Chinese regulators have required apps and WeChat mini programs by domestic developers to register via the same system as domestic websites. Experts said the move will help optimize registration and management procedures and mechanisms for apps and mini programs while helping to better deal with the issues that have arisen with the expansion of the internet such as online fraud and pornographic content.

According to a notice released by WeChat on Wednesday, starting from September 1 mini programs on the platform have to register with the Internet Content Provider (ICP) system before they can become available on WeChat. The registration has to be completed in accordance with national regulations and rules such as the Law on Combating Telecom and Online Fraud, and Internet Information Service Management Measures, the notice said.

The move came one day after China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) issued a notice requiring all domestic app developers to complete registration procedures.

China started to require ICP registration in 2000. The mechanism has played an active role in promoting the development of the internet in China over the past two decades. Along with the rapid development of the internet, apps have become the main content carrier of internet service and should register with the same requirements as websites, including registering the developers' real name, network resources and services, according to the notice.

Along with the rapid development of the internet in China over the years, apps and mini programs became widely used. So it is necessary to standardize and optimize the registration and management mechanism for these products, Xie Yongjiang, executive director of the Internet Management and Legislation Research Center at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunication, told the Global Times on Wednesday.

Xie highlighted some issues that have come along with the wide usage of apps and mini programs such as gambling, telecom fraud and pornographic content in education apps for children. Strict registration and review procedures will help to prevent such problems in the future, he said.

This optimized mechanism will also help deal with emerging problems such as private information leakage given the rapid development of big data and artificial intelligence technologies, the expert said.

Mini programs already on the platform also have to finish registration by the end of March 2024 or they will be shut down starting April 1, 2024.

According to the MIIT notice on Tuesday, app developers who started providing apps in the Chinese market before the notice was issued have to register with provincial-level communications administrations where the developer is based between September 2023 and March 2024. MIIT will carry out an inspection in April-June 2024 and developers who have not registered by that time will be dealt with according to the law, the notice said.

The notice stressed that app developers in the fields of journalism, publishing, education, film and television, and religion should also provide approval documentation from provincial-level communication administrations while registering their apps.

A new X-ray telescope run by the Japan Aerospace Agency has gone silent a little more than a month after its launch. JAXA reported online March 27 that the telescope, ASTRO-H (aka Hitomi), stopped communicating with Earth. U.S. Strategic Command’s Joint Space Operations Center also reported seeing five pieces of debris alongside the satellite on March 26.

Attempts to figure out what went wrong with the spacecraft, which launched February 17, have not been successful. Up until now though, ASTRO-H seemed to be functioning. In late February, mission operators successfully switched on the spacecraft’s cooling system and tested some of its instruments.

ASTRO-H carries four instruments to study cosmic X-rays over an energy range from 0.3 to 600 kiloelectron volts. By studying X-rays, astronomers hope to learn more about some of the more feisty denizens of the universe such as exploding stars, gorging black holes, and dark matter swirling around within galaxy clusters. Earth’s atmosphere absorbs X-rays, so the only way to see them is to put a telescope in space.

It’s official: Zika virus causes microcephaly and other birth defects.

A new analysis by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirms what many earlier studies had suggested: The virus, typically passed via the bite of an infected mosquito, can travel from a pregnant woman to her fetus and wreak havoc in the brain.

“There is no longer any doubt that Zika causes microcephaly,” CDC director Tom Frieden said in a news briefing Wednesday. The findings, reported April 13 in the New England Journal of Medicine, follow a March 31 report from the World Health Organization that concluded nearly the same thing.

Because the connection between a mosquito-borne illness and such birth defects is so unprecedented, the CDC took time to carefully weigh the evidence, Frieden said. “Never before in history has there been a situation where a bite from a mosquito could result in a devastating malformation.”

In the NEJM analysis, researchers factored in molecular, epidemiological and clinical data, including recent reports of babies born with microcephaly in Colombia. The country has been suffering from a Zika outbreak for months, and thousands of pregnant women have been infected with the virus. Based on what scientists know about the virus, now is about the time they would have expected to see birth defects, said CDC public health researcher and study coauthor Sonja Rasmussen. WHO reports 50 cases of microcephaly in Colombia, seven of which have a confirmed link to Zika.

