Veteran Shanghai soccer coach Xu Genbao on Monday has called for his former students with club Shanghai Port, which was crowned as the Chinese Super League (CSL) champions a day earlier, to focus on propelling Chinese soccer onto the global stage. The veteran sextet also paid tribute to the legendary coach.

Led by forward Wu Lei, the famed "East Asia Six Tigers" - Wu, Yan Junling, Zhang Linpeng, Wang Shenchao, Cai Huikang, and Lü Wenjun - made a special visit to pay their respects to coach Xu, the man who played a significant role in their careers while they attended his academy on Chongming Island as part of Shanghai East Asia FC. 

"The dream we cherished as teenagers, we did it together! It feels good to have everyone together," Wu wrote on social media on Monday, celebrating the league win with his fellow Shanghai East Asia teammates and coach Xu. 

Xu, a legendary figure in Chinese soccer, founded the soccer training base at the beginning of the 2000s. This Chongming Island school has been instrumental in nurturing and developing a generation of talented players who are now leading the way for Chinese soccer on both the domestic and international stage. 

"From today on, the happiness after winning the league championship is over. True happiness is helping Chinese soccer excel in Asia and propelling the team onto the global stage," Xu told his former students, who are now in their 30s.  

The players, who were the key players in Shanghai Port's previous league triumph in 2018, except for Zhang who was with Guangzhou FC, are all past their prime now. Zhang, Wang, Lü, and Cai are now 34 years old, while Wu and Yan are two years younger.

Zhang's departure to Guangzhou was mainly because the club was facing financial issues and selling promising players remains a practical way to generate revenue in club operations. But now the sextet has regrouped all together at Port, though their careers are declining due to age. 

The players are expected to represent China at the upcoming FIFA World Cup Asian qualifiers in November, when they will visit Thailand on November 16 before hosting South Korea on November 21.

"As the players approach the twilight of their careers, adding another CSL title to their list of accomplishments not only further enriches their soccer stories, but also reinforces the idea that long-term youth development pays off," Mao Jiale, a Chengdu-based sports commentator, told the Global Times.

"Their triumphant journey is a testament to Xu's legacy, who spent two decades dedicated to youth development on Chongming Island."

After spending three seasons overseas, Wu has topped the domestic scoring list by 16 goals. 

"You should have a bigger goal [rather than winning domestic championship]," Xu told Wu. 

During their meeting, Xu, who is now 80 years old and still actively coaches the local Shanghai youth team, also asked if his former students would consider following in his footsteps by becoming coaches. 

"I can't find someone to take over. Maybe you guys can take into consideration this role," Xu said. "I hope you will come back. I hope I can have a successor."

Xu's achievement is rare in the populous country as the "East Asia Six Tigers" are not only key players for the local Port team, but also once played a pivotal role in the Chinese national soccer team. 

Song Kai, the new president of the Chinese Football Association (CFA), recently stated that youth development should be a top priority in developing Chinese soccer. 

The island, located at the mouth of the Yangtze River, has become the cradle of Chinese soccer talent. The academy was founded on the principle that nurturing young talents from an early age was the key to China's soccer future.

"Xu had instilled in his players the importance of hard work, dedication, and a never-give-up spirit. His legacy is a shining example of what can be achieved through long-term commitment and investment in young talent," Mao noted. 

"The hope is that more coaches and institutions will follow in the footsteps of Xu Genbao and his soccer training school, paving the way for a brighter future for Chinese soccer.

A decade since the first North American Shaolin Cultural Festival in 2013, the Shaolin Temple is once again hosting an official cultural exchange event in the US. 

The highly anticipated "2023 North American Shaolin Games" and a series of martial arts-related activities are scheduled to take place in Los Angeles, the US, on November 11 and 12.

The announcement was made during a press conference held on November 7. 

Organized by the renowned Songshan Shaolin Temple in China, in collaboration with the Shaolin North American Association, the games are expected to serve as a platform for kung fu enthusiasts to show off their skills and promote the popularization of the ancient sport in North America. 

