China successfully launched the Tianzhou-6 cargo spacecraft into designated orbit on Wednesday, achieving a key victory of the first launch mission to the China Space Station since the Chinese crewed space outpost entered a normal operation and development phase at the end of 2022.

Carrying the Tianzhou-6 cargo spacecraft, China's Long March-7 Y7 carrier rocket took off from the Wenchang Space Launch Site in South China's Hainan Province on Wednesday at around 9:22 pm. After a flight lasting 10 minutes, the flagship spacecraft for the China Space Station new phase entered its preset orbit, which, according to the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA), marked the success of the launch mission.

The launcher's developer, the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), under the state-owned space giant China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), told the Global Times that Long March-7 has executed five Tianzhou cargo spacecraft launches since its maiden flight in 2016, with a perfect success rate.

The CALT also disclosed that following the Wednesday mission, another two orbital launches for the China Space Station would be carried out in 2023.

Wang Ran, chief designer of the cargo spacecraft system with China Academy of Spacecraft Technology (CAST) under the CASC, revealed that the new series of the Tianzhou cargo spacecraft, starting from Tianzhou-6 to Tianzhou-11, would be further upgraded compared to its predecessors, as its cargo capacity has been increased from the previous 6.9 tons to 7.4 tons, which makes the new Tianzhou spacecraft one of the strongest cargo spacecraft in the world. 

It was the first time that Tianzhou spacecraft possesses the cargo capacity exceeding 7 tons, which would reduce the frequency of cargo mission to the space station to three times in two years from four times in two years, boosting the comprehensive efficiency of the space station project. 

According to the CAST, the Tianzhou-6 cargo spacecraft is tasked with ferrying essential supplies for taikonauts that can sustain a three-strong crew's 280 days in space, around 260 different goods weighing some 5.8 tons as well as multiple payloads for scientific experiment and technology verification, to the China Space Station. 

Lü Congmin, deputy chief designer of the space application system and research fellow with the Technology and Engineering Center for Space Utilization under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told the Global Times that Tianzhou-6 will upload 98 pieces of payload and experiment materials weighing some 714 kilograms to the China Space Station. 

They will be used to carry out 29 scientific and application experiments in four domains - space life science and biotechnology, microgravity fluid physics and combustion science, space material science, and space application of new technology - according to Lü. 

According to developers with the CAST, starting with the Tianzhou-6, the technology team has upgraded the spacecraft system, including making improvement to the cargo cabin of the spacecraft and boosting the airtight cabin's cargo transport capability, which would provide more goods to the taikonauts to sustain a longer stay in space. 

The CAST stressed that through the implementation of comprehensive guarantee measures, 100 percent localization of key components has been realized.

The Tianzhou-6 cargo spacecraft is also the most versatile of its kind in terms of supporting capability in orbit; it is tasked to not only deliver supplies to the China Space Station, complete the attitude control of the space station combination, but also carry out space scientific and technological experiment. It will also unload waste from the China Space Station before falling back with control, the CAST told the Global Times in a statement. 

The stowage of the airtight cabin of the Tianzhou-6, according to the CAST insiders, has increased from 18.1 cubic meters to 22.5 cubic meters, an increase of 20 percent. The cargo capacity of the airtight cabin increased by 22 percent to 6.7 tons after upgrade, and that for the whole craft has been increased from 6.9 tons to 7.4 tons.

The Tianzhou-6 spacecraft will also deliver some 70 kilograms of fresh fruit for the crew to enjoy, which is twice the weight of fruit carried by the Tianzhou-5, according to Wang. 

"We used to be unsure about how long will such fresh fruit can be preserved in space. However, after learning from the past year, we are now sure about that we have the capability to upload more fruit at a time," Wang noted. 

Tianzhou-6 also delivered 1.75 tons of propellant, of which 700 kilograms will be provided to the space station.

The local court in Foshan, South China's Guangdong Province, recently announced the verdict in a case involving railway station employees who exploited their positions for financial gain by illegally selling private travel details of celebrities, according to a CCTV report on Saturday.

The Nanhai District's People's Court condemned a total of eight defendants to sentences ranging from 9 months to 3 years and 8 months in prison, along with fines totaling over 560,000 yuan ($87,000). Besides, the eight were ordered to delete the illegally obtained information and issue public apologies through national-level media outlets.

The case dates back to January 2019 when the main defendant, Chen, and other four colleagues leveraged their roles as railway station customer service staff to profit from selling celebrity's information such as high-speed train travel times, seat assignments, station locations, and identification numbers. 

