The EU's anti-subsidy probe into Chinese new energy vehicles (NEV) is based on subjective assumptions, lacks sufficient evidence and goes against WTO rules, China's Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) said on Wednesday, responding to an EU decision to conduct the probe.

We express strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to the EU decision, the MOFCOM said in a statement posted on its website on Wednesday.

China will closely follow Europe's investigative procedure and firmly safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies, the MOFCOM said.

The EU requires negotiation with the Chinese side under extremely short notice and failed to provide effective materials for negotiation, which has seriously infringed China's rights, according to the ministry.

The ministry noted that in the 10th China-EU High-level Economic and Trade Dialogue, held in late September, the Chinese side clearly stated that the EU's proposed probe is blatant protectionism and aimed at protecting the EU's industry under the guise of "fair trade," the moves of which will seriously disrupt and distort the global automotive industrial and supply chain, of which the EU has a part, and result in negative impacts on China-EU trade and economic ties.

China urged the EU to exert caution in applying trade remedy measures, considering the big picture of maintaining the stability of global industrial and supply chains and the China-EU comprehensive strategic partnership, the MOFCOM said.

"The EU should encourage deepened cooperation in the new energy industry which has NEVs as one of its spearheads, and create a fair, non-discriminatory and predictable market environment for the common development of the China-EU EV industry," the MOFCOM said.

In recent years, China's EV industry has seen rapid development thanks to its unremitting technological innovation and building up of a complete industrial and supply chain. And Chinese EVs have been favored by consumers including those in the EU.

According to auto consultancy Inovev, 8 percent of new EVs sold in Europe as of September this year were Chinese, up from 6 percent in 2022 and 4 percent in 2021.

In 2022, Chinese automakers exported 545,244 NEVs to Europe, accounting for 48.66 percent of all NEV exports, data from the China Passenger Car Association showed.

On Wednesday, the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM) expressed its strong opposition to the EU’s decision.

It is a clear fact that the Chinese EV market is a fiercely competitive market and not one supported and protected by subsidies, the industry association said, adding that the EU’s stubbornness in launching the probe regardless of the fact constitutes a blatant protectionist behavior and will definitely impede the global development of the EV industry and pose hazard to the global carbon neutralization process.

The Chinese and European automotive industries are partners, not rivals, and the development of the automotive industry needs fair competition, not protectionism, the CAAM said.

Taikonauts of the Shenzhou-14 manned spaceflight mission crew are conducting their third spacewalk operation on Thursday, which marked the first extravehicular activities (EVA) after the China Space Station completed its T-shape basic structure assembly on November 3.

As of 11:16 am, taikonauts have successfully opened the airlock and the Shenzhou-14 mission commander Chen Dong first came out of the cabin. Chen will be followed by his fellow crewmember Cai Xudong for the Thursday spacewalk. Liu Yang, the only female crewmember, will be supporting them on the inside, according to the China Manned Space Agency.

During the Thursday operation, which is the seventh at the China Space Station executed by taikonauts, spacewalking taikonauts are expected to carry out works including the installation of connecting devices to bridge space station modules to facilitate future spacewalk missions and the elevation of the panorama camera on the Wentian lab module. 

The Global Times learned from mission insiders that the Thursday spacewalk will also mark a first in the use of the combination of the large and small robotic arms to support taikonauts activities all over the mega space station combination.

Having been connected at the ends, the combination of the large and small robotic arms could provide a larger operation range for taikonauts that extends to 15 meters, meaning it will be able to cover almost every corner of the space station combination, according to mission insiders. 

The second space station lab module Mengtian conducted successful transposition in orbit at 9:32 am on November 3, marking the completion of the China Space Station's T-shape basic structure assembly and a key step forward toward the completion of the space station.

China has successfully tested a parachute system during a recent launch of a Long March-3B carrier rocket, confirming an ability to narrow the landing area by 80 percent, making the landing more precise, the Global Times learned from the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT) on Friday.