Approximately 500 Shaolin disciples from over 40 states in the US, as well as from countries ­including ­Canada and Mexico will ­participate in the events.

Shi Yongxin, the abbot of the Shaolin Temple, said at the press conference that Shaolin kung fu is famous all over the world. 

Kung fu not only strengthens the body, but also uses martial arts to achieve Zen and enlighten people through wisdom. 

The kung fu competition is a long-standing tradition at the Shaolin Temple, which aims to enable Shaolin disciples to study more diligently and constantly surpass themselves, according to Shi.

During the opening ceremony, dignitaries from various fields will witness the top performers in various categories. 

The 2023 North American Shaolin kung fu stars - the top three in each discipline - will receive medals, trophies, certificates, and accolades as encouragement.

According to Shi, the tradition of Shaolin kung fu competitions has flourished overseas since 2011. 

Events like the European Shaolin Cultural Festival and the North American Shaolin Cultural Festival all regard the Shaolin kung fu competition as core content.

In 2022, the Shaolin kung fu online competition continued this tradition, uniting 5,320 participants from 94 countries and regions across six continents. 

Before coming to the US in 2023, the Shaolin Games had already been held in Zambia in Africa, Singapore in Asia, and Argentina in Latin America.

Shi, leading the visiting delegation, arrived in Los Angeles on November 1 to kick off a series of North American visits. 

During his visit to San Francisco on November 7, he delivered a speech titled "Zen Meets AI" at Meta's headquarters. 

In his address, he emphasized that while AI possesses remarkable data processing and analytical capabilities, and may display similar human perceptions through programs and algorithms, but it cannot replicate the awakened consciousness advocated by Zen Buddhism. 

He encouraged human beings to seek inner wisdom and ­transcendence, even in the face of AI advancements.

According to Shi, Zen ­Buddhism emphasizes that Zen practitioners can gradually improve their state of enlightenment through their own efforts. 

As a tool, AI can search and find relevant classics to solve various doubts that Zen ­practitioners encounter, providing assistance and convenience to Zen practitioners.

In spite of international outrage, Japan on Thursday began releasing a second round of nuclear-contaminated wastewater from Fukushima. Chinese experts warned that this latest irresponsible move will not only further damage Japan’s international reputation, but also continue to eat away at Japan’s exports to China and discourage travel to Japan.

Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (TEPCO) said it finished inspections following the initial release, which concluded on September 11, and found no reason to alter procedures. During the first round, the company said a total of 7,788 tons of treated water, stored in 10 tanks within the plant's premises, were released, according to the Japan Times.

In the second round, roughly the same amount of water is set to be released over 17 days, the utility operator confirmed. TEPCO added that the treated water is stored in over 1,000 tanks.

Overall, the dumping of the water into the Pacific Ocean is expected to take three decades to complete.

After Japan's move, a spokesperson from the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated on Thursday that China's stance on Japan's dumping of nuclear-contaminated wastewater from Fukushima has always been consistent and clear. The spokesperson emphasized, "We firmly oppose Japan's unilateral action of discharging the water into the sea."

The spokesperson also urged the Japanese government to comprehensively respond to the concerns of the international community and engage in full consultations with neighboring countries in a sincere manner, and responsibly handle the disposal of nuclear-contaminated water. The international community should promote the establishment of a long-term and effective international monitoring arrangement and ensure the active participation of relevant parties, including neighboring countries of Japan, said the spokesperson.

Hong Kong’s Secretary for Environment and Ecology Tse Chin-wan said on Wednesday that Hong Kong has no plans to ease restrictions on Japanese seafood imports, reiterating the government’s opposition to Japan’s “unilateral” decision to dump wastewater from the crippled nuclear plant.

“The ball is in Japan’s court. If Japan does not change its ways, I don’t see that we are under any condition to [relax the bans],” Tse said.

China’s customs authority banned imports of all seafood from Japan starting from August 24, in response to Japan’s dumping nuclear-contaminated wastewater from the plant.