This information was sold to interested parties at prices ranging from 10 to 60 yuan per entry. When Chen was off duty, colleagues assisted in conducting searches, for which they were paid 5 to 10 yuan per request by Chen. He also promoted their services through multiple WeChat groups, advertising their ability to provide such information. While the other three people resold the information at higher prices to others after purchasing celebrity information from the aforementioned five staff members. 

The total illegal gains of the 8 individuals amounted to over 560,000 yuan, while Chen amassed approximately 190,000 yuan in profits. The court determined that Chen and other accomplices had committed the crime of infringing upon citizens' personal information, resulting in both criminal and civil liability.

After the first-instance verdict was announced, some defendants, including Chen, appealed the decision. Following a review by the Foshan Intermediate People's Court, the appeals were rejected, and the original verdict was upheld.

"The Criminal Law stipulates that individuals who sell or provide citizens' personal information obtained during their duties or service shall be heavily penalized," a Beijing-based lawyer told the Global Times.

According to Judge Zhong Qiwen from the Nanhai District People's Court, if citizens engage in the illicit sale, provision, or acquisition of communication content, credit information, financial data, and movement traces, exceeding 50 instances, criminal charges can be brought forth.

Zhong further clarified that as per judicial interpretations, criminal liability is triggered when illegal gains exceed 5,000 yuan. If these gains reach 50,000 yuan, the offense will be deemed especially severe. Specialized individuals handling personal information face stricter criteria; if more than half of their illegal gains surpass the thresholds, they face heightened penalties.

The court underscored the prevalence of personal information breaches in sectors like transportation, express delivery, accommodation, and intermediaries. Zhong reminded citizens that publicly available information still falls within the category of personal information and emphasized the need to protect such data.

In recent years, the media have frequently reported instances of congestion and disruptions in airports and railway stations caused by large-scale fan gatherings during celebrity arrivals. In 2019, at Shanghai Hongqiao Airport, the influx of fans resulted in glass breakage due to the crowd's intensity.

A 21-year-old woman, who declined to be named, told the Global Times that she had spent over 300 yuan purchasing a celebrity's travel information which proved to be the true later, from scalpers. However, she is unaware of the source's origin.

There’s no need to trek to the wilds of Borneo or the deepest Amazon if you want to discover a new species. There is at least one — and perhaps more — hiding among Ceuthophilus cave crickets in Texas, a new study finds.

Jason Weckstein of Drexel University in Philadelphia and colleagues weren’t looking for new species, and they haven’t definitively found any. But they have found some curious characteristics among the Texan crickets, as well as genetic evidence that there may be more species than science officially recognizes.

Ceuthophilus cave crickets have split into two groups. One subgenus — also named Ceuthophilus — is full of species that are trogloxenes, meaning they live in caves and venture out at night to find food. (If they get caught outdoors during the day, they hide under rocks.) The other subgenus, Geotettix, are troglobites that can only survive if they never venture out into the light.

Because crickets in the Ceuthophilus subgenus get out of the caves and perhaps even move between them, those crickets should be able to interbreed more, the researchers figured. Geotettix crickets would be stuck closer to home, and their populations would be more distinct from each other, the team predicted. And those differences should be detectable in the crickets’ DNA.

So the team collected 179 Ceuthophilus and 122 Geotettix crickets from 43 caves in 20 Texas counties, as well as a few caves in Mexico and New Mexico. The researchers then obtained the sequences of two genes found on the crickets’ mitochondria. Mitochondrial DNA evolves rapidly and can be useful for studying populations of organisms.

Crickets in the Ceuthophilus subgenus, the DNA analysis revealed, were not moving about nearly as much as the researchers had expected, they report March 3 in the Journal of Biogeography. The crickets might be limited by streams or other features of the landscape. Those in the Geotettix subgenus, meanwhile, are more homogeneous than expected. The genes from one population to the next are more similar than they should be if they were totally isolated from each other and couldn’t interbreed. Members of those populations may be able to travel underground between caves, the scientists suggest.

The DNA also showed that there might be multiple species lurking in the caves that have not yet been officially recognized and named. At least one, nicknamed “species B,” has been known to cave researchers in central Texas for years, but no one has yet formally described it in a scientific article. Nearly all the currently known species in the Ceuthophilus genus, the researchers note, were described more than 75 years ago, and no one has added any new species to the genus in more than 50 years.

