Editor's Note:

In the universe there is only one Earth, the shared home of humanity. Unfortunately, this planet on which we rely for our subsistence is facing immense and unprecedented crises, both known and unknown, both foreseeable and unforeseeable.

Whether human civilization can survive these has become an existential issue that must be squarely faced More and more people have come to the realization that rather than amassing material wealth, the most pressing task is to find a guiding beacon for the sustainable development of human civilization, because we all care about our future.

Chinese President Xi Jinping propounded the idea of building a global community of shared future ten years ago, answering a question raised by the world, by history and by the times: "Where is humanity headed?"

His proposal lights the path forward as the world fumbles for solutions and represents China's contribution to global efforts to protect our shared home and create a better future of prosperity for all.

Over the past decade the idea has been steadily enriched.In 2015, Xi fleshed it out with a five-point proposal in his speech at the General Debate of the 70th Session of the UN General Assembly. In 2017, he further proposed five goals for the world in his speech at the United Nations Office in Geneva. This represents the steady increase in the depth and scope of the vision of a global community of shared future.

The past decade has also seen steady progress in implementing the vision. From bilateral to multilateral and from regional to global dimensions, ground-breaking results have been achieved on every front. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Global Development Initiative(GDI), the Global Security Initiative (GSI), and the Global Civilization Initiative (GCI) have taken root and borne fruits, bringing prosperity and stability to the world and creating substantive benefits for the people.

On the occasion of the 78th session of the United Nations General Assembly, the Chinese government has released this white paper to comprehensively introduce the historical context in which the concept of building a global community of shared future was born, the ideological connotations the concept contains, the cultural soil it is rooted in, the path it advocates for realization and the vivid practices it has achieved.The purpose is to enhance international understanding and comprehension, foster broad consensus, and better collaborate with countries around the world in building a community with a shared future for mankind.

Our journey ahead will be a lengthy and arduous one. But as long as we press ahead with perseverance, there will be much to expect. Successes and setbacks await us, but hopes abound.

Building a global community of shared future depends on the joint actions of all countries. When all countries unite in pursuing the cause of common good, plan together, and act together day by day toward the right direction of building a global community of shared future, we can build an open, inclusive, clean, and beautiful world of lasting peace, universal security and shared prosperity and jointly create a better future for all of humanity.

During US President Joe Biden's recent visit to Vietnam, it was announced that the Vietnam-US relationship was upgraded to a comprehensive strategic partnership dedicated to "peace, cooperation and sustainable development," making the US Vietnam's fifth "comprehensive strategic partner."

The strengthening of Vietnam-US relations has been brewing for a long time. It seems grand in scale, but the essence of "peace, cooperation and sustainable development" needs to be carefully examined.

First, the US has always been quite enthusiastic about enhancing its relations with Vietnam, but not for the sake of "peace." During his visit, Biden expressed his "goodwill" not to let the consequences of the Vietnam War influence their bilateral relations, pointing out that the two peoples have overcome the "bitter past" together. However, it is worth questioning whether Washington can truly reflect on history.

In fact, through Biden's trip, Washington attempted to induce Vietnam to play a greater role in the US' Indo-Pacific containment circle against China and to divide ASEAN. The US is not pursuing peace. We still remember the lessons of the Vietnam War vividly, and Washington has not given up on provoking a "new cold war." No different from half a century ago, it still seeks hegemony, opposes communism and stirs up chaos and wars globally.

Second, as for "cooperation," Washington has always had a carrot-and-stick policy toward Hanoi instead of cooperation. And this is likely to continue after the enhancement of their ties. The history of Vietnam-US relations shows that every time a US leader visits Hanoi, there are voices in the US demanding pressure be put on Vietnam regarding democracy and human rights issues, claiming that Washington cannot "surrender" to Hanoi just because the former needs something from the latter. 

Moreover, the two countries' semiconductor partnership, one of the striking achievements of this visit, is also more about the interests of "American industry, consumers and workers." This is not genuine win-win cooperation. In addition, historical evidence has shown that when the interests of Hanoi and Washington clash, the US is quick to resort to threats of sanctions.

Third, "sustainable development" is what Vietnam is most concerned about. For Vietnam, the enhancement of relations with the US is primarily motivated by economic considerations. In other words, Vietnam aims to leverage US power to facilitate economic recovery and transformation. 

In fact, if the US changes its indifferent and episodic attitude toward Southeast Asia and develops normal and legitimate diplomatic relations and economic exchanges with Vietnam, enhanced Washington-Hanoi ties can promote prosperity and development in Vietnam and also Southeast Asia. However, the key is that the US has to first implement the agreements already reached before discussing so-called sustainable development.

