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The opening ceremony of the 31st World University Games will be held on July 28 at the Dong'an Lake Sports Park Stadium in Chengdu, Southwest China's Sichuan Province. While the stadium itself will not be hosting any matches or events other than the opening ceremony, the Dong'an Lake Sports Park is still one of the main sites for the Games, with artistic gymnastics and swimming events to be held there.

The Dong'an Lake Sports Park Multi-Purpose Gymnasium will host the artistic gymnastics events during the Games. With a floor area of 90,169.37 square meters, the gymnasium has one field of play and one warm-up area. The artistic gymnastics events will take place from August 1 to 5, with 14 gold medals to be awarded.

With a capacity of 18,000, the venue is one of the largest and highest-level indoor multi-purpose gymnasiums in China, according to Huang Hai'an, executive deputy manager of the Venue Operation Center (VOC) for Dong'an Lake Sports Park Multi-Purpose Gymnasium. "It will be used for artistic gymnastics competitions during the Chengdu Games, but actually it can do much more than that," Huang told the Global Times.

It has been reported that the venue is able to host 16 kinds of sports events, but "that is conservative," said Huang. "Basically, most of the sports you can imagine could be played here, be it badminton, volleyball, table tennis, and even winter sports like ice hockey and curling," Huang noted.

The gymnasium can be turned into a basketball court from an ice hockey venue in about six hours, while the reverse process would take around five days as making ice takes more time than melting it, Huang told the Global Times.

The Chengdu Games will be the first large-scale international comprehensive sports event to be held in western China, but the organizers are fully confident about the post-Games usage of the gymnasium, and planning for future events has already begun.

"About 20 concerts will be held here in the following months after the Chengdu Games, with the first one scheduled for late August," the gymnasium's Logistical Support Deputy Manager Luo Xingxing told the Global Times. "There will be concerts or business activities here every month" to bring in income, Luo said.

They will try to bring other national and international sports games to the gymnasium, and commercial competitions like boxing and NBA China games will also be an option for consideration, said Luo.

A few hundred meters away from the gymnasium sits the Dong'an Lake Sports Park Aquatics Center, which will host the swimming competitions of the Chengdu Games. Covering a floor area of 73,549.33 square meters, it has one competition pool with 10 lanes and one warm-up pool with 10 lanes.

The aquatics center will serve as a competition, warm-up and training venue for the swimming events, which are scheduled from August 1 to 7, with 42 gold medals up for grabs.

It is the only Class A aquatics center in Sichuan, according to Bai Xue, its VOC executive deputy manager. It's equipped with the world's most advanced timing and scoring system, which is accurate to one ten-thousandth of a second, said Bai.

Similar to the nearby gymnasium, the aquatics center will also be put to good use after the Games. Before the Chengdu Games, it has been open to the public for a very low price since May 2022, Bai told the Global Times. "Citizens can enjoy a world-class swimming pool for only 40 yuan [$5.6], which is cheaper than those in many gyms and hotels," Bai noted.

Besides being available for the public after the Games, the center will also invite professional swimming coaches to offer lessons.

The original London West End musical The Last Five Years is being staged at the Beijing Tianqiao Art Center from Wednesday to Friday. This is the first round of performances for the show in the "performing arts capital" Beijing.

The musical is adapted from the personal experiences of composer Jason Robert Brown, who has won the "Tony Award" three times. 

After its premiere, The Last Five Years debuted off-Broadway in 2002 and in London's West End in 2006. Countless audiences have cried because of this work, and even fell in love with musicals because of it.

The show interweaves more than 10 songs to tell the story of the five years of the protagonists' love, marriage, indifference and divorce, showing their joys and sorrows.

Unlike many large-scale musicals with complex stage designs, The Last Five Years is very streamlined, consisting of only two actors and a band of five musicians.

