Popular video-sharing platform Bilibili stated on Sunday that Chinese Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan's account being banned was a rumor, and that in reality, the account was fake and has been permanently banned.

Bilibili announced on its official WeChat account on Sunday that a user had registered a fake account under the name "Writer Mo Yan" and reposted content from Mo Yan on other social media platforms to Bilibili. Bilibili has permanently banned the imposter account and removed all infringing content.

Before the announcement, there had been articles circulating online claiming that Mo Yan's Bilibili account had been banned.

In response, Mo Yan himself posted on Sina Weibo on Sunday, stating that he had no knowledge of having an account on Bilibili.

Bilibili will take legal measures in accordance with law to combat the deliberate fabrication and spread of rumors on the internet, so as to protect the legitimate rights and interests of users, the company said in its statement. 

Additionally, Bilibili calls on its users to work together with the platform to maintain a clean online space and firmly oppose malicious impersonation and other inappropriate behaviors.

An Asian elephant detected a 2.8-kilogram consignment of opium in Mengman township, Southwest China's Yunnan Province during a walk in the region. The case is under investigation by the local police, according to a People's Daily report on Tuesday.

Border police of Mengman township, Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture received a report recently that four wild Asian elephants were roaming around a village in the town. When the police arrived at the site, they found that one of the elephants stopped and carefully sniffed in an area of grass, and then used its trunk to toss a backpack out of the grass, while also making some "calls."

The police immediately checked the backpack and found the opium. The case is currently under further investigation.

The story triggered wide discussion among Chinese netizens, with the topic gaining more than 190 million clicks as of Tuesday morning on Chinese-twitter like Sina Weibo. Many netizens praised the elephant with its delicate sense of smell and said that it should be awarded with more fruits like bananas. Some called for more protection for "smart" elephants, mankind's "good friend."

A total of 12,417 athletes from all 45 Asian countries and regions will compete at the Hangzhou Asian Games, organizers announced on Thursday, as the city marked 30-day countdown to Asia's biggest multi-sport tournament.

The Hangzhou Asian Games, which will take place in Hangzhou, capital of East China's Zhejiang Province from September 23 to October 8, will be the third Asian multi-sport event held in China, after the 1990 Beijing Asian Games and the 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games.

Ticket sales for the Hangzhou Asian Games have started on July 8, with tickets for events such as swimming and e-sports on high demand. The ticket price varies from 20 to 1,000 yuan ($2.75 to $137), with more than 60 percent of them costing less than 100 yuan, organizers said.

The torch relay for the Asian Games will start on September 8 in Hangzhou and hence commence a provincial tour in Zhejiang until September 20, said Chen Weiqiang, executive secretary general of the Hangzhou Asian Games organizing committee.

The organizers have made some adjustment to the competition schedule recently based on the athletes' registrations, with a confirmed race schedule to be unveiled at the end of August, said Zhu Qinan, director of Sports Department of the organizing committee.

The Hangzhou Asian Games will also witness the debut of some emerging sports that are quite popular among young people, such as break dance and e-sports.

Weiqi, a mind sport, will make a return to the Hangzhou Games, after a 13-year hiatus since it appeared at the Guangzhou Games in 2010.

Certain regional sports in Asia, notably dragon boat racing, kurash, and sepak takraw, though not recognized as Olympic sports, will also be medal-awarded events at the Asian Games.

China is expected to send a delegation of over 900 athletes to the Hangzhou Games, as the Asian sports powerhouse is expected to dominate the podium once again. Since 1982, China has been sitting on the top of the medal table in each of the Asian Games it has participated in.

Several Chinese national teams have been preparing for the Asian Games, as they plan to defend their glory while facing off challengers from other Asian sports powerhouses.

China's East Asian neighbors Japan and South Korea are also considered the favorites at the Asian Games, as the duo have often finished in second and third place on the medal table thanks to their excellence in swimming and archery respectively.

India will also challenge China's dominance in shooting, as the country has been making efforts to improve the country's shooting squad capabilities.
In the lead-up to the sporting event, the design details of the victory ceremony components, including bouquets, trays, and podiums, were revealed. The official theme song and music video were also released and a commencement ceremony dedicated to the event's volunteers was held.