In fact, after the talks with Biden, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam Central Committee Nguyen Phu Trong emphasized the keywords "independent" and "peace" at the press conference. It is believed that Vietnam can make its own rational judgment and truly implement its 2019 defense policy of "Four No's," the "bamboo diplomacy" concept grandly launched in 2021, and the new consensus reached by high-level visits between Vietnam and China in 2022. Vietnam should make every effort to avoid becoming a pawn for the US and ensure that the strengthening of their relations truly brings "peace and cooperation," thus providing a prerequisite for achieving "sustainable development." China will not have any objections to this, and such Vietnam-US relations can also benefit China-Vietnam relations.

On the contrary, if Vietnam follows the US to develop bilateral relations to target China or other third parties, engage in maneuvers on multilateral occasions, and cause chaos in the region, it will undermine the consensus between Beijing and Hanoi. If this were to happen, the establishment of China-Vietnam community with a shared future will likely face great storms. This is also very detrimental to Vietnam's image as a "responsible partner of the international community."

The developer of an unmanned suspension railway has finished its phase I construction and started testing on Monday in Shanghai, the latest step in intelligent monorail testing in China. 

The Baoshan demonstration line project finished its 400-meter-long phase I construction and started testing, aiming to offer passengers a new experience of traveling with a sense of technology.

Designed by EPN Skytrain Development Co, the demonstration line project, with a designed length of 940 meters, has two stations and one repair facility with a maximum speed of 60 kilometers per hour.

In line with the development trend of intelligent and unmanned urban rail transit in Shanghai, the system is equipped with a Grade of Automation 4 autonomous train operation system, the highest level in the industry.

Putting unmanned intelligent technology on a suspension railway is an innovative move in the industry, and it shows the developer's high-level development capability for intelligent systems, Sun Zhang, a railway expert from Shanghai Tongji University, told the Global Times on Monday.

Founded in 2018, the company introduced a German prototype system that had a safe operation history of nearly 40 years, after five years of independent research and development. The localization rate of the system has exceeded 90 percent, reported news outlet thepaper.cn.

Unlike traditional railway systems, suspension railway systems offer greener transportation while using less land and costing less money. They also give passengers a better view of the city, said Sun.

On April 27, 2006, Shanghai unveiled a maglev train, which was also the first maglev line in China. With German technology, the train was put into use on a 30-km track between downtown area and Shanghai Pudong International Airport.

Dutch semiconductor equipment maker ASML started its 2024 campus recruitment program in China on Tuesday, with key positions related to scanners, e-beams and computational lithography.

The recruitment program this year, which is about the same size as that of last year, shows that the company is staying committed to the Chinese market, despite geopolitical headwinds that are affecting the global chip supply chain, a Chinese analyst said.

The company, which had net global sales revenue of 21.2 billion euros ($22.46 billion) in 2022, said it plans to hire some 200 professionals this year, roughly the same as last year, indicating steady growth in its Chinese business.

"The continuous hiring by ASML at this critical juncture implies the company's confidence in China's vast market and its unwillingness to lose market share here," Xiang Ligang, director-general of the Beijing-based Information Consumption Alliance, told the Global Times on Sunday.

"Even if sales for certain machines are blocked in the future, the company will still need employees to maintain its existing fleet of lithography machines in China and service customers," Xiang said. 

Under new Dutch export control regulations that took effect on September 1, the company is required to have licenses to continue shipments of chip tools to China. 

The company said it has the required licenses for China-bound shipments of the NXT:2000i and subsequent systems until the end of 2023.

On June 30, the Dutch government announced a ministerial order restricting exports of certain advanced semiconductor equipment, a move widely believed to target China due to pressure from the US.

ASML sells about 80 Deep Ultraviolet Lithography machines to China each year, accounting for around 15 percent of the company's revenue, an analyst said.

Isolating China completely through export controls is not a viable approach, ASML CEO Peter Wennink emphasized during an interview.

China and the Netherlands have maintained communication on chip equipment export controls and China has urged the Netherlands not to abuse export control measures regarding semiconductor products, according to China's Ministry of Commerce.

In 2000, the Dutch giant that makes lithography machines established ASML China and built its first office in the country. After 23 years of development, the company now has more than 1,600 employees and 16 offices in China.

The Jakarta-Bandung High-Speed Railway (HSR), the first HSR in Indonesia and Southeast Asia, officially began operation on Monday. 

The high-speed line, a landmark project under the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), connects Indonesia's capital Jakarta and another major city Bandung. Observers said it will have a demonstration effect for future BRI developments in Southeast Asia.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo on Monday declared the official operation of the Jakarta-Bandung HSR at Halim Station in Jakarta, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

At the ceremony, Widodo announced the name of the HSR - "Whoosh" - inspired by the sound of the train, saying that the high-speed train marks the modernization of Indonesia's transportation system, which is efficient, environmentally friendly and integrated with other public transportation networks, Xinhua reported.

