A recent mall shooting in downtown Bangkok leaving two dead was particularly shocking. Mass shootings are relatively rare in Thailand despite the Southeast Asian Kingdom's high rate of private firearms ownership. 

However, this is the third American-style mass shooting in recent years.

The suspect, a 14-year-old boy, was put into custody wearing a hat with a prominent American flag on it. Media reports claim the boy suffered from mental illness and was supposed to be taking prescribed medication. It also became known that he indulged in a growing obsession with violence, particularly on unrestricted social media platforms. Before the shooting, he had posted videos of himself training with a firearm at a firing range.

It is a pattern that has already become all too familiar in the US. Now it appears a segment of Thai society is being infected by this same brand of senseless violence. 

All signs point to a mentally ill youth whose condition was compounded by what he consumed and posted on social media, along with the American-style games and media he appears to have been absorbed by. However, much of the Thai media and Thai government seem to be reflexively focusing on "gun control" and increased security at public places - treating the symptoms rather than the source of the violence. 

For those who have lived in Thailand over the last two decades, they must have seen a lot of changes. Many of these changes have been very positive. Some of these changes are negative, and are clearly imported from abroad. 

Western-style fast food has bloated the waistlines of Thais in ways unrecognizable, compared with just 10 years ago. The youth are increasingly covered in Western-style tattoos and have adopted a distinctively Western, highly self-centered perspective relative to Thailand's traditions of hierarchy, respect for one's elders, community, family and one's personal sacrifice for the collective good.  

In many ways, these changes are shaping certain segments of the population in a way that looks more American than Thai, and these changes come with many of the chronic problems that undermine social stability in the US. 

One of America's biggest problems is its toxic culture of dehumanization and violence. It is something that is purveyed through not only the media -- through games, movies and TV series -- but also through acts of very real violence, including mass shootings, carried out across the US at alarmingly frequent intervals. 

Beyond this, America's toxic culture of dehumanization and violence is expressed through US foreign policy. The US maintains hundreds of military bases abroad including in nations it illegally occupies, and has waged wars of aggression against nations from North Africa to Central Asia and everywhere in between. 

The American public and those who consume US media are told that America holds primacy over the world and that American interests come first, even at the expense of other nations. This foreign policy expressed at the highest levels of American society filters down to the culture of violence that plagues American streets where perpetrators do not see or consider the humanity of their victims, just like Washington does worldwide.

Looking at Americans today, we see just what being more "Western" means and the consequences it has on the nations being transformed in this way. 

It is no surprise then that Thailand's youth find themselves increasingly falling into a similar culture of dehumanization and violence, influenced and inspired by modern American "culture" and "values." 

While the Thai government should look into stricter gun controls to ensure firearms are not sold to the mentally ill and/or to minors, someone infected with these particular American exports will remain a danger to themselves and others with or without access to firearms. Collectively, a population infected by this culture, or lack thereof, risks destabilizing in many of the ways we now see Western nations unraveling.  

For Thailand as a nation, its economic success is built on agricultural and industrial exports as well as tourism particularly from the rest of Asia. Social harmony is part of what has always made Thailand an attractive destination for tourists and a partner for regional neighbors. Allowing Thai society to be slowly infected by these American exports of dehumanization and violence, is to forfeit some of Thailand's best attributes.

Thailand cannot solve a growing trend toward American-style dehumanization and violence through "gun control" and increased security alone. It can only solve this and other social sicknesses by first recognizing them, then protecting themselves against them, and encourage social harmony as well as elements that prom

The CR400BF-GZ train, the smartest and most frost-resistant Fuxing bullet train model, was deployed in Northeast China's Heilongjiang Province on Monday. It's the coldest and highest region the model has been used in so far. The Fuxing bullet train has a maximum speed of 350 kilometers per hour.

The trains will be operating for the first time during the ongoing 40-day chunyun or the Spring Festival travel rush on routes in China's northernmost alpine region, China Media Group reported.

Compared with other Fuxing models, the CR400BF-GZ has the highest speed level. It is more resistant to low temperature and snow and can operate under an extreme cold environment of -40 C.

The advanced technology represents a major breakthrough for China's high-speed railway technology. The nation's independently developed model can meet the operational demand under various temperature conditions.

The designated system and parts used for constructing the model have all been specifically equipped with low temperature-resistant design, while ensuring smooth ventilation and effectively preventing snow and ice from entering the equipment compartment through the filter.