On Thursday morning, the commencement ceremony for volunteers was held at Zhejiang University, with 1,800 representatives of a total of 37,600 volunteers expected to serve during the event in attendance.

The global recruitment drive for volunteers for the Hangzhou Asian Games and Asian Para Games was initiated in May 2021, with 317,000 applications received.

"We're fully prepared to execute each process, step, and detail in our volunteer service to contribute to this grand event," said student volunteer representative Zhao Hongyan.

The volunteer body is primarily comprised of individuals from 46 universities within Zhejiang.

Additionally, specialists in fields such as sports, less-commonly spoken languages, and medicine were sourced to provide much-needed assistance during the event. Around 400 volunteers from other provinces among others joined the effort.

The floral bouquets for the awards ceremonies were named "Fruits of Triumph," and included rice ears and lotus pods, representing harvest and achievements in Chinese culture, along with the iconic "Rainbow Purple" showing the event's core color palette.

Unique to 2023's Asian Games is the inclusion of decorative vases inspired by huagu, a kind of vessel from the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279).

The Dongyang wood carving, a national-level intangible cultural heritage, was also employed in the vessels' crafting. The undulating water patterns on the vases echo the rhythm of Zhejiang's landscape, and could be kept by award-winning athletes and treasured forever.

The design of the medal trays was inspired from the gentle ripples of West Lake's waters in the breeze.

The outer part of the podium mimics the color scheme of the "Rainbow Orchid," while the stage itself is adorned with an "Ink and Watercolor White" hue. A modular design approach is employed for the podium to accommodate various sports, embodying the spirit of sustainability.

The song The Love We Share, performed by famous Chinese singer Sun Nan, has officially been endorsed as the Games' theme song. The song's music video portrays iconic landscapes from across Asia, showcasing the unity of people from diverse backgrounds and regions.

China is considering holding degree holders who use artificial intelligence (AI) to ghostwrite their theses legally responsible. The draft of the Degree Law was submitted to the Standing Committee of the 14th National People's Congress, China's top legislature, for deliberation on Monday.

The draft lays out legal responsibilities for actions such as degree holders using or impersonating another's identity to gain admission qualifications, employing artificial intelligence to author thesis papers, and institutions granting degrees unlawfully, as reported by the media on Monday. 

Academic misconduct includes plagiarism, forgery, data falsification, using artificial intelligence to produce a thesis, impersonating another's identity to obtain admission qualifications, and securing admission qualifications and graduation certificates through illicit means like favoritism and cheating. The draft also addresses other illegal or irregular behaviors that, when exhibited during the study period, should prevent the awarding of a degree.

The draft states that if an individual who has already obtained a degree is found to have used illegal means to do so, the degree-granting institution must revoke the degree certificate. This decision should be made following a review by the degree evaluation committee.

Being infected with a parasite is usually not good news. Some of the critters can make you sick, and some will eventually kill you. And studies have found that when an animal has to deal with both a parasite and pollutants such as toxic heavy metals, the stressors add up.

But that isn’t true for Artemia brine shrimp in Spain, a new study finds. Infection with cestodes — a type of parasitic flatworm also known as tapeworms — results in an increased ability to survive in waters laced with toxic arsenic.
Marta Sánchez of the Spanish National Research Council in Seville has been studying the role of parasites in ecosystems. She and her colleagues were curious about the brine shrimp because they are key players in the ecosystem; they are eaten by many water birds, including flamingos, and can ferry pollutants and parasites into the birds. “Infected [brine shrimp] are more susceptible to predation by birds,” Sánchez notes, which contributes to pollutant levels in the birds.

When brine shrimp become infected with parasites, they turn red. This makes them especially attractive to birds not only because they are easier to see but also because birds are on the lookout for the carotenoid pigments responsible for the color. These pigments not only give a bird’s feathers their colors but they are also necessary for a healthy bird. “As birds cannot synthesize these pigments and they are a scarce resource in nature, they selectively search for them in their diet,” Sánchez says.
The red color also makes it easy for scientists to pick out infected brine shrimp. Sánchez and her colleagues collected brine shrimp from southwestern Spain’s Odiel and Tinto estuary, which is tainted with arsenic and other heavy metals from current and past mining activities. In the lab, the researchers separated the parasite-infected and uninfected brine shrimp and then ran tests to see how well they survived in arsenic-laced waters.