The test was conducted on May 17 when the rocket was successfully launched carrying the 56th satellite for China's BeiDou Navigation Satellite System.

After analysis of experimental data and debris at the site, the academy found that the parachute system can fly in accordance with arranged landing lines and precisely push the detached part of the rocket to the landing area. The system narrowed the landing area range by 80 percent, according to the academy.

The test laid the foundation for large-scale application of the system in future projects, the academy noted.

According to the academy, the parachute system was independently developed by CALT to improve the safety of the landing area of rocket debris at the inland launch site.

Encased atop one of the rocket's four boosters, the high-tech parachute system was activated after the booster separated from the rocket and fell back to a preset altitude in order to control the separated body's altitude and direction and guide it to the arranged landing area, the academy told the Global Times.

The precise controlling of the system was achieved after various rounds of optimization.

The main optimization was carried out in the electrical subsystem. Engineers integrated the design of the parachute system in the boosters with that of the rocket fairings, and also integrated the electrical equipment within the parachute system, achieving a weight reduction of 30 kilograms, according to CALT.

Along with EG.5, a sublineage of the Omicron variant, being classified as a "variant of interest" by the World Health Organization (WHO), the topic of a third COVID-19 wave has triggered discussions among Chinese netizens in recent days with many sharing their infection experiences. Experts noted that the COVID-19 situation in China is still stable and that there is no need to panic.

Some netizens on Monday who said on social media that they had been reinfected a third time noted that their symptoms were lighter than previous infections. However, some shared different experiences.

The current COVID-19 infections are more hidden, but generally still at a relatively stable level. There isn't an obvious seasonal pattern for COVID-19 transmission, but usually it will show a small infection peak every five to six months. Generally, "the infection peak is decreasing, with no impact on the country's overall prevention work," Lu Hongzhou, head of the Third People's Hospital of Shenzhen, told the Global Times on Monday.

Generally speaking, fewer people have been infected for a third or more time in Shenzhen, South China's Guangdong Province, according to Lu.

Peng Jie, director of the Difficult Infectious Disease Center at Nanfang Hospital in Guangzhou, also in Guangdong, said since the peak reinfection wave in May, some patients who thought they had ordinary fevers only found out they had COVID-19 after nucleic acid testing. Among them, only a few were infected for the third time, and their symptoms are relatively light, said Peng, according to a report issued on the Guangdong authorities' WeChat account on Saturday.

National fever outpatient treatment and the number of severe COVID-19 cases have shown a fluctuating downward trend, according to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC).

In July alone, the Chinese mainland reported 455 new serious cases of COVID-19, with 65 deaths. The patients had underlying health issues, and no one died of respiratory failure due to COVID-19, the China CDC said in its latest report issued on August 3. In June, the country reported 1,968 new serious cases, with 239 deaths, said the China CDC.

Based on the July data, the genome sequences of 9,591 local COVID-19 samples were all Omicron variant strains, covering 116 evolutionary branches, and the XBB variant strains were the main circulating ones, said the report released by the China CDC.

Due to the highly infectious nature of COVID-19 and the natural decrease in antibodies in individuals over time, basically most people can expect to be infected one to three times in a year. However, "for people with normal immune function, it will not have a significant impact on them," Lu explained. 

As long as the COVID-19 mutation doesn't completely break away from the Omicron subbranch, an individual will have a cross-immune memory, so when an individual encounters the EG.5 COVID-19 strain, it will respond fast and produce antibodies, according to Lu.

EG.5 was first reported in February, and designated as a variant under monitoring in July, according to a report released by the WHO on August 9. There has been a steady increase in the proportion of EG.5 reported globally. From July 17 to 23, the global prevalence of EG.5 was 17.4 percent, a notable rise from the data reported in the week from June 19 to 25, when the global prevalence of EG.5 was 7.6 percent, according to the WHO.