So it looks like there is a good opportunity here for someone who loves caves and insects to make some discoveries — and perhaps name a cricket or two after themselves or someone they love. But more importantly, this shows how little we know about some of the species around us.

When mice have a stroke, their gut reaction can amp up brain damage.

A series of new experiments reveals a surprising back-and-forth between the brain and the gut in the aftermath of a stroke. In mice, this dickering includes changes to the gut microbial population that ultimately lead to even more inflammation in the brain.

There is much work to be done to determine whether the results apply to humans. But the research, published in the July 13 Journal of Neuroscience, hints that poop pills laden with healthy microbes could one day be part of post-stroke therapy.
The work also highlights a connection between gut microbes and brain function that scientists are only just beginning to understand,says Ted Dinan of the Microbiome Institute at the University College Cork, Ireland. There’s growing evidence that gut microbes can influence how people experience stress or depression, for example (SN: 4/2/16, p. 23).

“It’s a fascinating study” says Dinan, who was not involved with the work. “It raises almost as many questions as it answers, which is what good studies do.”

Following a stroke, the mouse gut becomes temporarily paralyzed, leading to a shift in the microbial community, neurologist Arthur Liesz of the Institute for Stroke and Dementia Research in Munich and colleagues found. This altered, less diverse microbial ecosystem appears to interact with immune system cells called T cells that reside in the gut. These T cells can either dampen inflammation or dial it up, leading to more damage, says Liesz. Whether the T cells further damage the brain after a stroke rather than soothe it seems to be determined by the immune system cells’ interaction with the gut microbes.

Transplanting microbe-laden fecal matter from healthy mice into mice who had strokes curbed brain damage, the researchers found. But transplanting fecal matter from mice that had had strokes into stroke-free mice spurred a fourfold increase in immune cells that exacerbate inflammation in the brain.

Learning more about this interaction between the gut’s immune cell and microbial populations will be key to developing therapies, says Liesz. “We basically have no clue what’s going on there.”

Tree frog tadpoles are the ultimate escape artists. To avoid becoming breakfast, the embryos of red-eyed tree frogs (Agalychnis callidryas) prematurely hatch and wriggle away from a snake’s jaws in mere seconds, as seen above. Embryos also use this maneuver to flee from flooding, deadly fungi, egg-eating wasps and other threats. Adding to the drama, red-eyed tree frogs lay their eggs on the undersides of leaves that hang a few inches to several feet above ponds. So the swimmers perform this feat suspended on a leaf, breaking free in midair and cannonballing into the water below.
High-speed video, captured by Kristina Cohen of Boston University and her colleagues, of unhatched eggs collected from Panamanian ponds shows that the embryos’ trick plays out in three stages. First, upon sensing a threat, an embryo starts shaking and, in some cases, gaping its mouth. Next, a hole forms. (The movement helps tear open the hole, but an embryo’s snout probably secretes a chemical that actually does the breaking.) Finally, the embryo thrashes its body about as if swimming and slips out of the egg.
Orientation is key to a hasty escape, the team reports in the June 15 Journal of Experimental Biology. An embryo must keep its snout aligned with the hole for a speedy exit. In observations of 62 embryos, the getaway took between six and 50 seconds — 20.6 seconds on average.

Some tadpoles may be leaping out of a cauldron into a fire. “There’s a trade-off,” Cohen says. “They may have escaped the threat of a snake, but earlier hatchlings fare worse against some aquatic predators.”

Scientists have identified the “refrigerator” nerve cells that hum along in the brains of mice and keep the body cool. These cells kick on to drastically cool mice’s bodies and may prevent high fevers, scientists report online August 25 in Science.

The results “are totally new and very important,” says physiologist Andrej Romanovsky of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix. “The implications are far-reaching.” By illuminating how bodies stay at the right temperature, the discovery may offer insights into the relationship between body temperature and metabolism.
Scientists had good reasons to think that nerve cells controlling body temperature are tucked into the hypothalamus, a small patch of neural tissue in the middle of the brain. Temperature fluctuations in a part of the hypothalamus called the preoptic area prompt the body to get back to baseline by conserving or throwing off heat. But the actual identify of the heat sensors remained mysterious. The new study reveals the cells to be those that possess a protein called TRPM2.

“Overall, this is a major discovery in the field of thermoregulation,” says Shaun Morrison of Oregon Health & Science University in Portland.