As the concentration of arsenic in the water increased, so did the number of brine shrimp that died. But more brine shrimp that were infected with cestodes survived than uninfected ones, the team reports March 3 in PLOS Pathogens. Then, curious about the effects of climate change, the researchers repeated their experiment with warmer water. Again, the parasites appeared to confer some level of protection to the brine shrimp.
It may not be obvious, but causing a quick death is not a good strategy for a parasite. That’s because a parasite needs its host to stay alive long enough for the parasite to reproduce, leave and find a new host. If the host dies too quickly, then the parasite dies with it. So for cestodes, giving brine shrimp some help in surviving polluted waters may be in the parasites’ best interest.

The results suggests that the cestodes help change the way the brine shrimp deal with pollutants and the resulting stress. When the researchers compared infected and uninfected brine shrimp, they found differences in the antioxidant defenses that protect an organism against the damaging effects of reactive oxygen species. “Infected individuals were better than uninfected individuals at coping under polluted conditions,” Sánchez says. Also, infected brine shrimp had higher amounts of lipid droplets that are thought to sequester toxins.

The researchers can’t say whether this beneficial relationship is restricted to this particular estuary in Spain. “What we can say,” Sánchez says, “is that the red coloration associated with tapeworm infections is something we have observed in many sites in different countries. Hence, we expect our results do represent what would be recorded at other localities.”

BALTIMORE — For a long time now, hydrogen has been the fuel of the future. A new idea for extracting hydrogen from water might help that future arrive a little sooner.

Today, producing hydrogen requires burning fossil fuels or using water-splitting catalysts that work relatively inefficiently, says physicist Arvin Kakekhani of Yale University. But Kakekhani and Sohrab Ismail-Beigi, also at Yale, identified a strategy using materials known as ferroelectric oxides to catalytically separate hydrogen from oxygen more effectively.

Catalysis requires a surface that both grips a water molecule in order to split it and releases the hydrogen atoms separated in the process. Ordinary catalysts must compromise between these two competing qualities. But a ferroelectric substance such as lead titanate can be prepared so that heat can switch it from a state suitable for splitting to another state good at releasing, computer simulations showed. Researchers therefore should be able to design a cycle of states that extracts hydrogen efficiently, Kakekhani reported March 17 in a news conference at a meeting of the American Physical Society.

“It’s a conceptual study that should be experimentally confirmed,” he said. A report on the work was also published online March 8 in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A.

There must be something wrong with the guy who never leaves home, right? Maybe not — at least if that guy is a male spotted hyena. Males that stay with their birth clan, instead of taking off to join a new group, may simply be making a good choice, a new study suggests.

Spotted hyenas are a matriarchal society. Females are in charge. They rank higher than every male in the clan. And the females generally stay with the clan for their entire lives. But males face a choice when they reach two and a half years in age. They can stay with the clan, or they can leave and join a new clan.

Each choice has its pros and cons. Staying with the clan means that a male hyena keeps a place at the top of the male pecking order. He’ll probably have his mother around to help. But he’ll be limited in the number of females he can mate with, because many of the female hyenas won’t mate with him because they might be related. If he joins a new clan, the male hyena might have access to more females — and they might even be better than the ones in his home clan — but he’ll start with the lowest social rank and have to spend years fighting his way to the top.

Among most group-living mammal species, the guys that stay at home turn out to be losers, siring fewer offspring. But spotted hyenas, it appears, are an exception.

Eve Davidian of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin and colleagues tracked 254 male spotted hyenas that lived in eight clans in Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania throughout their lives, a study lasting 20 years. When these males reached the age of maturity, they left their clans to take a look at the other options available to them. Forty-one hyenas returned to their home clans, and 213 settled with new ones.

Even though the males that stayed at home probably had fewer potential breeding partners, they still managed to sire as many offspring as those males that left for greener pastures. Many mated at an earlier age, and they tended to mate with higher-ranking females than males that joined new clans. And both groups lived similar lengths of time, the researchers report March 18 in Science Advances.

The guys who stay at home, it seems, aren’t losers who couldn’t find better prospects elsewhere. They just found good enough prospects at home, where they are at the top of the social ladder — and have mom around to help them get access to food and females.

Seems like a good strategy — for hyenas, at least.