Lu suggested people with underlying health issues receive COVID-19 vaccinations regularly, including nasal spray vaccines or other multivalent vaccine strategies.

The Culture and Tourism Department of Northwest China's Qinghai Province issued an announcement on Monday, strictly prohibiting tourists from entering unmanned scenic areas for activities such as exploration and tourism, adding that the full cost of rescue operations will be borne entirely by the involved individuals and groups as the rescue work is extremely challenging, in the event of getting stranded.

With the increasing popularity and fervor of self-driving tours and adventure sports in recent years, a growing number of tourists and adventurers are opting to venture into uninhabited areas. Consequently, a series of incidents involving missing people and fatalities have unfolded in tandem.

Located within the heart of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, Qinghai Province is situated in a cold and high-altitude region. In certain areas, communication signals can be weak or nonexistent. The region features numerous "dangerous zones" and "uninhabited areas," with complex terrain and environmental conditions.

The announcement issued by local authorities highlighted that individuals venturing into uninhabited, unreleased, and undeveloped scenic areas, whether on foot or by vehicle, will face unpredictable risks. Travelers might encounter life-threatening situations such as dehydration, oxygen deficiency, getting lost, vehicle breakdowns, and communication loss at any time.

The latest case is that one of the vehicles carrying four people on a driving holiday has gone missing while crossing the Xinjiang Lop Nur Wild Camel National Nature Reserve without authorization, resulting in four deaths, according to media reports and local police from Ruoqiang County in Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region on July 28.

Following extensive search and rescue operations, the missing vehicle was located, with four individuals found dead. The rest of the convoy members have safely returned to Dunhuang in neighboring Gansu Province.

Industry experts said on Saturday that entering the Lop Nur in summer is very risky, as surface temperatures in the area would reach as high as 70 C. Vehicle breakdowns, communication malfunctions, and the lack of adequate logistical support can all lead to adventurers being unable to safely exit unpopulated areas.

The local government emphasized in the statement that tourists should further enhance their self-protection awareness. They should refrain from leaving designated roads and venturing deep into dangerous areas such as uninhabited, unopened, and undeveloped scenic spots for adventure, tourism, and crossings.

Furthermore, the statement particularly underscores that without proper authorization or reporting to relevant authorities, no individual or organization shall organize tourist groups under the pretext of exploration, crossing, or scientific research to venture deep into natural conservation areas. In the event of getting stranded, the full cost of rescue operations will be borne entirely by the involved individuals and groups.

Travelers should carefully assess their routes, and pay attention to weather forecasts, geological hazards, and traffic conditions while also maintaining ample reserves of supplies and ensuring vehicle maintenance, which is essential to ensure the safety of the journey, said the statement.

The dumping of nuclear-contaminated wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan has raised concerns among Chinese citizens about the state of the marine environment. Chinese environmental authorities on Monday vowed to strengthen the monitoring of marine environmental pollution through multiple means, including conducting baseline surveys of marine pollution and utilizing satellites for monitoring.

China has launched its third marine pollution baseline survey, with the goal of completing a thorough investigation and assessment by 2025, said Wang Juying, the director of the National Marine Environmental Monitoring Center, at the ministry's monthly press conference on Monday.

According to Wang, this survey follows the overall approach of "understanding the current situation, identifying problems, analyzing causes, and proposing countermeasures," and focuses on China's coastal waters and the country's 283 bays, with the aim of understanding the baseline levels of various pollutants in China's jurisdictional waters, the ecological conditions of various bays, and the impact of human activities. 

"The survey aims to comprehensively grasp the basic state and trends of the marine ecological environment," Wang said.

China previously conducted the first and second national marine pollution baseline surveys in 1976 and 1996, respectively.

Hu Songqin, deputy director of the Department of Marine Ecology and Environment of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, mentioned during the conference that the recent successful launch of a satellite to serve environmental protection and disaster management will significantly enhance data support and emergency response capabilities for sudden water environmental pollution events.