The two actors have to perform non-stop on a rotating stage for nearly 100 minutes, not only perfectly presenting their own singing and playing, but also accompanying each other on the piano while singing and acting, which is a true test of their performance skills.

A delegation from the Chinese senior care industry was invited by the Embassy of the Netherlands in Beijing, together with the Consulate General of the Netherlands in Shanghai and the Task Force Health Care to visit the Netherlands to further strengthen exchanges and cooperation in the field of senior care.

Wang Sheng from the Economic and Commercial Section of the Chinese Embassy in the Netherlands also participated in the event.

The delegation consisted of representatives of commercial companies, research institutes, and nursing and day care organizations from Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai.

The delegation visited different types of senior care organizations in the Netherlands and had in-depth exchanges with Vilans, the national think tank for long-term care, and the University of Groningen.

The delegation also had exchanges with representatives from the Netherlands business community involved in senior care services and technology products, as well as with representatives from the scientific research and development industry in the field of senior care.

The visit of the delegation is another milestone in the fruitful partnership between China and the Netherlands in the field of senior care, through which both sides hope to explore common solutions to global challenges in areas such as aging. 

Editor's Note:

The China-US bilateral relationship is one of the most important in the world. The trajectory of this relationship has attracted international attention. Still, the US is stepping up its efforts to suppress China on various fronts such as politics and diplomacy, economy, trade, technology, and military security, showing the true meaning of a cold war. The Global Times invites Chinese and foreign experts to expose the US' manipulation of the "new cold war" and reveal the damage it may potentially cause to the world.

This is the third installment of the series.

A couple of years ago, The Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, TFF, in Sweden, of which I am the director, published "Behind The Smokescreen. An Analysis of the West's Destructive China Cold War Agenda And Why It Must Stop."

Among several perspectives of the US/Western accusation industry, we looked into the medialized stories about genocide in Xinjiang, forced labor and Taiwan, and nine mainstream media manipulation methods that aim to manufacture a systematically negative image of China in the Western mind. 

We found that a cold war occurs by influencing the "free" press - also the Western state press - through three main mechanisms: a) Fake or fabricated stories, b) Omission - for instance, of every positive aspect of China's developments, and c) Source Ignorance: using the same few sources spreading disinformation, from the US rippling through and being repeated ad nauseam and never checking the root empirical evidence or validity of the assertions, in short, FOSI.  

Ultimately, this causes a decay of the crucial and critical role of mainstream media and their conversion toward tabloid banalizing black-and-white worldviews - "we good, them evil" - that promote confrontation and warfare, all operated by the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex, MIMAC. 

Tragically for democracy, mainstream media have become the leaders in promoting militarism, armament and legitimizing the empire and its wars. What are the elements of the cold war in all this? 

First and foremost, the cold war is a psycho-political phenomenon. It dichotomizes our incredibly complex world into two: good versus evil. It seeks to preserve our superiority and keep others submissive and weaker. It promises war if its deterrence fails. And it precludes a world of equals, cooperation and mutual learning. If you are No. 1 in a system, you do not learn and listen; you teach, bribe and issue orders. 

Cold wars may go well for the cold warrior when in ascendancy. In the "old" Cold War in Europe, two fundamentally Western systems - one based on Karl Marx, the other on Adam Smith, to put it crudely - competed while the US/NATO ascended after 1945. On all power scales, it was superior to the Soviet Union and its system. We know how it ended. 

The winner then - foolishly - took it all: The US/NATO world did what it pleased within its exceptionalist "international rules-based order," not the UN Charter and other parts of international law. Catchwords: out-of-NATO-area military actions in violation of NATO's own Treaty - Yugoslavia - and regime change/resource/anti-terrorism wars on an assembly line basis; NATO's expansion against all promises given to the Soviet Union.  

It all went so well and seemed so easy. Why listen to or empathize with others? Why focus on the changing world when "we" are the change-makers, God's own country par excellence? If we can get away with it, we do it. However, prudence, statesmanship and long-range thinking would have compelled global impact analyses instead of narcissist imperial self-aggrandizement. 