The train is also more intelligent with advanced technology implemented in targeted fields such as safety monitoring, aiming to further elevate the service quality.

Two sets of the trains will undergo a series of test run, and start operating on lines in Heilongjiang.

The world's first hydrogen-energy urban train with independent intellectual property rights officially rolled off the assembly line in Chengdu, Southwest China's Sichuan Province, on Wednesday. The train adopted the key core technology of the Fuxing bullet train, with a maximum speed of 160 kilometers per hour.

In half a month, two economic powerhouse provinces in East China relaxed their household registration limits, leaving many wondering what the lifting of rule which once restricted migration between rural areas and cities signals for the country? 

Household registration, known as hukou in Chinese, was formed in 1958. It serves to categorize citizens as either rural residents or non-rural residents.

For a long period, almost all large cities have set strict household registration thresholds, the more economically developed, the higher the bar for registering a local hukou. Obtaining a Beijing and Shanghai hukou could be very difficult as the top cities tend to restrict population growth from becoming overcrowded.

Jiangsu Province recently drafted regulations aiming to relax limits for registering a hukou, allowing residents from rural areas to register themselves in cities, except Nanjing and Suzhou.

Earlier, except provincial capital of Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province also announced to ease restrictions.

A VOA report interpreted the policy shift aimed at propping up China's housing market.

Ma Li, former director of China Population and Development Research Center, told the Global Times that the driving force behind allowing new arrivals to become permanent residents in urban areas is aimed at expanding the available urban talent pool to boost local economic development. 

Propping up the housing market is not an explicit goal set by officials, but could be one of those benefits of scrapping household registration limits, Ma noted.

Niu Fengrui, a researcher from Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, told the Global Times that linking the current economic situation to hukou policy reform is too short-sighted, because the essence of lifting household registration curbs is aimed at closing the gap between rural and urban regions and accelerating the urbanization of rural populations, allowing citizens to enjoy equal basic public services, which serves the overall goal of achieving the country's modernization for the wellbeing of all Chinese people. 

Optimizing population distribution

The reform of allowing rural hukou holders to register in urban cities is not a new concept. In 2014, the third meeting of the Central Leading Group for Comprehensively Deepening Reform proposed to facilitate 100 million rural migrants and other residents to resettle into urban areas by 2020.

Previously, Guizhou, Sichuan, Inner Mongolia, Hainan, Guangxi and other jurisdictions have also proposed full opening-up of household registration. At least 18 provinces in China have relaxed restrictions on household registration to date, according to media reports.

However, the policy shift may be less attractive to current residents in rural areas as obtaining a urban hukou leads to a possibility of losing their rural land contracting rights and their rights to use residential land. In well-developed provinces including Zhejiang, the shortened gap between rural and urban regions' living standards means any move to further relax restrictions only delivers marginal benefits, Ma noted. 

But, rural hukou holders who now work and live in urban areas will certainly embrace the change which allows them to move their permanent place of residence to larger cities. It will grant them the equal access with urban citizens to employment, social security, family planning and other social services, Ma said. 

Zhejiang Province said it will increase quotas for public schools and improve capacity for children of residence permit holders to receive education. 

Cai Fang, former vice president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, calculated that the number of migrant workers who live in urban areas but do not hold an urban hukou is likely between 130 million and 170 million. 

But Ma also noted if rural hukou holders convert their registration to an urban area but still are allowed to hold their rural land contracting rights, an urban hukou would become very attractive because of access to better education and employment in cities. "Cities are on the process of optimizing the relevant measures." 

For provincial capital cities including Hangzhou, first-tier cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou where public resources are already stretched, however, the opening up of the household registration policy is unlikely in the short term, experts said. 

According to a recent announcement by China's Ministry of Public Security (MPS) on further relaxing household registration, a points-based household registration system for mega cities with a permanent urban population of over 5 million will also be optimized, encouraging local governments to lift restrictions on annual quotas for local household registration.

"The removal of the household registration system has been discussed for many years in China, I personally believe that the economic and social conditions to scrap the policy are already in place, but the traditional mindset of hukou has slowed down the process of household registration reform." 

The lifting of hukou restrictions will lead to the concentration of populations in urban areas and the decline of rural populations, several demographers noted. 