Researchers still can’t pin down the odds that an infection during pregnancy will lead to microcephaly, though. “What we don’t know right now is if the risk is somewhere in the range of 1 percent or in the range of 30 percent,” Rasmussen said.

Scientists do believe, however, that women who aren’t pregnant would probably clear a Zika infection within eight weeks, and not have problems with future pregnancies, Rasmussen said.

SALT LAKE CITY — Flying dinosaurs took off from the ground — no leap from the trees required.

Ancient birds and some nonavian dinosaurs used their wings and powerful legs to launch themselves into the air, a new analysis of 51 winged dinos suggests. Paleontologist Michael Habib of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles reported the findings October 26 at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.

“That’s a big deal, because the classic idea was that early birds started out gliding between trees,” says Yale ornithologist Michael Hanson.
The origin of flight in birds is a sticky subject, says paleontologist Corwin Sullivan of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. “There’s been a long-standing controversy over whether flight evolved from the ground up or the trees down.”

Traditionally, scientists have thought that early birds scrambled up trees to get an altitude assist. The birds would then start their flight with a jump, like a hang glider diving off a cliff. Over time, descendants of those gliding birds would have evolved larger wings and, eventually, the ability to flap. Flapping “means you can push yourself forward on your own power,” Habib said. That’s how modern birds fly.

But in recent years, several lines of evidence have begun to dismantle the trees-down approach to flight evolution. Birds descended from terrestrial animals, for one, not tree dwellers. Habib’s team wondered whether early birds needed an elevation boost from trees at all — perhaps they could take off directly from the ground.

He and colleagues examined 51 fossil specimens from 37 different winged dinosaur genera that lived from 150 million to 70 million years ago, from the Late Jurassic to Late Cretaceous epochs. The sample included both avian and nonavian dinosaurs.

The specimens all had stiff, flightlike feathers on their forelimbs. But not all animals with feathered wings can fly, Habib says. To figure out if his specimens once could, he and colleagues analyzed wing length, body mass and hind limb muscle power, among other fossil features. Dinos that could fly (by flapping their wings) had to have enough leg strength to propel them up and enough wing speed to carry them forward.
Just 18 specimens (representing nine of the 37 groups) had the right stuff to get off the ground: every one of the avian specimens in the sample, as well as a few of the nonavian dinos too, including a tiny, four-winged dinosaur called Microraptor.

“Little guys did well,” Habib says. “Anything over four to five kilograms was struggling.”

Whether the early fliers could sustain flight for long distances is a different ball game, Habib says. “But there’s a big difference between flying a little and not flying at all.”

Early flying dinosaurs may have burst off the ground to escape from predators. This bursting behavior could have set the stage for the powered flight systems of modern birds, Habib says. Quick, powerful takeoffs “put a premium on large wings, large flight muscles and really fast wings” — all characteristics of today’s best fliers.

WASHINGTON — A nasty stomach virus that can linger on fruits and veggies may have met its match in cold plasma.

In experiments, the ionized gas, created by filtering room-temperature air through an electric field, virtually eliminated norovirus from lettuce, researchers reported February 7 at the American Society for Microbiology Biothreats meeting.

Norovirus is the leading cause of foodborne illness in the United States, infecting more than 20 million people every year. Sterilizing food with heat is one way to kill the virus, but that approach doesn’t work for fresh produce. Cold plasma could be a way to sterilize fruits and vegetables without damaging them, said Hamada Aboubakr, a food microbiologist at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul.
Aboubakr and colleagues used a cold plasma device to blast contaminated romaine lettuce leaves and stainless steel surfaces. After five minutes, the plasma wiped out about 99 percent of norovirus particles.

The researchers are testing the device on other foodborne viruses such as hepatitis A, which sickened more than 140 people last year after they ate contaminated strawberries. Unpublished experiments have shown that cold plasma also can destroy drug-resistant bacteria on chicken breasts and leafy greens. Aboubakr hopes to adapt the technology for use in restaurants, on cruise ships and in the produce aisles of grocery stores.

A wearable robot could prevent future falls among those prone to stumbles.

The new exoskeleton packs motors on a user’s hips and can sense blips in balance. In a small trial, the pelvic robot performed well in sensing and averting wearers’ slips, researchers report May 11 in Scientific Reports.