It went so well that the West overlooked the Rest: China's impressive socio-economic development based on an eclectic combination of Chinese concepts - that the West still doesn't understand - and imported Western elements; the establishment and maturation of organizations like BRICS, Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and African and other regional organizations.  

The West also did not sense the actual price that would be paid for its militarism: It's huge and growing burden on all civilian sectors, including technology and economy, and - in the wake of the history of colonialism and imperialism - the Rest becoming more and more nationally and collectively self-reliant - a concept developed about 50 years ago and ridiculed by the West.  

And what was the result? Well, this is written the day after BRICS expanded with essential countries in Africa, the Middle East and South America - a huge step toward a multipolar and cooperative Rest saying: We can do without you, America and Europe! If you want to cooperate on new, reasonable terms, we are ready, but the days of your Western hegemony and universalization of Western values are coming to an end.   

Such is global macro history: Empires have come and gone, and that of the US/NATO is the last: Nobody is so naive as to believe that it has a God-given right to be the ruler of the whole world and force others to accept its values. 

The enormous world order changing before our very eyes is as predictable as it is inexorable. Only the ignorance - blinding intoxication - of power overlooks it. The West has run its race and become over-extended, insensitive to other cultures and ways of thinking, and unable to adapt to system changes but insisted on steering unilaterally. It's losing legitimacy in the eyes of others, relative economic and political strength and the creative ability to outline a better future world that the Rest feels attracted to: Classical decline indicators! 

What I have said here is pure Gandhian thinking: You may harm others by using violence - physical, economic, military, structural, cultural and environmental - but, sooner rather than later, your violence boomerangs: It corrupts, debases, brutalizes and makes you more loathed than loved. A critical mass will develop.

In a deeper socio-cultural sense, the Christian Occident has never appropriately problematized those many types of violence upon which it built its relations with the Rest.  

The West's cold war on China is about so much more than the issues that dominate daily news - chips, trade, Taiwan and the topics of the permanent accusation industry. It's about profound tectonic changes in humanity's way of developing - and about whether or not the West will join and contribute or become a de-developed periphery in the new world. And whether its empire will go down with a whimper or a bang, or adapt to macro history's unavoidable changes.

 We know very little about humanity's future in the next 100 or so years. The safest philosophy will be for the Rest to, despite all, extend compassion and cooperation to the good forces of the West and abstain from tit-for-tat against its evil ones.

Editor's Note:

China's State Council Information Office issued an informative white paper, entitled "A Global Community of Shared Future: China's Proposals and Actions," to review and preview the China-led vision of co-building a global community of shared future on Tuesday in Beijing. Humanity is yet again at another crossroads in history, and the choices between unity and division, between opening up and closing off, as well as between cooperation and confrontation test the wisdom of all countries, the white paper said. How should we understand the global community of shared future? How should countries around the world work together to promote the construction of the global community of shared future? Global Times invited two foreign scholars to share their views on this issue.

A world of global cooperation, security, prosperity and dialogue among civilizations is being realized right before our eyes today. 10 years ago, China's vision for international relations and the globe were just words expressed as a community of shared future for mankind, or in today's terms, a global community of shared future. In the blink of an eye, this dream has bloomed before our eyes. 

Multipolar and multilateral global partnerships and organizations such as BRICS and the Group of 77 with its 135 coalition partners, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the ASEAN are actively creating a new world order based on the harmony of all nations, campaigning for world peace and building economic foundations for global prosperity.

China has used its national power as a top economic engine of the world economy and a major power in geopolitics to create the conditions for the emergence of this dynamic new world. In this world,  the nations of the Global South can realize their potential with economic and infrastructure development support from institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the New Development Bank and other development-oriented financial institutions.