Following major reform and opening-up, China's urbanization level has increased rapidly, rising from 17.92 percent in 1978 to 64.72 percent in 2021, with the country's urban population reaching 914.25 million, the Guangzhou Daily reported citing Xiao Jincheng, former director of Institute of Land Development and Regional Economy affiliated with the NDRC.

In other words, every year, more than 10 million people move from rural areas to urban areas, find jobs and live in cities. It is believed that China's urbanization level will exceed 70 percent by 2030 and 80 percent by 2050. In the next decade, more than 100 million people will migrate from rural areas to cities and towns, Xiao said.

In the future, as more rural hukou holders move to cities, the country's rural areas are expected to be revitalized as technology-empowered agriculture will nurture professional farmers and ensure talent remains in the farming economy, Ma told the Global Times. "Like those towns in Europe, each town has its own characteristics and own way of development."

Achieving the country's modernization is the process of re-optimizing the layout of China's population, Niu concluded.

Normal is the new strange for the world’s largest cave salamanders.

Biologists are thinking deep thoughts about why some of Europe’s olm salamanders living in darkness have (gasp!) skin coloring and eyes with lenses.

Most salamanders, of course, have skin pigments and grow adult eyes like other vertebrates. But after eons of cave life, olms (Proteus anguinus) have become mostly pinkish-white beasts, about 30 centimeters head to tail, that spend long lifetimes (maybe 70 years) slinking in cold, subterranean water.
Living at 11 to 12° Celsius, olms don’t mature sexually until about age 11 for males and 14 for females. Even then, they never really grow up, staying in water like giant larvae and keeping such youthful features as neck fluff gills into old age. “They look a little creepy, especially if you look at the skull,” says Stanley Sessions of Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y. Their blunt heads have no real upper jaw, and their adult eyes start to form but then regress to nubbins buried under skin.
These salamanders live frugally. They can go more than a year without eating. (Lilijana Bizjak Mali of the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia says a lab-dwelling olm survived even after more than 10 years without food.) Females take six-to-12-year breaks between laying eggs, which “develop extraordinarily slowly,” Sessions says. Recently laid olm eggs in Slovenia’s Postojna Cave took about seven weeks to start forming a nervous system; a common spotted salamander takes about one.

Among extreme cave-lifers, the oddballs are the more normal-looking salamanders (for now, called subspecies parkelj), with dark skin and better-developed eyes. For decades, biologists treated these curios as remnants of the most ancient olms that haven’t shed all their daylight ways. But rather than putting the dark salamanders at the base of the genealogical tree of olms, a genetic analysis places them higher among more recent, pale lineages.

“This forces you to consider that the black one probably evolved from white ancestors by reversing cave adaptations,” Sessions says. In evolution, “weirder things have happened.”

Childhood fears are common, normal — Some behavior, such as nail biting, bed-wetting and fearfulness, may actually represent a temporary phase in normal development…. A most important finding [in a recent study] was that the fearful or anxious children, defined … as those with seven or more worries, did not seem to be in any particular psychological trouble.…Anxieties may be part of normal child development. — Science News, June 25, 1966

UPDATE
Actually, there is reason to worry about anxious children. Kids with anxiety disorders, depression or behavioral problems are especially likely to develop a range of difficulties as young adults, say researchers who conducted a long-term study published in 2015. The same goes for kids whose anxiety, mood or behavior issues cause daily problems but don’t qualify as psychiatric ailments. Problems that later dogged the study’s troubled youngsters, who grew up in rural North Carolina, included drug addiction, teenage parenthood, dropping out of high school and criminal arrests.

A mosquito’s spit can be worse than its bite alone. In some cases, the insect’s saliva makes the viral disease dengue fever more severe, a new study finds.

In mice, scientists found that mosquito spit weakened blood vessels, making them more permeable, or “leaky.” Easier exchange between the blood and tissues may help the virus spread faster — and increase the severity of disease — immunologist Michael Schmid and colleagues report online June 16 in PLOS Pathogens.

Dengue virus enters the bloodstreams of nearly 400 million people a year, through the sharp proboscises of tropical Aedes mosquitoes, which also deliver a spit-load of other molecules as they slurp a meal. There are four strains of dengue, which can cause bone and muscle aches, high fever and, in severe cases, death. Overcoming one type of dengue doesn’t protect the host from the other three strains. In fact, subsequent infections are often worse (SN: 6/15/16, p. 22).

Immune cells fight off the first dengue infection, and the body develops antibodies to that strain. But during a subsequent episode with a different variety of dengue, the antibodies from the first infection don’t kill the second — they amplify it. They pull new virus into healthy cells.

