters of sea level rise annually in 1900 and increased to around 0.27 millimeters annually by 2000. “Current sea level rise is about 3 millimeters per year, so that’s a pretty large chunk,” Sumner says. “Unfortunately, Earth’s groundwater reserves are disappearing. It’s unclear whether the groundwater contribution to sea level rise will continue to increase indefinitely.”

Bad weather may have driven the mighty Mongols from Hungary. The Mongols’ retreat shows that small climate changes can influence historical events, researchers argue May 26 in Scientific Reports.

In the early 1200s, the Mongol empire had expanded across Eurasia into Russia and Eastern Europe. But when the Mongols got to Hungary in 1241, they invaded and then suddenly retreated back to Russia in 1242. Though theories abound, historians have never found a clear reason for the abrupt exit.

Now, Ulf Büntgen of the Swiss Federal Research Institute in Birmensdorf and Nicola Di Cosmo of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., think they may have an explanation. Weather data preserved in tree rings points to a series of warm, dry summers in the region until 1242, when temperatures dropped and rainfall increased. The shift to a wet, cold climate caused flooding and created marshy terrain. That would have been less than ideal for the nomadic Mongol cavalry, reducing their mobility and pastureland.

Say hello to hobbits’ possible ancestors. Excavations of fossils from roughly 700,000-year-old hominids on the Indonesian island of Flores have reinvigorated scientific debate over the evolutionary origins and identity of Homo floresiensis, a half-sized member of the human genus — dubbed hobbits — that lived much later on Flores.

Remains of at least three individuals found at a central Flores site, called Mata Menge, probably represent early versions of H. floresiensis, says a team led by paleontologist Gerrit van den Bergh of the University of Wollongong in Australia and Japanese biological anthropologist Yousuke Kaifu. A lower-jaw fragment and six teeth excavated in 2014 come from hominids that were about as small as hobbits. These fossils look enough like hobbit jaws and teeth to be assigned provisionally to H. floresiensis, the researchers conclude in the June 9 Nature.
Researchers are divided over what the new finds imply about hobbit evolution. “Nothing related to humans on Flores has a simple explanation,” says paleoanthropologist María Martinόn-Torres of University College London. She calls the new discoveries “puzzling and exciting.”

In a second paper in Nature, archaeologist Adam Brumm of Griffith University in Nathan, Australia, and colleagues describe chemical analyses of one hominid tooth and two animal teeth, as well as of volcanic ash and sediment layers at Mata Menge, that yielded the age estimate for the finds. Excavations also uncovered 149 stone artifacts, including 47 that lay among hominid fossils, Brumm says. Nonhuman animal bones unearthed in the new dig indicate that Mata Menge hominids lived in a river valley dominated by grasslands.

Mata Menge hominids were “a dwarfed descendant of early Homo erectus that somehow got marooned on Flores,” suggests Kaifu, of the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo. The Mata Menge fossils look more like H. erectus than other ancient hominids, his team reports.

H. erectus reached the Flores vicinity deep in the Stone Age, arriving on the nearby island of Java at least 1 million years ago. An unknown hominid species inhabited the Indonesian island of Sulawesi by 194,000 years ago (SN: 2/6/16, p. 7).

Hobbit fossils, previously unearthed 74 kilometers west of Mata Menge in Flores’ Liang Bua Cave, range in age from 100,000 to 60,000 years ago (SN: 4/30/16, p. 7). Stone tools probably made by hobbits date to as early as 190,000 years ago.
Stone implements previously found at Mata Menge and another Flores site date to between around 1 million and roughly 800,000 years ago (SN: 6/3/06, p. 341). The new hominid fossil finds provide the first peek at the likely makers of the Mata Menge tools, Brumm says.

Too few fossils have been found to exclude the possibility that, even if Mata Menge and Liang Bua hominids were related, they belonged to different populations that arrived on Flores at different times, Martinόn-Torres says.

Even so, the new discoveries fit a scenario in which presumably large-bodied H. erectus settled on Flores around 1 million years ago and shrank in size over the next 300,000 years, a surprisingly short time for such dramatic brain and body changes to evolve, Kaifu says. These hominids may have evolved smaller bodies over a relatively short period in response to limited island resources, proposes archaeologist Robin Dennell of the University of Sheffield in England.

But biological anthropologist William Jungers of Stony Brook University School of Medicine in New York says it’s unlikely that H. erectus shrunk to two-thirds of its initial body size and half its original brain size over only several hundred thousand years on Flores. He predicts that ongoing excavations at Mata Menge and nearby sites will uncover 1-million-year-old fossils of small-bodied hobbit ancestors that differed in many respects from H. erectus.

Like the Mata Menge team, though, Jungers says the new discoveries challenge an argument that a partial hobbit skeleton represents a Homo sapiens with Down syndrome (SN Online: 8/5/14).

Proponents of that idea disagree. Different hominids could have reached Flores at different times, as suggested by Martinόn-Torres, says Penn State developmental geneticist Robert Eckhardt. Not enough fossil evidence exists to show an evolutionary link between Mata Menge and Liang Bua individuals, Eckhardt and biological anthropologist Maciej Henneberg of the University of Adelaide in Australia argue.

The Olympic and Paralympic Games probably won’t further the international spread of Zika virus, the World Health Organization concluded in a news conference June 14.

Data from past events, including previous Olympics and World Cup tournaments, suggest that mass gatherings don’t greatly increase the spread of diseases. In addition, the 2016 Olympics will take place in August during Brazil’s winter months, when mosquito-borne diseases aren’t so rampant. Brazil also is stepping up efforts to curb mosquito populations. According to WHO, both factors are likely to reduce Zika transmission during the games.

“Everything is being done to minimize what is already a low risk,” said Bruce Aylward, who heads WHO’s division on outbreaks and health emergencies.

Not all scientists are convinced. More than 200 scientists and doctors have now signed an open letter to WHO’s director calling for postponing the Olympics and Paralympics or moving them from Rio de Janeiro.

BOSTON — Moms get blamed for a lot — including their kids’ cavities. But new data show that the most common cause of tooth decay, the bacterium Streptococcus mutans, doesn’t always come from mother-to-child transmission.

Researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham studied 119 children in rural Alabama and 414 of their household contacts, tracking the path of S. mutans. Contrary to expectation, 40 percent of the children did not share any strains with their mothers. Instead, those strains usually overlapped with those of siblings and cousins. And 72 percent of children carried a strain of S. mutans that no one else in the family had, probably picked up from other children at school, day care or other locations. The research was presented June 17 at ASM Microbe 2016, a meeting of the American Society for Microbiology and the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.

While maternal transmission was still the most common route, “we’re not trying to say ‘Don’t kiss your babies,’” said Stephanie Momeni, a doctoral candidate at UAB. Rather, the ultimate goal of the research is to learn whether particular strains of S. mutans pose a greater hazard for dental health. Knowing that would help identify children who might be in need of more aggressive dental hygiene.