It is important to acknowledge the central role of the China-proposed multi-trillion dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in creating interconnected networks of infrastructure, transportation, and trade corridors. These networks enable developing economies to connect to markets and stimulate economic growth and socio-political progress, as we can observe in Africa today.

These efforts toward the creation of a global community of shared future are liberating the Global South from centuries of enforced under-development by colonialism, neocolonialism and the latest of the evils, the Cold War modality and mentality which is coming to an end. In every part of the globe these "forever wars" of the West are being rejected in favor of "forever peace" of a global community of shared future. 

Building up from Asia to the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, the spirit of the community of shared future is generating the hope and optimism that mankind can and is taking control of its fate and shaping the future toward the mission of forever peace and economic-technological development. The recent South Africa-China space exploration agreement attests to this, as well as the China-brokered Iran-Saudi Arabia peace deal. 

I am always reminded of one of the most famous Western Christian Christmas carols, "Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men." Unfortunately, the West has used this theme song as a means to deceive the colonialized nations while they used their power to exploit and plunder the impoverished. The advancement of the community of shared future is to end this exploitation and strive for genuine justice for all.

With 500 years of colonization and its "forever wars" in the past, we can now look forward to 500 years of "forever peace" in the global community of shared future. Imagine what the world can achieve even in the first 50 years of those 500 years of peace. Today, trade among BRICS has produced about 31 percent of Global GDP, with the six new members it will reach 37 percent, its population base would constitute 47percent of the world.

ASEAN is an early component of the community of shared future, its trade with China has increased from $641.5 billion in 2019 to $975.3 billion in 2022 due to the peace and stability of the region from cooperation of the two sides and resistance to interventions of disruptive forces from the West. The West has not ceased in carrying out aggressive actions to disrupt the ASEAN region, violating its Zone of Peace, Freedom and Neutrality (ZOPFAN) and Treaty of Southeast Asia Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone (SEANWFZ Treaty). 

The West is pushing its NATO forces into Asia and proposing a Tokyo headquarters. The US has regained its neo-colonial foothold in the Philippines, bringing in new military bases, personnel, war planes and warships while the country suffers from fertilizer, rice and fuel shortages. Additionally, the US is creating lawfare and concocted media-focused crises between China and the Philippines. 

ASEAN is politely quiet about the Philippines' alignment with the US' "forever war" campaign. Many in the region believe that the US's influence will decline due to its declining polity and economy, but it still creates an unsettling disturbance. 

Despite this irritant, China continues its patient and transcendent cultivation of peaceful dialogue with the Philippines for the sake of the greater cause of the community of shared future.

The China-initiated global community of shared future backed by its resources and determination has given hope for a better future for humanity. Another 10 years of the project for the global community of shared future will see Africa, Latin America, the Eurasian continent and ASEAN blooming with wealth, technological advancement and collective cooperative projects. 

China marked its eighth Space Day on Monday, with a grand opening ceremony held in Hefei, capital of East China's Anhui Province. At the event which also kick-started the annual China Space Conference, China unveiled significant accomplishments in the aerospace domain in the past year and outlined exciting plans for future exploration, winning applauds from attendees from all over the world.

The opening ceremony of the Space Day of China had quite a friendly atmosphere from the very beginning, with distinguished guests from space agencies of countries including France, Argentina and Thailand as well as international organizations like the European Space Agency (ESA) and the United Nations, sending congratulatory messages to the China National Space Administration (CNSA) as the Chinese national space agency celebrated the 30th anniversary of its establishment.

China released the country's first-ever global color image map of Mars at the Monday event. The map was produced by processing a mosaic with 14,747 images obtained by the Moderate Resolution Imagining Camera onboard the country's Tianwen-1 orbiter, the Global Times learned from the CNSA.
Tianwen-1, successfully launched on July 23, 2020, was China's first interplanetary exploration. After a flight of 202 days, Tianwen-1 reached Mars' orbit and on May 15, 2021, the Zhurong rover landed on the red planet. So far, the rover has trekked 1,921 meters on the Mars surface in 385 Martian days - long past its designed 90 days service life.