Exoskeletons have the potential to help stroke victims and people with spinal cord injuries walk again (SN: 11/16/13, p. 22) — and even kick soccer goals (SN Online: 6/12/14). But this new model focuses on a more ordinary aspect of the human condition: falling on your face or your rear. “Exoskeletons could really help in this case,” says study coauthor Silvestro Micera, an engineer at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland.
Most exoskeletons guide the movement of the wearer, forcing the person to walk in a particular way. But the new pelvic device allows the user to walk normally and reacts only when it needs to. A computer algorithm measures changes in a wearer’s hip joint angles to detect the altered posture that goes along with slipping. The robot then uses its motors to push the hips back into their natural position to, hopefully, prevent a fall.

At a rehab facility in Florence, eight elderly people and two amputees — two groups at risk for balance issues — tried out the device while walking on a treadmill. The robot picked up on slips within 0.35 seconds of a change of gait.

Still, the device has some hurdles ahead. The exoskeleton is bulky, so Micera and his team are working on a sleeker model that would be less imposing for elderly users. The team is also testing the robot’s skills in other types of balance loss like tripping.

Our view of the earliest flowers just bloomed. A new reconstruction, the most detailed to date, suggests the flowers were bisexual, with more than five female reproductive organs, or carpels, and more than 10 male reproductive organs, or stamen. Petallike structures, grouped in sets of three, surrounded the sex organs, researchers report August 1 in Nature Communications.

Flowering plants comprise roughly 90 percent of plants on Earth. Researchers think they evolved from a common ancestor that lived about 140 million years ago. But it has been hard to reconstruct the structure of such ancient blooms because so few fossils have been found.

In the new study, Hervé Sauquet of the Université Paris-Sud in Orsay, France, and colleagues combined models of flower evolution with a database of features for 792 species of flowering plants, and data from the fossil record. The new picture of ancient flowers suggests some blossoms lost their bisexuality with time. Also, modern blooms lost some of their whorls, the concentric layers of different flower parts. In some flowers, whorls dropped from at least four to two in petals and the leaflike structures at the base of a bloom, and from four to one in stamen, the team concludes. The finding suggests that natural selection pushed the plants to a less complex floral plan over time.

Sometimes body armor just isn’t enough. A car-sized dinosaur covered in bony plates may have sported camo, too, researchers report online August 3 in Current Biology. That could mean the Cretaceous-period herbivore was a target for predators that relied on sight more than smell to find prey.

The dinosaur, dubbed Borealopelta markmitchelli, has already made headlines for being one of the best preserved armored dinosaurs ever unearthed. It was entombed on its back some 110 million years ago under layers of fine marine sediments that buried the animal very quickly — ideal preservation conditions, says study coauthor Caleb Brown, a paleontologist at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, Canada. The fossil, found in Alberta in 2011, captured not only large amounts of skin and soft tissue but also the animal’s three-dimensional shape.
“Most of the other armored dinosaurs are described based on the skeleton. In this case, we can’t see the skeleton because all the skin is still there,” Brown says.

That skin contains clues to the dinosaur’s appearance, including its coloration. “We’re just beginning to realize how important color is, and we’re beginning to have the methods to detect color” in fossils, says Martin Sander, a paleontologist at Bonn University in Germany who wasn’t part of the study.

But despite ample tissue, the researchers didn’t find any melanosomes, cellular structures that often preserve evidence of pigment in fossilized remains. Instead, Brown and colleagues turned to less direct evidence: molecules that appear when pigments break down. The researchers found about a dozen types of those molecules, including substantial amounts of benzothiazole, a by-product of the reddish pigment pheomelanin. That might mean the dinosaur was reddish-brown.
The distribution of pigment by-products also gives clues about the dinosaur’s appearance. B. markmitchelli had a thin film of pigment-hinting organic molecules on its back, but that layer disappeared on the belly. That pattern is reminiscent of countershading, when an animal is darker on its back than its underside, Brown says. Countershading is a simple form of camouflage that helps animals blend in with the ground when seen from above or with the sky when seen from below.
This is not the first time countershading has been proposed for a dinosaur (SN: 11/26/16, p 24). But finding the camouflage on such a large herbivore is somewhat surprising, Brown says. Modern plant eaters that don similar camouflage tend to be smaller and at greater risk of becoming someone’s dinner. B. markmitchelli’s skin patterning suggests that at least some top Cretaceous predators might have relied more on eyesight than today’s top carnivores, which often favor smell when hunting, Brown says.