She stated that the Ministry of Ecology and Environment will actively collaborate with relevant research institutions and coastal regions, making effective use of data sources from monitoring systems. 

"These will provide crucial technical support for addressing sudden environmental events, pollution incidents, investigations of key risk sources, and enhancing marine ecological environmental governance capabilities," she noted.

In response to Japan dumping the contaminated water from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the ocean, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment has stated the specific measures that China has taken in terms of marine radiation environment monitoring.

At present, the ministry is actively conducting marine radiation environment monitoring in areas under China's jurisdiction for the year 2023, guided by a focus on critical regions, comprehensive coverage of jurisdictional waters, and a thorough understanding of key pathways, according to the ministry.

The ministry also vowed that in the future it will continue to strengthen relevant monitoring efforts, closely track and assess the potential impact of of contaminated water from the Fukushima nuclear plant on China's marine environment, and effectively safeguard the national interests and public health.

In 2021 and 2022, the ministry organized marine radiation environment monitoring in areas under China's jurisdiction, which provided insight into the baseline condition of the marine radiation environment in these regions. The monitoring results indicated that there were no abnormal levels of artificial radioactive isotopes in the seawater and marine organisms in China's jurisdictional waters, and overall, the concentrations remained within the historical fluctuation range.

Here’s a good idea for the next presidential candidate debate: They can insult each other about their ignorance of statistics.

Actually, it’s a pertinent topic for political office seekers, as public opinion polls use statistical methods to measure the electorate’s support (or lack thereof) for a particular candidate. But such polls are notoriously unreliable, as Hillary Clinton found out in Michigan.

It probably wouldn’t be a very informative debate, of course — just imagine how Donald Trump would respond to a question asking what he thought about P values. Sadly, though, he and the other candidates might actually understand P values just about as well as many practicing scientists — which is to say, not very well at all.
In recent years criticism about P values — statistical measures widely used to analyze experimental data in most scientific disciplines — has finally reverberated loudly enough for the scientific community to listen. A watershed acknowledgment of P value problems appeared this week when the American Statistical Association issued a statement warning the rest of the world about the limitations of P values and their widespread misuse.

“While the p-value can be a useful statistical measure, it is commonly misused and misinterpreted,” the statistical association report stated. “This has led to some scientific journals discouraging the use of p-values, and some scientists and statisticians recommending their abandonment.”

In light of these issues, the association convened a group of experts to formulate a document listing six “principles” regarding P values for the guidance of “researchers, practitioners and science writers who are not primarily statisticians.” Of those six principles, the most pertinent for people in general (and science journalists in particular) is No. 5: “A p-value, or statistical significance, does not measure the size of an effect or the importance of a result.”

What, then, does it measure? That’s principle No. 1: “… how incompatible the data are with a specified statistical model.” But note well principle No. 2: “P-values do not measure the probability that the studied hypothesis is true, or the probability that the data were produced by random chance alone.” And therefore, always remember principle No. 3: “Scientific conclusions … or policy decisions should not be based only on whether a p-value passes a specific threshold.”

In other words, the common convention of judging a P value less than .05 to be “statistically significant” is not really a proper basis for assigning significance at all. Except that scientific journals still regularly use that criterion for deciding whether a paper gets published. Which in turn drives researchers to finagle their data to get a P value of less than .05. As a result, the scientific process is tarnished and the published scientific literature is often unreliable.
As the statistical association statement points out, this situation is far from merely of academic concern.

“The issues touched on here affect not only research, but research funding, journal practices, career advancement, scientific education, public policy, journalism, and law,” the authors point out in the report, published online March 7 in The American Statistician.

Many of the experts who participated in the process wrote commentaries on the document, some stressing that it did not go far enough in condemning P values’ pernicious influences on science.