According to the CNSA on Monday, 13 pieces of payload onboard the Tianwen-1 mission have obtained 1,800 gigabytes of raw scientific data, formulating standard data products, through which scientists and research teams have made several discoveries.

China has also been engaged with international partners in sharing fruits of its landmark Chang'e-5 lunar sample returning mission.

According to the CNSA, China gifted 1.5 grams of Chang'e-5 lunar samples to France during French President Emmanuel Macron's visit to China in early April and the same amount of the precious samples to Russia during Russian President Vladmir Putin's China visit on February 4, 2022.

So far, scientists and researchers from Australia, Russia, France, the US, the UK and Sweden have joined in the study of the lunar samples retrieved by the Chinese mission, according to the CNSA.

"The international sharing [of these samples] and joining forces to study these samples is a major event in the global scientific circle, and it is also a crucial way for us to understand the formation and evolution of the moon. China has carried out aerospace exchange and cooperation with other countries based on the principle of peaceful use, equality and mutual benefit, jointly pushing forward the building of a shared future of mankind in the outer space," said the CNSA in a statement it provided to the Global Times on Monday.

With the completion of the in-orbit assembly and building of China Space Station in 2022, Zhou Jianping, chief architect of China's manned space program, was recognized with the Qian Xuesen Highest Award at the Monday event. Qian (1911-2009) was a Chinese aerospace engineer and cyberneticist who made significant contributions to the field of aerodynamics and established engineering cybernetics.

Rapid pace

Former US astronaut Donald Thomas told the Global Times during an exclusive interview on Monday on the sidelines of the China Space Conference that he had been closely following China's space program for the last 10 years, starting with the Chang'e-2 and the Yutu Rover. What really caught his attention was two years ago when the Chang'e-5 brought the lunar soil back to the Earth.

"It was an amazing accomplishment to land on the moon, to drill down to collect samples, to take off from the moon and get the samples back to the Earth. China made it look easy, but we all know it is very hard," Thomas said. "So I was just in awe that they accomplished that in first try with no problems along the way."

The development of manned space program has been so rapid that Thomas was really impressed how quick the building of the Tiangong space station was. "They [Chinese taikonauts] live up there for six months at a time already. And it took the US many years to get to that point. So I've just been impressed with the rapid pace of your space program," he said.

Thomas also said China and the US are not rivals in space, noting there is no space race between the US and China. "We're all learning about the planet Mars and about the moon, about the universe, our solar system. And I think it's shared knowledge for everybody back on the Earth. So I don't think I would use the word like 'competition' to describe the relationship."

Thomas is hopeful that China and the US and all countries could cooperate in space exploration. It has been learned in the last 50 years, in the example of the Soviet Union and the US, that cooperation in space is a much better path than competition, Thomas said. He believes the friendship between the astronauts from different countries can be a great model from which people can draw inspiration down on the Earth.
Good news for developing countries

Mazlan Othman, former director of the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, who attended the Monday event, told the Global Times that China has made it very clear and has held its hand out to cooperate with developing countries, especially at the space station.

"When I was at the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, we had a program called Human Space Technology Initiative. Under that program, China led the way in discussing how we can bring experiments from developing countries to the China Space Station, as well as possibly an astronaut chosen at the international level to bring this particular person, not from ESA or NASA or Roscosmos, but from the developing countries, to go to China Space Station," said the former UN official.

The reason why China stands above everyone else is because the other countries are focused on themselves. But China is focused on the developing countries. That was why there is very special place in Othman's heart for the China space program.

When asked to comment on whether astronauts from the ESA would join missions to the China Space Station, Karl Bergquist, administrator of external relations department with the ESA, told the Global Times that the matter hadn't been discussed yet. But who knows what will happen in the future if there will be discussions on such things, he said.