China's seafood imports from Japan in August dived 67.6 percent from a year earlier to 149.02 million yuan ($20.44 million), after a fall of 28.5 percent in July, Kyodo News reported, citing data from Chinese customs released last month.

Japan’s seafood exports to South Korea also plunged in August, according to reports.

Japan's nuclear-contaminated wastewater dumping opened a Pandora's Box and the damage to Japan's fishery industry will worsen, Lü Xiang, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times. The expert also said that if Japan continues to dump nuclear-contaminated wastewater, it will face more international condemnation potentially devastating Japan's seafood export market.

During China’s eight-day Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day holidays, which last from September 29 to October 6, long lines can be seen at most restaurants in the Chinese capital of Beijing, however, some Japanese restaurants remained empty. When a Global Times reporter visited the popular Solana shopping mall in Beijing on Wednesday, no one was dining at the two Japanese restaurants in the complex.

A waitress from one of the Japanese restaurants told the Global Times that she only received a few customers during the holidays, because “people are concerned about the nuclear-contaminated wastewater [from Japan].”

The wastewater issue is not only hitting seafood exports, Chinese tourists’ enthusiasm for traveling to the country has also taken a hit following Tokyo’s irresponsible move. Ahead of the holidays, cancellations of Chinese tours to the country had already begun, media reported last month, ahead of the holidays.

However, many Japanese media outlets began to claim that despite concerns about the dumping of nuclear-contaminated wastewater, Japan remained a hotspot for Chinese tourists during the holidays.

The Japan Times reported on September 29 that “Japanese airlines' flights from China to Japan are almost fully booked during an eight-day holiday that began Friday, the airlines said, despite Chinese media reports last month that Japan-bound trips had been canceled following the release of treated radioactive water from the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant into the sea.”

Da Zhigang, director of the Institute of Northeast Asian Studies at the Heilongjiang Provincial Academy of Social Sciences refuted the report.

He said that the Japanese media linked various reasons behind the surge of Chinese visitors in Japan, including the fact that China resumed Japan-bound group tours, the demands for business trips and visiting family members are growing, adding that October is also when foreign students enroll in Japanese colleges.

They generalized "Chinese people traveling to Japan" as "Chinese tourists," ignoring the fact that the passengers include a large number of business people and students, and even some Japanese citizens are on these so-called "packed" flights to Japan.

Da also said these Japanese media outlets are using "tourism public opinion warfare" to muddle through and downplay their country's responsibility in wastewater dumping, as they link the "Chinese visitors to Japan" with the issue of Japan's dumping of nuclear-contaminated wastewater into the sea.

The "Out of Africa - Celebrating the Beijing Swifts" seminar was successfully held on Monday evening in the Belgian Residence in Beijing, coinciding with the World Migratory Bird Day to promote the conservation of migratory birds such as the Beijing Swifts and their habitats. 

Ambassador of Belgium to China H.E. Bruno Angelet, deputy director-general of the Beijing Municipal Forestry and Parks Bureau Wang Xiaoping, deputy director of the Wildlife and Wetland Protection Division Ji Jianwei, Beijing Normal University professor Zhao Xinru, professor of Ornithology at the Sun Yat-sen University, Liu Yang and Beijing-based wildlife conservationist Terry Townshend, and several ambassadors attended the event.

Ambassador Angelet, the host of the event delivered a speech. He declared a love for birds, especially the Swifts as they are intelligent, social, gentle and free, adding that he was also a birdwatcher in Belgium and after arriving in Beijing in August, he was pleasantly surprised at the great variety of birds in the city, including sparrows, which have almost disappeared in Belgium, but can be found everywhere in Beijing. 

"I was so excited to discover that European and Chinese scientists have studied specific aspects of their journey. Through this study, we have discovered that the Swifts which nest in Beijing also come every spring from Africa, mostly from Namibia, Botswana, and South Africa," he told the Global Times. 