“Viewed alone, p-values calculated from a set of numbers and assuming a statistical model are of limited value and frequently are meaningless,” wrote biostatistician Donald Berry of MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. He cited the serious negative impact that misuse and misinterpretation of P values has had not only on science, but also on society. “Patients with serious diseases have been harmed. Researchers have chased wild geese, finding too often that statistically significant conclusions could not be reproduced. The economic impacts of faulty statistical conclusions are great.”

Echoing Berry’s concerns was Boston University epidemiologist Kenneth Rothman. “It is a safe bet that people have suffered or died because scientists (and editors, regulators, journalists and others) have used significance tests to interpret results,” Rothman wrote. “The correspondence between results that are statistically significant and those that are truly important is far too low to be useful. Consequently, scientists have embraced and even avidly pursued meaningless differences solely because they are statistically significant, and have ignored important effects because they failed to pass the screen of statistical significance.”

Stanford University epidemiologist John Ioannidis compared the scientific community’s attachment to P values with drug addiction, fueled by the institutional rewards that accompany the publication process.

“Misleading use of P-values is so easy and automated that, especially when rewarded with publication and funding, it can become addictive,” Ioannidis commented. “Investigators generating these torrents of P-values should be seen with sympathy as drug addicts in need of rehabilitation that will help them live a better, more meaningful scientific life in the future.”

Although a handful of P value defenders can still be found among the participants in this discussion, it should be clear by now that P values, as currently used in science, do more harm than good. They may be valid and useful under certain specific circumstances, but those circumstances are rarely relevant in most experimental contexts. As Berry notes, statisticians can correctly define P values in a technical sense, but “most statisticians do not really understand the issues in applied settings.”

In its statement, the statistical association goes a long way toward validating the concerns about P values that have been expressed for decades by many critical observers. This validation may succeed in initiating change where previous efforts have failed. But that won’t happen without identifying some alternative to the P value system, and while many have been proposed, no candidate has emerged as an acceptable nominee for a majority of the scientific world’s electorate. So the next debate should not be about P values — it should be about what to replace them with.

Clownfish and anemones depend on one another. The stinging arms of the anemones provide clownfish with protection against predators. In return, the fish keep the anemone clean and provide nutrients, in the form of poop. Usually, several individual clownfish occupy a single anemone — a large and dominant female, an adult male and several subordinates — all from the same species. But with 28 species of clownfish and 10 species of anemone, there can be a lot of competition for who gets to occupy which anemone.

In the highly diverse waters of the Coral Triangle of Southeast Asia, however, clownfish have figured out how to share, researchers report March 30 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Anemones in these waters are often home to multiple species of clownfish that live together peacefully.

From 2005 to 2014, Emma Camp, of the University of Technology Sydney and colleagues gathered data on clownfish and their anemone homes from 20 locations that had more than one species of clownfish residents. In 981 underwater survey transects, they encountered 1,508 clownfish, 377 of which lived in groups consisting of two or more fish species in a single anemone.

Most of those cohabiting clownfish could be found in the waters of the Coral Triangle, the team found, with the highest levels of species cohabitation occurring off Hoga Island in Indonesia. There, the researchers found 437 clownfish from six species living among 114 anemones of five species. Every anemone was occupied by clownfish, and half had two species of the fish.

In general, “when the number of clownfish species exceeded the number of host anemone species, cohabitation was almost always documented,” the researchers write.

The multiple-species groups divvied up space in an anemone similar to the way that a single-species group does, with subordinate fish sticking to the peripheries. That way, those subordinate fish can avoid fights — and potentially getting kicked off the anemone or even dying. “Living on the periphery of an anemone, despite the higher risk of predation, is a better option than having no host anemone,” the team writes.

These multi-species groups might even be better for both of the clownfish species, since they wouldn’t have to compete so much over mates, and perhaps even less over food, if the species had different diets.