Jan Siemens, a neurobiologist at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, and colleagues tested an array of molecules called TRP channels, proteins that sit on cell membranes and help sense a variety of stimuli, including painful tear gas and cool menthol. In tests of nerve cells in lab dishes, one candidate, the protein TRPM2, seemed to respond to heat.

The researchers gave mice artificial fevers by injecting “heat up” molecules into the hypothalamus. Mice that lacked TRPM2 grew about 1 degree Celsius warmer than mice with the protein, results that suggest that TRPM2 helps counter high temperatures. “We like to think of it as an emergency brake” that prevents a fever from getting too hot, Siemens says.
Romanovsky cautions that the fever results are not easy to interpret. In some experiments, mice without TRPM2 didn’t run hotter fevers than mice with the protein. More experiments are needed to clarify how these nerve cells affect fever, he says.

Siemens and colleagues then used a genetic trick to take more direct control of preoptic-area nerve cells that have TRPM2. When these cells were prevented from firing off signals, the mice heated up slightly. And when these cells were prompted to fire off lots of signals, the mice grew downright frigid. A mouse’s normal body temperature hovers around 37°C (98.6°Fahrenheit). After a burst of activity from TRPM2 neurons, mice’s temperatures dropped by about 10 degrees C and stayed cool for about 12 hours, the team found. “That was really a ‘wow’ experience when we saw this,” Siemens says.
The cold mice grew less active, but didn’t seem to suffer any ill effects. It’s not clear how similar this chilly state is to torpor, a hibernation-like state that mice enter when the temperature is cold or food is scarce.

When these nerve cells sent their cool-down signals, mice started dumping body heat by shunting warm blood to the surface of their bodies, warming up the paws and tails — body parts from which heat easily escapes. Infrared cameras revealed hot tails soon after the nerve cells were activated. The mice’s sleeping areas also heated up as warmth transferred from bodies to beds, the cameras revealed. “They were actually warming up their surroundings,” Siemens says.

More work is needed to say whether similar cells help cool people, and scientists don’t have good drugs that affect TPRM2 specifically. Yet the results might one day lead to ways to induce hypothermia from inside the body. Doctors sometimes use ice packs and cooling blankets to chill people after cardiac arrest. But an internal cooldown might be more effective.

What’s more, the chilly mice may also offer scientists ways to study how body temperature and metabolism are connected. The results could have important implications for obesity and longevity, both of which are related to metabolism, Morrison says.

I found burping my babies to be highly satisfying. A little jiggle, a little pat, and suddenly, a big, funny jolt of air comes flying out of a tiny, floppy baby. There’s lots of burping methods — the over-the-shoulder jiggle, the propped-up-on-the-lap pat, even the face-down-on-the-knees position — and they all lead to this amusing outcome.

I will not weigh in on burping methodology here. Instead, I am going to back up a step further. At the risk of losing all credibility with grandmas, I am prepared to argue that you might not need to burp your baby at all. Despite the immense joy and amusement burping brings, there’s scant scientific evidence that burping after meals actually does anything helpful for babies.

Researcher and mother Bhavneet Bharti found it challenging to burp her infant after every single feeding, particularly at night. “Similarly, I heard stories of many more exhausted mothers and other caregivers spending hours patting their babies in the middle of the night, trying to wait for the elusive sound of the burp,” says Bharti, of the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research in Chandigarh, India. She looked for studies that supported this age-old practice. To her surprise, she found none.

That led her and her colleagues to put this common practice to the test. The researchers enrolled 71 mother-newborn pairs. Half of the mothers received advice about immunizations, breastfeeding and other health issues, but none about burping. The other half of the mothers was instructed on how to burp their babies. Over the next three months, the moms kept track of their babies’ colic episodes (excessive crying, inconsolability or other signs of discomfort) and spit-ups, tallying each event every 24 hours.

The results, published in Child: Care, Health and Development in 2015, were striking: Burped babies didn’t cry less than ones that weren’t burped. And the burped babies actually spit up more: They spit up about eight times a week, on average, compared with 3.7 times a week for unburped babes.

That’s an interesting result, given how entrenched burping advice is. The American Academy of Pediatrics advises parents to burp their babies, as do many other doctors, nurses, lactation consultants and parenting websites. Yet the recommendation isn’t particularly rooted in evidence. Bharti’s study “is a clever and well-done study of a ‘wellness practice’ that many people take for granted, but — as I would certainly agree with the authors — has rarely, if ever, been truly shown to have benefits,” says Jenifer Lightdale, a pediatric gastroenterologist who specializes in fussy infants and reflux at theUniversity of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester.