Ambassador Angelet also expressed his hope that embassies and their Chinese counterparts will join forces to improve bilateral international scientific cooperation.

Professor Zhao and Professor Liu, two of the best-known Chinese scientists who have been studying the bird species shared the results of the citizen science surveys to count the Swifts in Beijing to help understand the bird's population trends.  

The Beijing Swift, as a migratory bird named after "Beijing," is a landmark species and one of the ecological symbols of Beijing. It spends three months a year in Beijing to breed before undertaking an incredible migration to southern Africa in mid-July for the northern hemisphere winter, professor Zhao said at the event.

The three taikonauts from China's Shenzhou-15 crewed mission, known as the "dream crew," on Monday made their first appearance in public 57 days later after returning to Earth in June. The crem members shared their experience and feeling in the space and deeply felt the wonder of nature, the vastness of the universe.

China launched the manned spaceship Shenzhou-15 on November 29, 2022, sending Fei Junlong, Deng Qingming and Zhang Lu to China's space station core module Tianhe.

Having spent six months living and working in the China Space Station, the three Shenzhou-15 taikonauts safely returned to the Dongfeng landing site in the Gobi Desert, North China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in June.

China Astronaut Research and Training Center has scientifically formulated a recovery plan. The recovery period is mainly divided into three stages - quarantine, recuperation and observation. So far, the crew has completed the first two stages, and they are in good physical and mental condition, and have been fully in the observation stage. They will resume regular training after completing all health and wellbeing assessments.

The four extravehicular activities (EVAs) are the highlight of our crew and the highlight of China's manned spaceship development. We believe that the following crew members will create more records, Fei said at Monday's press meeting.

"To realize a dream is not the end of the efforts, but a new starting point," Deng said. Deng has been made efforts for 25 years and finally fulfilled dream of missions in space.

Zhang who took the mission in the space for the first time took a lot of beautiful photos in space, many of them are about the motherland and hometown. Zhang again and again in the window looked at the motherland, and Zhang said that what impressed him most was extravehicular activities.

"Before my first extravehicular activities, I had been looking out of the porthole, which was so small that I couldn't get a full view." When I was faced with the boundless space for the first time, "I had a deep understanding of the wonders of nature and the vastness of the universe," Zhang said.

China has unveiled its preliminary plan on manned lunar landing. China planned to land its taikonauts on the moon before 2030 to carry out scientific exploration, according to a preliminary plan released by the China Manned Space Agency in July.

"We are fully aware of the mission and responsibility on our shoulders. We firmly believe that with scientific and systematic training, the full support of space science and technology staff, the unity of our crew, we can overcome any difficulty," Fei noted.

Some people can evade diseases even though they carry genetic mutations that cause serious problems for others.

Researchers found 13 of these genetic escape artists after examining DNA from nearly 600,000 people, the scientists report online April 11 in Nature Biotechnology. Learning how such people dodge genetic bullets may help move inherited-disease research from diagnosis to prevention.

Hundreds of mutations that lead to genetic diseases have been uncovered since the discovery of a disease-causing flaw in the “cystic fibrosis gene” in 1989. But, says study coauthor Stephen Friend, “finding the gene that causes the disease is not the same as finding a way to prevent the symptoms or manifestations of that disease.”
Clues to preventing genetic diseases could come from studying people who should have gotten sick but didn’t, suggest Friend, of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, and colleagues. Finding people like that is a challenge, though, because they don’t have symptoms.

To find such people, the team assembled existing genetic data from 589,306 adults who had their DNA tested as part of 12 ongoing or past studies. The researchers then searched for mutations known to cause genetic diseases in childhood. Since study participants were adults, they should already have developed symptoms.

Initially, the researchers found more than 15,000 potential escape artists. Further analysis whittled the field to 42. Of those, medical records indicated that 14 had symptoms of their genetic disease after all. Another 15 were ruled out because a closer examination found that each person had only one copy of a mutated gene. The other copy was normal, so could compensate for the debilitated copy.