This isn’t the first time that scientists have found cohabitation to be an effective strategy in an area of high biodiversity. This has also been demonstrated with scorpions in the Amazon. But it does show how important it is to conserve species in regions such as this, the researchers say — because losing one species can easily wipe out several more.

NEW YORK — Lip-readers’ minds seem to “hear” the words their eyes see being formed. And the better a person is at lipreading, the more neural activity there is in the brain’s auditory cortex, scientists reported April 4 at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society.

Earlier studies have found that auditory brain areas are active during lipreading. But most of those studies focused on small bits of language — simple sentences or even single words, said study coauthor Satu Saalasti of Aalto University in Finland. In contrast, Saalasti and colleagues studied lipreading in more natural situations. Twenty-nine people read the silent lips of a person who spoke Finnish for eight minutes in a video. “We can all lip-read to some extent,” Saalasti said, and the participants, who had no lipreading experience, varied widely in their comprehension of the eight-minute story.

In the best lip-readers, activity in the auditory cortex was quite similar to that evoked when the story was read aloud, brain scans revealed. The results suggest that lipreading success depends on a person’s ability to “hear” the words formed by moving lips, Saalasti said.

To rewrite an Alanis Morissette song, the brain has a funny way of waking you up (and putting you to sleep). Isn’t it ionic? Some scientists think so.

Changes in ion concentrations, not nerve cell activity, switch the brain from asleep to awake and back again, researchers report in the April 29 Science. Scientists knew that levels of potassium, calcium and magnesium ions bathing brain cells changed during sleep and wakefulness. But they thought neurons — electrically active cells responsible for most of the brain’s processing power — drove those changes.
Instead, the study suggests, neurons aren’t the only sandmen or roosters in the brain. “Neuromodulator” brain chemicals, which pace neuron activity, can bypass neurons altogether to directly wake the brain or lull it to sleep by changing ion concentrations.

Scientists hadn’t found this direct connection between ions and sleep and wake before because they were mostly focused on what neurons were doing, says neuroscientist Maiken Nedergaard, who led the study. She got interested in sleep after her lab at the University of Rochester in New York found a drainage system that washes the brain during sleep (SN: 11/16/13, p. 7).When measuring changes in the fluid between brain cells, Nedergaard and colleagues realized that ion changes followed predictable patterns: Potassium ion levels are high when mice (and presumably people) are awake, and drop during sleep. Calcium and magnesium ions follow the opposite pattern; they are higher during sleep and lower when mice are awake.
In the study, Nedergaard’s group administered a “wake cocktail” of neuromodulator chemicals to mouse brains. Levels of potassium ions floating between brain cells increased rapidly after the treatment, the researchers found. That ion change happened even when the researchers added tetrodotoxin to stop neuron activity. The results suggest that the brain chemicals — norepinephrine, acetylcholine, dopamine, orexin and histamine — directly affect ion levels with no help from neurons. Exactly how the chemicals manage ion levels still isn’t known.
Similar changes happen under anesthesia. When awake mice were anesthetized, potassium ion levels in their brains dropped sharply, while levels of calcium and magnesium rose, the researchers found. As mice awoke from anesthesia, potassium ion levels rose quickly. But calcium and magnesium levels took longer to drop. As a result, the mice “are totally confused,” says Nedergaard. “They bump into their cages, they run around and they don’t know what they are doing.”

Those results may help explain why people are groggy after waking up from anesthesia; their ion levels haven’t returned to “awake” levels yet, says Amita Sehgal, a sleep researcher at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

Learning more about how ions affect wake and sleep may eventually lead to a better understanding of sleep, consciousness and coma, Nedergaard says.

But, says neuroscientist Chiara Cirelli of the University of Wisconsin‒Madison, practical implications of the work, such as improved sleep drugs, are probably far in the future. “How they make use of it will take some time, but just knowing this is certainly very eye-opening.” It would be interesting to find out what happens to ion concentrations during REM sleep, when neurons are as active as they are when a person is awake, she says.