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.

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.”

Laser blasts might help scientists tweak Earth’s thermostat by shattering the ice crystals found in cirrus clouds.

Zapping tiny ice particles in the lab forms new, smaller bits of ice, researchers report May 20 in Science Advances. Since clouds with more numerous, smaller ice particles reflect more light, the technique could combat global warming by causing the clouds to reflect more sunlight back into space, the scientists say.

Scientists from the University of Geneva and from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany injected water drops into a chilled chamber that mimics the frigid conditions high in the atmosphere, where wispy cirrus clouds live. The water froze into spherical ice particles, which the scientists walloped with short, intense bursts of laser light.
When the laser hits an ice particle, ultrahot plasma forms at its center, producing a shock wave that breaks the particle apart and vaporizes much of the ice. The excess water vapor left in the aftermath then condenses and freezes into new, smaller ice particles.
Applying this technique to clouds is “a long, long, long way in the future,” says physicist Mary Matthews of the University of Geneva, a coauthor of the study. Current laser technology is not up to the task of cloud zapping — yet. “What we are hoping for is that the advances in laser technology, which are moving faster and faster all the time, will enable high-powered, mobile lasers,” Matthews says.

But tinkering with cirrus clouds could backfire if scientists aren’t careful, says atmospheric scientist Trude Storelvmo of Yale University. The clouds also trap heat, through the greenhouse effect, so breaking up their ice particles could actually warm the Earth. The method“could potentially work, but only if you target certain types of cirrus clouds,” she says, such as those that are very thick.

There could also be warming if fossil fuels are burned to power the laser, says David Mitchell of the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nev. “I think it’s really interesting research, but I’m just not seeing how it’s going to make the world a cooler place.”

U.S. 191 is one of the driving options for people headed to Grand Teton or Yellowstone National Parks. But the road also cuts through prime territory for mule deer and pronghorns. And cars and large wildlife don’t usually mix well. When they do tangle, the cars end up heavily damaged, and the animals end up dead.

In an effort to reduce this conflict, the Wyoming Department of Transportation spent nearly $10 million to install two overpasses and six underpasses, along with deer-proof fencing, on sections of the highway near Daniel Junction in 2012. The sites for the passes were chosen based, in part, on the migration patterns of mule deer and pronghorns through the area.

Shortly after the installation, the animals were seen using the crossings, and vehicle collisions appeared to decline. The project was labeled a success. Now, an analysis of the project finds just how successful it has been: Car collisions with pronghorn have disappeared entirely and those with mule deer have dropped by 79 percent, Hall Sawyer of Western Ecosystems Technology Inc., and colleagues report May 16 in the Wildlife Society Bulletin.

Two digital cameras were installed at each overpass and one at each underpass to monitor wildlife using the crossings during the spring and fall migration periods in 2012 through 2015. Thousands of animals started using the pathways, and each year, more and more animals crossed the highway using these safe paths. Over the years, 40,251 mule deer and 19,290 pronghorn made their way through the passages.

Of the mule deer passing through, 79 percent used the underpasses. But among pronghorns, 92 percent took the overpasses. This confirms something that researchers had thought would be true but never really had any data to back up. They figured that ungulates such as pronghorns that live in open areas and are heavily reliant on vision to detect predators should prefer overpasses, because the structures would allow the animals to have better vision and movement. The new finding supports this, at least for pronghorns, and shows that building overpasses, which are more expensive than paths beneath highways, really is necessary for some animals.

This area of U.S. 191 was one of the worst for wildlife vehicle collisions before the crossings were built, averaging 85 per year from 2005 to 2012. By the third year after the installation, though, collisions had dropped to just 16 per year.

When the crossings were put in place, the Department of Transportation claimed that, by preventing vehicle collisions, the project would essentially pay for itself in 20 years. But this project has been so successful, the team calculates, that a crossing could pay for itself in just 4 years. And then, of course, there’s the benefit for the wildlife itself, which can now more easily and safely move through the landscape.
The team does note that Wyoming did have to make a few adjustments to the project to accommodate human behavior. The overpasses are edged with high berms to prevent animals from seeing the highway, but those berms proved tempting to ATV users and motorcyclists. Because this activity is damaging to vegetation and could reduce effectiveness of the crossings, the Bureau of Land Management had to post signs warning people away.

And when the crossings first went up, some canny hunters figured that the overpasses were good spots to find hundreds of pronghorn; hunting is now banned within 800 meters of a wildlife overpass.