The remaining 13 people carried mutations associated with one of eight different diseases, but somehow had not developed symptoms. The study suggests that it is possible to find people who are resistant to getting genetic diseases.

But some resilient people may have been missed because the study included only a fraction of known disease-causing mutations, says Daniel MacArthur, a geneticist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. More troubling is that the researchers could not confirm that resistant people were disease-free or verify that they really have mutations. That’s because consent forms signed when participants agreed to share their genetic information did not contain provisions for researchers to contact volunteers later for retesting. “Some of their resilient cases may be mirages,” MacArthur wrote in a commentary, also in Nature Biotechnology.
Garry Cutting, a medical geneticist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, is also concerned that some of the lucky 13 may not be true escape artists. Cutting studies genes and environmental factors that determine the severity of cystic fibrosis, a disease in which thick mucus builds up in the lungs, pancreas and other organs. People develop the disease when they inherit two defective copies of the CFTR gene. More than 1,800 mutations in that gene can cause the disease if inherited in double copies or in combinations of mutations.

Of the 13 resilient people in the study, three carry dual copies of a very rare mutation in the CFTR gene, but don’t have cystic fibrosis.

Only one person in a database of 88,000 cystic fibrosis patients carries two copies of the rare mutation. So finding three people with double copies of the mutation is extraordinary, Cutting says. “It’s so exceptional that I believe it requires more extensive verification.”

He says he would be “delighted” if the people really turn out to be resistant to getting cystic fibrosis, but he’s puzzled why that mutation alone allows escape. It could be that a variant in another gene counteracts that specific mutation in the CFTR gene. Or a second mutation in the mutant CFTR gene may reverse the effect of the disease-causing one. However, it is possible that the three people avoided cystic fibrosis because they have only one copy of the mutated gene and one healthy copy that the researchers missed with the methods they used, Cutting says.

MacArthur points out another potential drawback to the study: Even if the researchers expand the study to 1 million or more people, they may not discover enough “genetic superheroes” to create a sample size large enough to detect protective genes. Such an effort may require participation from hundreds of millions of people and researchers willing to share data on a global scale.

A fossil dinosaur embryo known as “Baby Louie” has a new name. It belongs to a newly identified species of dinosaur called Beibeilong sinensis, researchers report May 9 in Nature Communications.

In the 1980s and 1990s, farmers found thousands of fossilized dinosaur eggs in the rocks of Henan Province in China and sold them overseas. It turned out that one chunk of rock, purchased by a company that sells museum-quality fossils and rock specimens, held not only eggs but also an embryonic dinosaur skeleton. It was dubbed “Baby Louie,” after a National Geographic photographer whose images of it appeared in a cover story for the magazine.
Paleontologists knew Baby Louie was some kind of oviraptorosaur, a two-legged, birdlike dinosaur. But its species was a mystery. So in 2015, Junchang Lü of the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences in Beijing and colleagues returned to the site in China where the eggs were excavated. They analyzed fossils there and examined Baby Louie’s remains, now housed in the Henan Geological Museum. The embryo measures 38 centimeters from its snout to the start of its tail and dates to about 90 million years ago.

Based on the structure of Baby Louie’s facial bones and other anatomical features, the team declared the dinosaur a new species. In Chinese, Beibei means “baby” and long means “dragon.”

Baby Louie’s skeleton was found with six to eight similar-looking dinosaur eggs. This type of dino egg is the largest identified to date and appears to have been abundant, leading paleontologists to think that birdlike dinosaurs like Baby Louie were common in the Late Cretaceous.

Nearly 1 in 5 adolescents has suffered at least one concussion, according to a survey of U.S. teens. And 5.5 percent reported two or more concussions diagnosed in their lifetimes, researchers report in the Sept. 26 JAMA.

About 13,000 eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders participated in the 2016 Monitoring the Future survey, an annual national questionnaire of adolescent behavior and health given in schools. Among other questions, teens were asked whether they had ever had a head injury that was diagnosed as a concussion — 19.5 percent replied “yes.” Those teens were more likely than others to play competitive sports and be male, white and in a higher grade.