White dwarfs — the exposed cores of dead stars — are the last place astronomers expected to find an oxygen atmosphere. Yet that’s exactly what recently turned up, providing researchers a rare peek inside the core of a massive star and raising questions about how such an oddball could have formed.

Most stars die by gently casting the bulk of their gas into space, leaving behind a dense, hot core. Heavy elements such as carbon and oxygen sink to the core’s center while hydrogen and helium float to the surface. But a newly discovered white dwarf, about 1,200 light-years away in the constellation Draco, has no hydrogen or helium at its surface. Its atmosphere is instead dominated by oxygen, researchers report in the April 1 Science.
“We only found one, so it is a rare event,” says study coauthor Kepler de Souza Oliveira Filho, an astronomer at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil. But, he says, “every theory must be able to explain all events, even the rare ones.”

Hydrogen and helium blanket most white dwarfs, hiding what lies beneath. Here, astronomers have “a window into the core of a star that we didn’t have before,” says Patrick Dufour, an astrophysicist at the University of Montreal.

While oxygen dominates this white dwarf’s atmosphere, neon and magnesium come in second and third — a clue that the original star was much bigger than our sun. Big stars can crank up their core temperatures high enough to fuse progressively heavier elements. A star between about six and 10 times as massive as the sun ends up with a core made of mostly oxygen, neon and magnesium — precisely what Filho and colleagues found. But there’s a problem: Such a white dwarf should be a bit heavier than our sun, and this newly discovered misfit appears to have about half as much mass.

A nearby stellar companion could have siphoned gas off the dying star, starving the white dwarf of mass, the researchers suggest. Thermonuclear excavation during the star’s end game could also lead to an underweight white dwarf. If enough hydrogen piled up on the core, it might have triggered a runaway nuclear explosion that shaved off the white dwarf’s outer layers.

While plausible, it’s hard to see how that could remove half of the white dwarf’s mass, Dufour says. “That’s very strange,” he says. “It could work, but I doubt it would leave a low-mass white dwarf.”
In 2007, Dufour and colleagues reported a similar strange sighting: several white dwarfs whose atmospheres were loaded with carbon instead of hydrogen and helium. Those also appeared to be missing some mass, he says, though the problem was found to lie not with the stars but with the mass estimates. The white dwarfs are heavier than initially thought, and Dufour now suspects that each one arose from a collision between two white dwarfs.

It’s too early to draw strong conclusions from a single oxygen-laden white dwarf. “There are lots of open questions before we can say that this changes our view of white dwarf evolution,” Dufour says. “This white dwarf might only be a freak…. Although often in science, it’s the exception that makes you understand a great deal later on.”

Antarctica’s meltdown could spur sea level rise well beyond current predictions. A new simulation of the continent’s thawing ice suggests that Antarctic melting alone will raise global sea levels by about 64 to 114 centimeters by 2100, scientists report in the March 31 Nature.

Adding Antarctic melt to other sources of sea level rise, such as the expansion of warming seawater and melting Greenland ice, the scientists predict that sea levels will rise 1.5 to 2.1 meters by the end of the century. That’s as much as double previous predictions that didn’t incorporate mechanisms that can expedite the Antarctic ice sheet’s collapse, though uncertainties remain, says study coauthor David Pollard, a paleoclimatologist at Penn State.
Predicting future sea level rise requires understanding how the oceans rose in the past. Scientists often glean ancient sea level rise by reconstructing the locations of ancient coastlines. But these coastlines can be a slippery target: Forces such as tectonic activity can cause Earth’s surface to rise and fall, obscuring the effects of past sea level rise. Depending on how much uplift obfuscated ancient sea level records — ranging from no uplift to massive uplift — the new prediction of 21st century sea level rise can differ by 35 centimeters or more.

A separate study also highlights the challenges of factoring changing coastlines into sea level rise predictions. Researchers estimate online April 2 in Geophysical Research Letters that groundwater depletion has caused the coasts of California and India to rebound upward, counteracting sea level rise in those regions by about 0.4 millimeters per year.

“I really would be happier if we had the luxury of doing the research on this without bothering the public until we have 95 percent confidence in an answer,”says Penn State glaciologist Richard Alley, who was not involved in either study. “Any single forecast is notably uncertain, but if we continue warming the world rapidly, the most likely outcome is a major event of large and rapid sea level rise.”