"We have many collaborations between Europe and China on the scientific use of the China Space station. This is also something which is important to highlight," the ESA official said.

The ESA has very good cooperation with China, including building a satellite with the Chinese Academy of Sciences for the study of the magnetosphere and it also provides instruments and hardware to the Einstein probe in a Chinese mission.

"We have a big corporation with the US yet we believe we can cooperate with both China and the US," Bergquist said.

The ninth Kubuqi International Desert Forum (KIDF), which aims to promote ecological civilization construction and scientific innovation in sand control and land restoration, providing the international community with China's experience in the prevention of desertification, kicked off on Saturday in Ordos, North China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.

An important effort to combat desertification - the China-Arab International Research Center for Drought, Desertification and Land Degradation - was established at the forum's opening ceremony. Representatives of the meeting signed the memorandum of understanding on building the center and launched the first batch of collaboration projects, including greening the upgrading projects for Saudi new cites and exporting knowhows to other Gulf Cooperation Council countries, and Saudi 10 billion trees and shrubs nursery, plantation, and eco-solar desert control engineering projects.

The two-day forum, themed "Technology-empowered Desert Control for the Benefit of Mankind," was attended by more than 300 participants, including foreign political figures, representatives from UN agencies, officials from relevant ministries and commissions, as well as experts, scholars, and entrepreneurs. The attendees reached a consensus that in the face of the current uncertain international environment and the increasingly severe challenges of land desertification, the KIDF is an important platform for countries around the world to exchange experience in combating desertification, and China's efforts to scientifically control deserts have made new contributions to the global response to desertification challenges and ecological crises.

"This time I came to Ordos, I was most impressed by the Kubuqi Desert green area which is getting bigger and bigger. And through the forum, I also saw that the Chinese government is paying more and more attention to the desertification control, this is consistent with the efforts of the international community to manage environmental protection," Former Polish President Bronisław Komorowski told the Global Times on Saturday.

Kubuqi Desert is the seventh largest desert in China, forming a huge yellow sand belt lying toward the north of the Ordos Plateau, only 800 kilometers away from Beijing. The Kubuqi Desert was once known as "the sea of death," however, currently, more than 6,000 square kilometers of the desert have been covered with green vegetation. Animals and plants have grown from more than 100 species to more than 530 species. At the same time, the quality of local people's life has been greatly improved.

The KIDF, jointly held by China's Ministry of Science and Technology, the National Forestry and Grassland Administration, and the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Regional People's Government, is the only large-scale international forum dedicated to promoting global desertification control and green economic development. This year's forum invited the United Nations Environment Programme and the Secretariat of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification as co-organizers.

"I had the privilege to visit the extraordinary landscapes of the Ordos region. I witnessed firsthand the remarkable, socioeconomic and ecological restoration, an inspiring example for the regions around the world, struggling against land, degrading desiccation and decimation," Amina Mohamed, Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations said at the forum.

Over the past ten years, China has taken a series of measures in the areas of policy, marketization and industrialization, and encouraged governments, enterprises and social forces to work together to implement a series of major sand control projects, completing the task of sand control and prevention of 282 million mu (18.8 million hectares), reducing the area of sandy land by more than 64.9 million mu, contributing to 25 percent of the world's green increment.

Scholars and experts attending the forum noted that 2023 marks the 10th anniversary of China's proposal of building a community with a shared future for mankind and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). China actively promotes international dialogue, alignment between international cooperation on the BRI and the implementation of the 2030 Agenda.

The Forum adheres to the concept of "Harmonious Coexistence of Human and Nature," and through the exchange of new concepts and technologies for global desertification control, it promotes international cooperation in desert ecological science and technology and new energy industry, boosts the world's effective response to the challenges of desertification, and facilitates the realization of the United Nations 2030 sustainable development goals.

White-tailed prairie dogs — those stand-up, nose-wiggling nibblers of grass — turn out to be routine killers of baby ground squirrels. And the strongest sign of successful white-tailed motherhood could be repeat ground squirrel kills, researchers say.