Scientists have studied this strange immune trap for three decades, “but what we didn’t know was that saliva could exacerbate it,” says Schmid, now at the University of Leuven in Belgium.
Investigating spit is important, says virologist Eva Harris of the University of California, Berkeley, a coauthor of the study. Molecules in mosquito saliva “can modify and modulate the infection process,” she says. Saliva’s role is well-studied in other viral diseases, like West Nile, but not for dengue.

Schmid’s team inoculated mice either with virus, saliva, or both virus and saliva, during primary and secondary dengue infections. In primary infections, the severity of the disease did not differ substantially between treatments. Symptoms were mild, at most. But in secondary infections, the combination of virus and saliva was lethal to more than half of the mouse population. Without the saliva, mortality was much lower.

To understand why, the researchers ran experiments to track viral spread through the circulatory system. In mouse ears, a molecule about the size of the dengue virus moved farther, and faster, when packaged with mosquito spit. And in the lab, human endothelial cells lining the inner walls of blood vessels sealed less tightly in the presence of Aedes saliva. The researchers also found that mice inoculated with virus alone could be rescued if the skin around the injection site was removed four hours later. The same procedure did not rescue mice dosed with virus and saliva.

These results should be interpreted with caution, says Duane Gubler, an infectious disease researcher at Duke University who was not involved in the study. Various environmental and genetic factors also play a role in the severity of the disease. “It’s not clear-cut,” he says.

Some bedbugs are better climbers than others, and the bloodsuckers’ climbing prowess has practical implications.

To detect and monitor bedbugs, people use an array of strategies from DIY setups to dogs. Pitfall traps, which rely on smooth inner walls to prevent escape, are highly effective for detecting and monitoring an infestation. The traps are sold around the world, but they have only been tested with common bedbugs (Cimex lectularius) — the most, well, common species in the United States.

As it turns out, tropical bedbugs (C. hemipterus) can easily scale the walls of pitfall traps, Chow-Yang Lee, an entomologist at Malaysia’s University of Science, and his colleagues found in lab tests. While 24 to 76 percent of tropical bedbug strains escaped traps, only 0 to 2 percent of common strains made it out. In measurements of vertical frictional force, tropical bedbugs also came out on top. Further investigation of the species’ feet revealed extra hairs on the tibial pads of tropical bugs. These may give their legs a better grip on trap walls, the researchers propose March 15 in the Journal of Economic Entomology.

Tropical bedbugs live in some regions of Africa, Australia, Japan, China and Taiwan — and have recently resurfaced in Florida.

Many babies born early spend extra time in the hospital, receiving the care of dedicated teams of doctors and nurses. For these babies, the hospital is their first home. And early experiences there, from lights to sounds to touches, may influence how babies develop.

Touches early in life in the NICU, both pleasant and not, may shape how a baby’s brain responds to gentle touches later, a new study suggests. The results, published online March 16 in Current Biology, draw attention to the importance of touch, both in type and number.

Young babies can’t see that well. But the sense of touch develops early, making it a prime way to get messages to fuzzy-eyed, pre-verbal babies. “We focused on touch because it really is some of the basis for communication between parents and child,” says study coauthor Nathalie Maitre, a neonatologist and neuroscientist at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

Maitre and her colleagues studied how babies’ brains responded to a light puff of air on the palms of their hands — a “very gentle and very weak touch,” she says. They measured these responses by putting adorable, tiny electroencephalogram, or EEG, caps on the babies.

The researchers puffed babies’ hands shortly before they were sent home. Sixty-one of the babies were born early, from 24 to 36 weeks gestation. At the time of the puff experiment, they had already spent a median of 28 days in the hospital. Another group of 55 babies, born full-term, was tested in the three days after birth.

Full-term babies had a strong brain reaction to the hand puff. (This reaction was missing when researchers pointed the air nozzle away from the babies, a control that ruled out the effects of the puff’s sound.) Preterm babies had weaker brain reactions to the hand puff, the researchers found.

But the story doesn’t stop there. The researchers also looked at the number and type of touches — positive or negative — the preemies received while in the hospital.
Preemies who received a greater number of positive early touches, such as breastfeeding, skin-to-skin cuddles and massage, had stronger brain responses to the puffs than preemies who received fewer. More worryingly, preemies who had a greater number of negative touch experiences, including heel pricks, IV insertions, injections and tape removal, tended to have diminished brain responses to the puffs.