Some experts, however, want stronger evidence for the coloration claims. Molecules like benzothiazole can come from melanin, but they can also come from a number of other sources, such as oils, says Johan Lindgren, a paleontologist at Lund University in Sweden. “What this paper nicely highlights is how little we actually know about the preservation of soft tissues in animal remains. There’s definitely something there — the question is, what are those [molecules], and where do they come from?”

Sander does buy the evidence for the reddish tint, but it might not be the full story, he says. The dino could have displayed other colors that didn’t linger in the fossil record. But the countershading findings “point out the importance of vision” for dinosaurs, he says. Sharp-eyed predators might have made camouflage a perk for herbivores — even ones built like tanks.

A single genetic mutation made the Zika virus far more dangerous by enhancing its ability to kill nerve cells in developing brains, a new study suggests.

The small change — which tweaks just one amino acid in a protein that helps Zika exit cells — may cause microcephaly, researchers report September 28 in Science. The mutation arose around May 2013, shortly before a Zika outbreak in French Polynesia, the researchers calculate.

Zika virus was discovered decades ago but wasn’t associated with microcephaly — a birth defect characterized by a small head and brain — until the 2015–2016 outbreak in Brazil. Women who had contracted the virus while pregnant started giving birth to babies with the condition at higher-than-usual rates (SN: 4/2/16, p. 26).
Researchers weren’t sure why microcephaly suddenly became a complication of Zika infections, says Pei-Yong Shi, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. Maybe the virus did cause microcephaly before, scientists suggested, but at such low rates that no one noticed. Or people in South America might be more vulnerable to the virus. Perhaps their immune systems don’t know how to fight it, they have a genetic susceptibility or prior infections with dengue made Zika worse (SN: 4/29/17, p. 14). But Shi and colleagues in China thought the problem might be linked to changes in the virus itself.
The researchers compared a strain of Zika isolated from a patient in Cambodia in 2010 with three Zika strains collected from patients who contracted the virus in Venezuela, Samoa and Martinique during the epidemic of 2015–2016. The team found seven differences between the Cambodian virus and the three epidemic strains.

Researchers engineered seven versions of the Cambodian virus, each with one of the epidemic strains’ mutations, and injected the viruses into fetal mouse brains. Viruses with one of these mutations, dubbed S139N, killed brain cells in fetal mice and destroyed human brain cells grown in lab dishes more aggressively than the Cambodian strain from 2010 did, the researchers found.
“That’s pretty convincing evidence that it at least plays some role in what we’re seeing now,” says Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

The mutation changes an amino acid in a Zika protein called prM. That protein helps the virus mature within infected cells and get out of the cells to infect others. Shi and colleagues don’t yet know why tweaking the protein makes the virus kill brain cells more readily.

The alteration in that protein probably isn’t the entire reason epidemic strains cause microcephaly, Shi says. The Cambodian strain also led to the death of a few brain cells, but perhaps not enough to cause microcephaly. “We believe there are other changes in the virus that collectively enhance its virulence,” he says. In May in Nature, Shi and colleagues described a different mutation that allows the virus to infect mosquitoes more effectively.

Brain cells from different people vary in their susceptibility to Zika infections, says infectious disease researcher Scott Weaver, also at the University of Texas Medical Branch but not involved in the study. He says more work on human cells and in nonhuman primates is needed to confirm whether this mutation is really the culprit in microcephaly.

Physicists often ponder small things, but probably not the ones on Kerwyn Casey “KC” Huang’s mind. He wants to know what it’s like to be a bacterium.

“My motivating questions are about understanding the physical challenges bacterial cells face,” he says. Bacteria are the dominant life-forms on Earth. They affect the health of plants and animals, including humans, for good and bad. Yet scientists know very little about the rules the microbes live by. Even questions as basic as how bacteria determine their shape are still up in the air, says Huang, of Stanford University.