At a Colorado prairie dog colony, females that kill at least two ground squirrels raise three times as many offspring during their lives as nonkiller females, says John Hoogland of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science in Frostburg. The “serial killers,” as he calls repeat-attack females, rarely even nibble at the carcasses and aren’t getting much, if any, meat bonus. Instead, the supermom assassins may improve grazing in their territories by reducing competition from grass-snitching ground squirrels, Hoogland and Charles Brown of the University of Tulsa propose March 23 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
“This really caught me by surprise,” Hoogland says. Carnivorous mammals killing other carnivore species wouldn’t be surprising, but prairie dogs and ground squirrels eat plants. He knows of no other systematic study documenting routine fatal attacks by one herbivore species on another.

“It’s also striking because it’s so subtle,” he says. He had been watching prairie dogs in general for decades and the white-tailed prairie dogs in the Arapaho National Wildlife Refuge for a year before he noticed an attack. A female “jumped on something, shook it, shook it hard, kept attacking — and then walked away,” he says. The encounter lasted just minutes. Hoogland rushed from his observation tower to the scene of the fight and, to his surprise, retrieved a dead baby ground squirrel.
Once he and his colleagues knew what to look for, they saw 101 such lethal attacks (mostly from females, but also from some males) over six years and inferred 62 more from carcasses. A propensity for killing ground squirrels turned out to be the only factor (among such possibilities as body mass, age and number of neighbors) that predicted a tendency toward lifetime success in raising lots of young. That factor, which biologists describe as fitness, is a big deal in analyzing how populations change and species evolve.

Hoogland and Brown propose that prairie dogs and ground squirrels compete for grazing. An analysis of the animals’ diets finds at least six plant species in common, the researchers say. Hoogland didn’t directly test to see if the serial killer prairie dogs just had great territories that attracted lots of ground squirrels and thus provided more opportunities for killing. But if that were true, he says, he would predict that the holders of this prime territory would have robust body sizes, and therefore there would be some link between maternal body size and high offspring number. No such link shows up, he says. The best hypothesis explaining the benefit of killing squirrels that Hoogland can think of, he says, is that prairie dogs slay the competition for food resources.

Still, the idea that prairie dogs and ground squirrels compete for plants needs more information, says ecologist Liesbeth Bakker of the Netherlands Institute of Ecology in Wageningen. The total of ground squirrel kills was an impressive number, she says, but it’s unclear what percentage it represents. If the deaths remove only a small proportion of ground squirrels, competition isn’t likely to ease much. Also, any effect would be weakened by the relative sizes of the species. “The ground squirrels are about half the size of the prairie dogs and thus eat less food,” she says.
Behavioral ecologist James Hare wonders why ground squirrels venture into prairie dog territory if it’s so dangerous. One of the ideas Hoogland suggests is that prairie dog vigilance in raising alarms about predators might make the risks of hanging out in a colony worthwhile. Hare, at the University of Manitoba in Canada, also wonders whether ground squirrels have trouble finding good habitat free from prairie dogs.

Hoogland too is left with questions, including one about the big-family bonus of interspecific killing. “Is this really unique to prairie dogs or is this more common?”

During last year’s outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome in South Korea, about 20 percent of hospital patients in close contact with a single MERS case, known as Patient 14, contracted the disease, South Korean researchers found after reviewing medical records and security footage.

From May to July 2015, South Korea experienced the biggest outbreak of MERS outside of the Middle East. A few people dubbed “superspreaders” transmitted the virus to many others. Patient 14, a 35-year-old man, unwittingly transmitted the virus to 82 other people — including 33 patients, 41 visitors and eight health care workers — between May 27 and 29 while in the emergency room of Samsung Medical Center in Seoul. The man did not know he had been exposed to the virus while at another hospital.

