US intelligence agencies found no direct evidence that the Covid-19 pandemic stemmed from an incident at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, a report declassified on Friday said. The four-page report by the office of the director of national intelligence (ODNI) said the US intelligence community still could not rule out the possibility that the virus came from a laboratory, however, and had not been able to discover the origins of the pandemic. “The Central Intelligence Agency and another agency remain unable to determine the precise origin of the Covid-19 pandemic,…
Tag: Science
China begins drilling one of world’s deepest holes in hunt for discoveries deep inside the Earth
China has begun digging its deepest borehole in an effort to study areas of the planet deep beneath the surface. The drilling of the borehole began on Tuesday in a desert in the Tarim basin in China’s north-western region of Xinjiang, according to the Chinese state-run Xinhua news agency. With a planned depth of 11,100 metres, the narrow shaft will penetrate more than 10 continental strata and reach the cretaceous system in the Earth’s crust – a series of stratified rocks dating back 145m years. The project is expected to…
China overtakes US in contributions to nature and science journals
China has overtaken the US to become the biggest contributor to nature-science journals, in a sign of the country’s growing influence in the world of academic research. The Nature Index, which tracks data on author affiliations in 82 high quality journals, found that authors affiliated with Chinese institutions are more prolific than their US counterparts in physical sciences, chemistry, Earth and environmental sciences. The only category in which the US is still in the lead is life sciences. The finding comes from a snapshot of the Nature Index’s data taken…
South China Sea shipwrecks give clues about historic Silk Road trade routes
Two 500-year-old shipwrecks in the South China Sea, filled with Ming-era porcelain and stacked timber, provide significant clues about the maritime Silk Road trade routes, Chinese archaeologists have said. The two shipwrecks were discovered in October, and cultural and archaeological authorities have now begun a year-long process of deep-sea exploration and excavation, government officials announced. Marine researchers found the two vessels in the north-west region of the South China Sea, about 1,500 metres below sea level. The officials said the wrecks were “relatively well preserved, with a large number of…
Some of the first humans in the Americas came from China, study finds
Some of the first humans to arrive in the Americas included people from what is now China, who arrived in two distinct migrations during and after the last ice age, a new genetics study has found. “Our findings indicate that besides the previously indicated ancestral sources of Native Americans in Siberia, the northern coastal China also served as a genetic reservoir contributing to the gene pool,” said Yu-Chun Li, one of the report authors. Li added that during the second migration, the same lineage of people settled in Japan, which…
Air pollution spikes linked to irregular heartbeats, study finds
Spikes in air pollution increase the risk of cardiac arrhythmias, a large study has found. The research, based on nearly 200,000 hospital admissions in China, found a significant increase in risk of arrhythmias in the first few hours after an increase in air pollution levels. Heart arrhythmias can increase the risk of heart disease and sudden cardiac death. “We found that acute exposure to ambient air pollution was associated with increased risk of symptomatic arrhythmia,” said Dr Renjie Chen of Fudan University in Shanghai. “The risks occurred during the first…
Newly released Chinese Covid data points to infected animals in Wuhan
Newly released data from early in the Covid-19 pandemic has offered a crucial insight into the outbreak’s origins, suggesting that Covid-infected animals were present at a market in Wuhan and could have been a “potential source of human infections”. A pre-print report on Monday by a team of international researchers fleshed out analysis of previously unseen genomic samples collected by Chinese scientists at the Huanan market in Wuhan in the early days of the pandemic. Initially leaked last week after a meeting of the World Health Organization (WHO) committee studying…
Australia news live: total fire bans in parts of Victoria, NSW and SA amid autumn heat blast
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New data links Covid-19’s origins to raccoon dogs at Wuhan market
Newly released genetic data gathered from a live food market in Wuhan has linked Covid-19 with raccoon dogs, adding weight to the theory that infected animals sold at the site started the coronavirus pandemic, researchers involved in the work say. Swabs collected from stalls at the Huanan seafood market in the two months after it was shut down on 1 January 2020 were previously found to contain both Covid and human DNA. When the findings were published last year, Chinese researchers stated that the samples contained no animal DNA. That…
‘Gargantuan’: China fossils reveal 70-tonne dinosaur had 15-metre neck
A dinosaur that roamed east Asia more than 160m years ago has been named a contender for the animal with the longest neck ever known. A new analysis of bones from the beast’s neck and skull revealed that the dinosaur, known as Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum, sported a neck 15metres long, or one-and-a-half times the length of a doubledecker bus. The fossilised remains of the creature were recovered in 1987 from 162 million-year-old rocks in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of north-west China, but the full length of the animal’s neck was…