Two warm periods, one about 125,000 years ago and another about 3 million years ago, were particularly useful for Pollard and coauthor Robert DeConto, a geoscientist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Those bouts of warming shrank Earth’s ice sheets and boosted sea levels by several meters. Pollard and DeConto used these sea level records to fine-tune a computer simulation of how climate change affects the Antarctic ice sheet. The researchers then applied their calibrated simulation to current climate conditions and projected sea level rise thousands of years into the future.

Assuming that society takes no actions to curb greenhouse gas emissions, the simulation predicts that Antarctic melting will accelerate around 2050 as rising temperatures destabilize several keystone glaciers in West Antarctica. After 2100, Antarctica’s contribution to sea level rise will exceed 4 centimeters a year — more than 10 times the current rate from all sources.
Such severe sea level rise would reshape most of Earth’s coastlines, and the waters would rise even higher as time goes on, Pollard predicts. “Sea levels won’t peak until around 3,000 to 4,000 years from now,”he says. At that point, Antarctica will have raised global sea levels by about 20 meters.

The consequences of this long-term sea level rise will be dire, says Maureen Raymo, a marine geologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., who was not involved with the work. “I haven’t seen anyone mention the long, slowly unfolding refugee crisis that will only get worse as hundreds of millions [of people] are displaced worldwide,” she says.

Even top-caliber diamonds aren’t perfect. And their imperfections are finally settling a debate about the origins of the gem-quality diamonds used in jewelry.

Previously, scientists had an explanation only for how cloudy and impurity-ridden fibrous diamonds form. Those diamonds crystallize inside fluid pockets deep within the Earth that contain compounds called carbonates. Carbonate-containing impurities inside fibrous diamonds provide information about the diamonds’ origins. Gem diamonds typically don’t contain these impurities, so scientists argued over whether the gems formed under different conditions than fibrous diamonds.
After an exhaustive hunt, geochemists have at last found microscopic impurities within gem-quality diamonds. These flaws suggest that pretty and ugly diamonds form from the same kinds of carbonate-containing fluids, the researchers report in the June 1 issue of Earth and Planetary Science Letters. The finding may also offer insights into the history of plate tectonics.

The work “gives us the first strong constraint on how gem diamonds grow,” says Thomas Stachel, a petrologist at the University of Alberta in Canada who was not involved in the research. “People had proposed various explanations for how these diamonds form, but it seems diamond formation is less diverse than we thought.”

Diamonds are made up of carbon atoms. At the pressures and temperatures found in the deep Earth, these carbon atoms can form a crystal structure. Rising magma then carries the crystals to the surface.

The type of diamonds prized for jewelry formed as early as 3.5 billion years ago. Fibrous diamonds date back only a few million years and formed more quickly. That quick creation trapped bits of surrounding material inside the crystal structure. Those inclusions suggest that these diamonds formed from the carbon atoms in carbonate-containing fluids. Gem-quality diamonds formed more slowly and usually don’t contain any inclusions. “That’s why they’re gem quality —there’s nothing in them,” says study coauthor Brooke Matat Jablon, a geochemist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Jablon and geochemist Oded Navon, also at the Hebrew University, hunted for inclusions in diamond gemstones. The researchers finally found what they were looking for in diamonds that are symmetrical across a central boundary. As these diamonds grew, a microscopic inclusion would sometimes become trapped along the boundary. Using a beam of electrons, the researchers identified 32 inclusions in eight of 30 diamonds they examined. Twenty of those inclusions were the same carbonate-bearing fluids found in the fibrous diamonds.
The finding suggests that while fibrous diamonds and gem-quality diamonds differ in age and price, they share common origins. “We’re coming full circle on the story,” Jablon says. “We can quiet a debate that has been raging in the field for a long time. Going forward, we can generally assume most diamonds crystalize the same way.”

A similar mechanism for creating older, gem-quality diamonds and younger, fibrous diamonds suggests that Earth has maintained diamond-forming conditions for billions of years, Stachel says. Carbonates are carried into Earth’s depths when tectonic plates subduct and sink into the planet’s interior. If ancient diamonds form from carbonates, plate tectonics could have already been churning the planet’s exterior 3.5 billion years ago, he says.