The Indonesian Transportation Ministry issued an operating license Friday to PT Kereta Cepat Indonesia-China (KCIC), a consortium of Indonesian and Chinese firms responsible for developing and operating the Jakarta-Bandung HSR line.

From September 7 to 30, the high-speed railway conducted trial operations, having offered free rides to local residents, according to media reports.

A spokesperson of the China Railway No.4 Engineering Group Co told the Global Times in September that ridership of the HSR could exceed 10 million trips in the first year of operation.

China Railway No.4 Engineering Group Co participated in the construction of the rail line.

Connecting Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, and Bandung, the fourth-largest city in Indonesia, the Jakarta-Bandung HSR is 142 kilometers long and has a maximum design speed of 350 kilometers per hour. It will cut the journey between the two cities from 3.5 hours to just 40 minutes.

The HSR passes through the hinterlands of West Java province and has several stops including Halim, Karawang, Padalarang and Tegalluar.

The grand opening of the HSR received a warm welcome from the locals, who see the project as a symbol of national pride and a dream come true.

Grace Jessica, an Indonesian assistant director at the Tegalluar station of the Jakarta-Bandung HSR, told the Global Times that the "beautiful day" for a rapid ride has finally arrived. "Before the opening, many friends asked me for train tickets, and my family also longs for a chance to get on board," she noted. 

As the HSR becomes a reality, Zhang Chao, executive director of the board of KCIC, told the Global Times that his feelings could be compared to "sitting the national college entrance exam," and he is excited to see eight years of hard work pay off, while having a sense of responsibility to ensure the line operates smoothly.

The Jakarta-Bandung HSR is the first time that Chinese high-speed railway technology was implemented in an all-round way outside of China, with the whole system, all elements and entire industrial chain.

Chinese Ambassador to Indonesia Lu Kang told the Global Times in a recent interview that in the long term, the HSR will further optimize the local investment environment, increase job opportunities, drive commercial and tourism development along the line, and even create new growth points to speed up the building of an HSR economic corridor.

Analysis of large amounts of dinosaur and bird fossils has suggested that the evolution of primitive birds was slow and the diversity of body shapes dropped, which is opposite to the common belief that quick and major changes occur when a new species is taking shape.

The discovery was made by Wang Min and Zhou Zhonghe from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. An article about the research has been published by Nature Ecology & Evolution, a sub-journal of Nature.

Vertebrate evolution from dinosaurs to birds was an epic moment in natural history and the process involved many changes in bones, muscle and skin, which are related to flying, according to a press release the institute sent to the Global Times on Monday.

One of the most notable changes was in body shape, represented by the length of the limb bones. Theropod dinosaurs, which are closer to birds in the evolutionary tree, have relatively long forelimbs. Therefore, a systematic quantitative analysis of the dynamic evolutionary trajectory of limb bones during the origin of birds is key to understanding the important transition from "dinosaurs running on land" to "dinosaurs (birds) flying in the blue sky."

Researchers established a model to analyze the limb bones of avialans (birds), non-avialan paravians (dinosaurs similar to but not the same as birds) and non-paravian theropods, finding that diversity of avialans was the lowest while for non-paravian theropods it was the highest. An estimate of limb bone evolution speed indicated the evolution "slowed down" among avialans, or primitive birds.

Analysis also found two other indexes, which represented the flying pattern and cursorial pattern, were also the lowest among birds, indicating a low evolution speed.

These findings go against the common sense that the diversity and evolution speed increase at an epic evolutionary juncture.

One hypothesis is that birds' forelimbs can only have limited changes within the aerodynamic frame, and many characteristics related to flying had already appeared among theropods.

Computer: 1, Human: 0.

That’s the score after the first match between Lee Sedol, the world’s top Go player and AlphaGo, the computer program that recently defeated the European Go champion.

AlphaGo is the creation of Google DeepMind, an artificial intelligence company based in London. The company’s program is the first to give top human players a run for their money in Go, a complex Chinese strategy game that almost makes chess look like Candy Land.

AlphaGo and Sedol will play four more matches over the next week in Seoul, South Korea. The winner will receive a $1 million prize and, perhaps more importantly, secure a place in history as either the man who triumphed over the best Go-playing machine ever created — or the first machine to surpass humankind’s players.

A new refrigerator-sized factory can rapidly pump out a diverse assortment of drugs on demand.

Researchers designed the system to offer a speedy alternative to large-scale pharmaceutical production. Rejiggering chemical inputs and the device’s collection of tanks and tubes allowed the team to produce four different drugs: an anesthetic (lidocaine), an antihistamine (Benadryl), an anti-anxiety medication (Valium) and an antidepressant (Prozac). The self-contained system was equipped to mix, heat, pump and purify ingredients into hundreds to thousands of doses of pharmaceutical-grade compounds. Making each medication took the device between roughly 12 and 50 hours, the team reports in the April 1 Science. Attached computers allow one person to control and monitor the whole process.