About a third of the premature babies in the study didn’t receive any positive touches that the researchers counted. Between birth and the time of the hand-puff experiment, the median number of positive touch experiences for the preemies in the study was 4. In contrast, the median number of painful procedures was 32.

The study turns up links, not cause. That means scientists can’t say whether the early touches, both positive and negative, are behind the differences in brain response. But it’s possible that early tactile experiences pattern the brain in important ways, Maitre says. If so, then the results have big implications.

Oftentimes, parents don’t have the luxury of snuggling their baby, particularly when parental leave is limited and babies are being treated far from home. Nurses, doctors and other medical professionals provide other forms of care. But anything parents, medical professionals or even volunteer cuddlers can do to shift the balance of positive and negative touches might encourage babies’ development, giving these smallest and newest of people the best start possible.

The heavy-duty material used to build bridges and sculpt skyscrapers could learn a few tricks from humble bones.

Steel’s weakness is its tendency to develop microscopic cracks that eventually make the material fracture. Repeated cycles of stress — daily rush hour traffic passing over a bridge, for example — nurture these cracks, which often aren’t apparent until the steel collapses. Bones, however, have a complex inner structure that helps them deal with stress. This structure differs depending on the scale, with tiny vertically aligned fibers building up into larger cylinders.
To mimic this variability, researchers fabricated steel with thin, alternating nanoscale layers of different crystal structures, some of which were just unstable enough to morph a bit under stress. That complicated microstructure prevented cracks from spreading in a straight line, slowing their take-over and preventing the material from collapsing, the scientists report in the March 10 Science. This experimental steel requires much more testing before it can be used in construction, says study coauthor C. Cem Tasan, a materials scientist at MIT. But the principles could be applied to other mixed-composition metals, too.

Hard-boiled eggs are a dish best served cold.

When quickly reheated in a microwave and then pierced, the picnic staple can explode with a loud bang in a shower of hot, rubbery shrapnel. But this blast is far more likely to make a hot mess than hurt your hearing, according to research presented December 6 at the Acoustical Society of America meeting in New Orleans.

That distinction isn’t as odd as it might sound. In a lawsuit, a man claimed to have suffered burns and hearing damage after a microwaved, hard-boiled egg exploded in his mouth at a restaurant. Researchers from Charles M. Salter Associates, Inc. in San Francisco called as expert witnesses couldn’t find scientific papers backing up the claim that an egg could burst with enough vigor to cause hearing loss — just a lot of YouTube videos documenting eggsplosions.
So the researchers microwaved peeled hard-boiled eggs in water on high power for three minutes.

The eggs were “uncooperative,” study coauthor Anthony Nash said in a news conference. Some exploded in the microwave, while others wouldn’t explode at all. But of nearly 100 eggs tested, 28 exploded outside of the microwave after being poked with a meat thermometer. From 30 centimeters away, the sound pressure from those explosions ranged from 86 to 133 decibels.

The median sound pressure level recorded, 108 decibels, is about the same as that at an average rock concert. Continuous exposure to that noise level could damage hair cells inside ears that respond to sound. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health sets recommended exposure limits for sound pressures above 85 decibels, says William Murphy, a researcher at NIOSH who wasn’t part of the study. But those limits are based on daily exposure over years, he says.
A burst egg’s boom, on the other hand, lasts just milliseconds — not long enough to do much harm. “The likelihood for hearing damage from a single exploding egg was very low,” Nash said.

The lawsuit was settled out of court before Nash and his colleagues conducted the second phase of the study – considering how sound hits your ears when it’s coming from inside your mouth. An in-mouth explosion might send slightly more sound pressure to the ears, Nash says, but still probably not enough to cause lasting damage as a one-time accident.

A peeled egg probably explodes when pockets of water trapped in the yolk become superheated — hotter than the boiling temperature of water without actually bubbling, Nash suggested. When disrupted, say by a fork or a tooth, the water pockets spontaneously boil, bursting through the squishy egg white and sending bits flying. (It’s the same phenomenon that can occasionally make microwaved coffee spurt out of the mug onto your clean work clothes.)

A bigger risk than the noise might be the heat. Nash and his colleagues measured the temperature of yolks in eggs that didn’t burst. Those temperatures were, on average, 12 degrees Celsius above the surrounding water bath, which was often close to boiling.