Previous studies have found that kids taking part in contact sports are at higher risk of suffering a concussion. These new data on actual prevalence of concussions, though self-reported, are important, say the authors, for crafting prevention efforts that protect teens from injuries.

People in the United States who wear contact lenses share an eye-opening characteristic. Roughly 85 percent report regularly taking at least one risk when wearing or cleaning their lenses. In the Aug. 18 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describe results from a 2016 national survey of more than 6,000 people.

Contrary to previous studies, teens did better in some categories than adults. The no-no’s below can lead to serious eye infections, mainly by introducing microorganisms into the eye. Even water that’s safe to drink or swim in can bug up lenses.

Gene-editing tools heralded as hope for fighting invader rats, malarial mosquitoes and other scourges may be too powerful to use in their current form, two new papers warn.

Standard forms of CRISPR gene drives, as the tools are called, can make tweaked DNA race through a population so easily that a small number of stray animals or plants could spread it to new territory, predicts a computer simulation released November 16 at bioRxiv.org. Such an event would have unknown, potentially damaging, ramifications, says a PLOS Biology paper released the same day.
“We need to get out of the ivory tower and have this discussion in the open, because ecological engineering will affect everyone living in the area,” says Kevin Esvelt of MIT, a coauthor of both papers who studies genetic solutions to ecological problems. What’s a pest in one place may be valued in another, so getting consent to use a gene drive could mean consulting people across a species’s whole range, be it several nations or continents.

Researchers have constructed this kind of drive in yeast, a fruit fly and several mosquitoes, but none of the tools have been deployed yet in the wild (SN: 12/12/15, p. 16). Meanwhile, some researchers are already working to add brakes or off-switches into a new generation of gene drives.

The major concern is that current gene drives “are probably too powerful for us to seriously consider deploying in conservation,” says geneticist Neil Gemmell of the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. Gemmell is a coauthor of the PLOS Biology paper.
This opinion could prove especially controversial in New Zealand. In 2016, the government resolved to protect the nation’s imperiled biodiversity by exterminating invader rats, stoats and possums that are wreaking havoc on native species. Gene drives just might make that possible.

Though warning of perils, the researchers also propose some solutions. A weaker system, which Esvelt calls a daisy drive, splits up components of the drive called guide RNAs. These guide RNAs direct the gene-editing machinery to its DNA target, where molecular scissors then snip and swap genetic material. As genes get inherited or not in the chancy jumbling of sexual reproduction, descendants in later generations become less likely to inherit all the spaced-apart pieces needed to operate the gene drive.

Esvelt’s lab is working to create a daisy drive in two kinds of nematode worms and is looking at other species as well. Other labs are now working on tamer gene drives, too.

Anthony A. James of the University of California, Irvine says that the disease-carrying Anopheles mosquito species that he and his colleagues have equipped with gene drives are self-limiting. When females end up with two of the genes he’s inserting, they don’t “survive very well after they have fed on blood.” Researchers are now raising these mosquitoes to see whether the genes spread and then dwindle away. “We don’t need our genes to last forever,” James says, “only long enough to contribute to getting rid of malaria.”

Another lab’s current version of disease-fighter mosquitoes already has a touch of the daisy. Aedes aegypti mosquitoes engineered with some built-in parts of the gene editor have their guide RNA split into two parts and put on different chromosomes, says molecular biologist Omar Akbari of the University of California, San Diego. Pictures of many weird mosquitoes created this way — all yellow or with three eyes or forked wings — attest to the fact that the drive system works. Akbari’s research appears November 14 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Akbari is not very worried about the risk of accidentally wiping out disease-carrying mosquitoes. “A thousand children die every day,” he says. It would be unethical not to use a tool that could lessen the loss, he says.

He does recognize that the case for caution could be different for other species. “A lot of pet owners would be sad,” he says, if a gene drive went wrong and escaped worldwide during some future attempt to rid, say, Australia of its terribly destructive feral cats.