During his time in the ER, the man came in contact with 675 patients, 218 health care workers and about 683 visitors, researchers report July 8 in The Lancet. People who spent time in the same zone of the emergency room with Patient 14 were most likely to catch the virus from him. But even people who weren’t in close contact had about a 5 percent chance of getting ill. That includes three people who overlapped with the man for a short time in the radiology suite. Even four of the 500 patients who were never in the same part of the emergency room as Patient 14 caught the virus.

The most likely place to catch MERS from Patient 14 was the hospital’s waiting room, designated Zone II, even though people in that part of the emergency room were exposed to him for only about three hours. On average, it took about seven days after exposure to the virus for people to develop symptoms.

A three-way tectonic tango may have led to the birth of what is now the largest chunk of Earth’s crust.

By scrutinizing what little geologic evidence remains from 190 million years ago, researchers reconstructed the origins of the Pacific tectonic plate, which now covers a fifth of Earth’s surface. The plate formed during the early Jurassic period from a single point where three tectonic plates once met, the work suggests. The plate’s birthplace sat above the gravesite of a section of tectonic plate that sank into the planet’s depths, the researchers report July 27 in Science Advances. The remnants of that sunken plate remain embedded in Earth’s mantle.
This origin story of tectonic life and death is unique in Earth’s known history, says study coauthor Lydian Boschman, a geologist and geodynamicist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. All of the other modern plates formed by one plate splitting into two, she says. “We’re not sure why this happened, but we now know how it happened.”

A network of shifting tectonic plates covers Earth’s surface. While pieces of continental plates can date back billions of years, the oldest oceanic crust is only about 200 million years old. Anything older has been swallowed into Earth’s interior by subduction.
The oldest part of the Pacific Plate dates back 190 million years and is triangle-shaped. That shape led scientists to postulate that the Pacific Plate formed at a convergence of three other plates. Some scientists proposed that these three plates were in a Y-shape configuration, with the plates spreading away from a central point. As the plates drifted, the ground split and new crust formed as molten rock extruded onto the seafloor and cooled. But such a setup of three spreading ridges wouldn’t create a new plate — the new material would have just made the existing plates bigger.
Reviewing the ages of the seafloor across the Pacific Ocean, Boschman and Douwe van Hinsbergen, a geophysicist also at Utrecht University, instead propose a different story.

The story begins with three tectonic plates that slid together, with one of the plates steamrolling over a section of another, forcing the plate segment into Earth’s depths. That plate segment’s disappearance briefly led to a three-way junction. But instead of the plates moving away from a central point, the three plates bumped and scraped alongside one another in a pinwheel motion. (One plate gliding past another plate is the type of movement seen along California’s San Andreas Fault.)

With all three plates now sliding past one another, a triangular gap opened in the middle. Fresh molten rock from Earth’s interior rushed up to fill the void, creating the nucleus of the Pacific Plate. Spreading ridges formed on each side of this budding plate, adding additional rock to the plate as the gap between the three original plates grew.

“The Pacific Plate is the largest on Earth, but it started out as the smallest,” Boschman says.

Using seismic imaging, scientists previously identified the possible remains of a sunken tectonic plate west of Costa Rica. That lost plate could mark the birthplace of the Pacific Plate, Boschman says.

Verifying this story will be “extremely challenging,” says geophysicist Dietmar Müller of the University of Sydney. No seafloor lingers from before the Pacific Plate formed, and the sunken tectonic plate may have moved over time, making it difficult to concretely tie the plate to the proposed scenario. Boschman says the composition of the Pacific Plate’s oldest rocks may reveal whether they formed over a submerged plate, though collecting such rocks could be expensive and difficult.

Even so, the work provides the first plausible look at the tectonic movements that may have led to the Pacific Plate’s formation, says marine geophysicist William Sager of the University of Houston. “It was a dark room and they turned on the light. It’s a dim light, so we can’t see very far, but it’s something.”