For now, the device only makes liquid medications. But it may be a step toward overcoming limitations of cumbersome drug-making supply chains by developing automated tools that make medications on demand.

Over the years, readers have on occasion written to me to point out what they see as an increasing politicization of Science News. These are not accolades — more than one of those readers has contemplated ending their subscription. Some of those critics deny climate change, some oppose GMOs, others view any policy discussion in our coverage as worrisome. So, are we actually getting involved in politics?
My short answer is no. But there are many areas in which science has important things to say to citizens and policy makers. And reporting on the body of evidence that relates to societal issues falls fully within our mission, even for scientific questions with political ramifications. It’s well worth the ink to inform people about pressing problems or provide factual information in what have become hotly contested and polarizing debates.
Science can help establish what’s known, what’s not known and how scientists might find answers. That’s what Science News reports on, with the aim of giving readers not a political argument but a clear idea of where the evidence currently stands and what questions remain. Facts based on sound science can perhaps even provide a common ground for people of differing opinions to speak to each other rationally.

In the case of what researchers can say with respect to the efficacy of gun laws, it turns out that there are more questions than answers. The numbers on U.S. gun violence are clear: In 2013, the United States had many more gun-related deaths than other nations with similar standards of living. But as Meghan Rosen investigated the state of the knowledge, it became evident that now, in the United States, it’s hard to even do the science. Researchers told her that they just don’t have the data needed to answer questions about the impacts of different gun control laws.

“I thought the evidence behind well-known gun control policies would be more clear-cut,” Rosen says. But studies of background checks, waiting periods and a 1994 assault weapons ban don’t necessarily show a corresponding reduction in gun violence. Maybe such laws don’t do what lawmakers intended, but there are also confounding factors that may dilute any conclusions, Rosen reports. The 1994 ban on assault weapons, for example, stopped only sales of new weapons and didn’t apply to those already in circulation. Most disturbing to Rosen was the blocking of scientific research by Congress, which has maneuvered to stop the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health from doing or funding work that might advocate or promote gun control laws. That has effectively reduced research into the best ways to prevent gun violence.

The science that has been done on whether U.S. gun control laws reduce gun violence has been mixed. There aren’t a lot of straightforward answers to guide policy. But in this case, science has not had a fair chance to build the foundation for an evidence-based conversation. Without facts, it really is all political. Our aim is to find and report on those facts (or the lack of them), so that they can become part of the conversation.

A gut microbe collected from chinchilla droppings might be the first complex life form to lack even a shred of a supposedly universal organelle.

Monocercomonoides, a one-celled gut microbe collected from a pet chinchilla in Prague decades ago, apparently has no mitochondria, the organelles known as the cell’s power plants. Cataloging DNA in the microbe turns up none of the known genes for mitochondrial proteins. But stealing genetic material from bacteria — which survive without mitochondria — allowed the microbe to do without them, too, researchers report May 12 in Current Biology.
Mitochondria are tiny capsules that speckle the insides of all complex cells from pond scum to people, or so textbooks have said for decades. Some complex (or eukaryotic) cells look as if they have no mitochondria; so far, though, further searches have eventually detected mitochondrial remnants.

But Monocercomonoides appears to have completely done away with mitochondria and the genes to make them, says study coauthor Anna Karnkowska, an evolutionary biologist now at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

This discovery marks “the most extreme mitochondrial reduction observed,” says Vladimír Hampl of Charles University in Prague, also a coauthor of the study.

The new work also supports the idea that there really is no single core function that defines mitochondria. Although commonly described as cell powerhouses, mitochondria don’t have much to do with supplying energy for cells that live in low-oxygen or no-oxygen environments, Karnkowska says. For these anaerobic cells, mitochondria can serve as more of a building studio. One supposedly essential mitochondrial function, scientists have proposed, is assembling clusters of iron and sulfur that activate a class of widely useful cell compounds.

Bacteria and other simple (prokaryotic) cells have their own assembly systems, and they don’t need to wall off the construction of iron-sulfur clusters. The newly studied Monocercomonoides carry the genes for an assembly system that looks as if it was taken from bacteria, the researchers conclude.
Researchers discovered the lack of mitochondrial genes and the bacterial substitute while working out the DNA components that encode instructions for all the proteins in the whole organism. There were notably no signs of chaperone proteins for conveying other proteins through membranes, something mitochondria do. Nor did other signature mitochondrial proteins show up.

“Pretty amazing story,” says Roland Lill of Philipps University of Marburg in Germany, who studies the way cells use iron. The new paper doesn’t change the basic idea that complex cells need very special conditions, usually created only inside mitochondria, to build their iron-sulfur clusters. “But the beauty of biology,” he says, “is that there are always amazing exceptions to basic biological rules.”