Huang, 38, is out to change that. He and colleagues have determined what gives cholera bacteria their curved shape and whether it matters (a polymer protein, and it does matter; the curve makes it easier for cholera to cause disease), how different wavelengths of light affect movement of photosynthetic bacteria (red and green wavelengths encourage movement; blue light stops the microbes in their tracks), how bacteria coordinate cell division machinery and how photosynthetic bacteria’s growth changes in light and dark.

All four of these findings and more were published in just the first three months of this year.
Huang also looks for ways to use tools and techniques his team develops to solve problems unrelated to bacteria. Computer programs that measure changes in bacterial cell shape can also track cells in plant roots and in developing zebrafish embryos. He’s even helped determine how a protein’s activity and stability contribute to a human genetic disease.

A physicist by training, Huang delves into biology, biochemistry, microbial ecology, genetics, engineering, computer science and more, partnering with a variety of scientists from across those fields. He’s even teamed up with his statistician sister. He’s an “all-in-one scientist,” says longtime collaborator Ned Wingreen, a biophysicist at Princeton University.

When Huang started his lab at Stanford in 2008, after getting his Ph.D. at MIT and spending time at Princeton as a postdoctoral fellow, his background was purely theoretical. He designed and ran the computer simulations and then his collaborators carried out the experiments. But soon, he wanted to do hands-on research too, to learn why cells are the way they are.
Such a leap “is not trivial,” says Christine Jacobs-Wagner, a microbiologist at Yale University who also studies bacterial cell shape. But Huang is “a really, really good experimentalist,” she says.

Jacobs-Wagner was particularly impressed with a “brilliant microfluidics experiment” Huang did to test a well-established truism about how bacteria grow. Researchers used to think that turgor pressure — water pressure inside a cell that pushes the outer membrane against the cell wall — controlled bacterial growth, just like it does in plants. But abolishing turgor pressure didn’t change E. coli’s growth rate, Huang and colleagues reported in 2014 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “This result blew my mind away,” Jacobs-Wagner says. The finding “crumbled the foundation” of what scientists thought about bacterial growth.

“He uses clever experiments to challenge old paradigms,” Jacobs-Wagner says. “More than once he has come up with a new trick to address a tough question.”
Sometimes Huang’s tricks require breaking things. Zemer Gitai, a microbiologist at Princeton, remembers talking with Huang and Wingreen about a question that microbiologists were stuck on: How are molecules oriented in bacterial cell walls? Researchers knew that the walls are made of rigid sugar strands connected by flexible proteins, like a chain link fence held together by rubber bands. What they didn’t know was whether the rubber bands circled the bacteria like the hoops on a wine barrel, ran in stripes down the length of the cell or stuck out like hairs.

If bacteria were put under pressure, the cells would crack along the weak rubber band–like links, Huang and Wingreen reasoned. If the cells split like hot dogs on a grill, it would mean the links ran the length of the cells. If they opened like a Slinky, it would suggest a wine-barrel configuration. The researchers reported the results — opened like a Slinky — in 2008. Another group, using improved microscope techniques, got the same result.

Huang teamed up with other researchers to do microfluidics experiments, growing bacteria in tiny chambers and tracking individual cells to learn how photosynthetic bacteria grow in light and dark.

But in nature, bacteria don’t live alone. So Huang has also worked with Stanford colleague Justin Sonnenburg to answer a basic question: “Where and when are bacteria in the gut growing? No one knows,” Huang says. “How can we not know that? It’s totally fundamental.” Without that information, it’s impossible to know, for example, how antibiotics affect the microbial community in the intestines, he says.

Stripping fiber from a mouse’s diet not only changes the mix of microbes in the gut, it alters where in the intestines the microbes grow, the researchers discovered. Bacteria deprived of fiber’s complex sugars began to munch on the protective mucus lining the intestines, bumping against the intestinal lining and sparking inflammation, Huang, Sonnenburg and colleagues reported in Cell Host & Microbe in 2015.

Huang’s breadth of research — from deciphering the nanoscale twists of proteins to mapping whole microbial communities — is sure to lead to many more discoveries. “He’s capable of making contributions to any field,” Jacobs-Wagner says, “or any research question that he’s interested in.”