Babies can appear to be uncomfortable as they’re trying to burp spontaneously. Scrunched up faces may have prompted parents to rub, jiggle or pat the burp up. Bharti doesn’t take issue with this occasional gas-shifting assistance. “It is not the practice of an intuitive occasional burp by the caregivers, but the ritual after every feed that is being questioned,” she says.

The study is too preliminary to conclude that burping is actually behind the increased numbers of spit-ups. The study was small, relied on mothers’ memories for their tallies and may have been influenced by cultural factors specific to the suburb of the northern Indian city of Chandigarh, where the study was based. And researchers didn’t track how often the babies in each group were actually burped. Yet it’s intriguing to wonder whether burping might cause more spitting up for some babies, Lightdale says.

When talking with her patients’ parents, Lightdale doesn’t actually recommend burping. “It’s not that I counsel against it,” she says. “Rather, I would consider the recommendation to burp a baby to be less medical advice, and more an infant feeding practice that is passed down across generations, and that humans universally seem to assume is useful for infants.” Her patients have come from all over the world: China, Nigeria, Brazil, France, the Philippines, Canada, India, Germany, Iceland, Russia and the United States. And she’d be hard pressed, she says, to think of any culture that doesn’t burp their babies.

Maybe baby burping’s ubiquity means that there’s something to it. It’s quite possible, likely even, that folk wisdom reflects a benefit that went undetected in this study. But it’s also possible that parents burp babies because we think it makes our babies feel better, and that’s something that makes us feel better. Plus, little baby burps are funny.

While we wait for larger, more rigorous trials of burping infants, which in reality may never materialize, we will have to settle for ambiguity. “It is a fun exercise to question why exactly we do this, and whether the practice is actually accomplishing what we think it is,” Lightdale says.

New details about a baby boy born with genetic material from his mother, his father and a female donor show the promise and drawbacks of a technique used to produce a “three-parent baby.” Called spindle transfer (SN Online: 10/18/2016), the technique is designed to avoid passing on potentially harmful DNA mutations in the mother’s mitochondria, powerhouse organelles that contain their own genetic material.

Now 6 months old, the baby boy appears to be healthy, John Zhang of New Hope Fertility Center in New York City said October 19 during a news conference at a meeting in Salt Lake City of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. The baby’s average portion of mitochondrial DNA from his mother — some of whose mitochondria have a mutation that causes a fatal neurological disorder called Leigh syndrome — is less than 1.6 percent, Zhang and colleagues wrote in an abstract. The rest came from the healthy donor. Future checkups will examine whether the mitochondria the boy received from his mother increase in number (SN: 6/25/16, p. 8).

The procedure, performed in Mexico, resulted in five fertilized oocytes, four of which continued developing, Zhang and colleagues reported. Only one of those four blastocytes — the one that belonged to the baby boy — had the right number of chromosomes.

Mitochondrial DNA is inherited from mothers. Because the baby is a boy, any potentially harmful mitochondrial mutations wouldn’t be passed on to his children.

A mind-bogglingly strange state of matter may have finally made its appearance. Two teams of scientists report the creation of supersolids, which are both liquid and solid at the same time. Supersolids have a crystalline structure like a solid, but can simultaneously flow like a superfluid, a liquid that flows without friction.

Research teams from MIT and ETH Zurich both produced supersolids in an exotic form of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate. Reports of the work were published online at arXiv.org on October 26 (by the MIT group) and September 28 (by the Zurich group).
Bose-Einstein condensates are created when a group of atoms, chilled to near absolute zero, huddle up into the same quantum state and begin behaving like a single entity. The scientists’ trick for creating a supersolid was to nudge the condensate, which is already a superfluid, into simultaneously behaving like a solid. To do so, the MIT and Zurich teams created regular density variations in the atoms — like the repeating crystal structure of a more typical solid — in the system. That density variation stays put, even though the fluid can still flow.

The new results may be the first supersolids ever created — at least by some definitions. “It’s certainly the first case where you can unambiguously look at a system and say this is both a superfluid and a solid,” says Sarang Gopalakrishnan of the College of Staten Island of the City University of New York. But the systems are far from what physicists predicted when they first dreamt up the strange materials.

Scientists originally expected supersolids to appear in helium-4 — an isotope of the element helium and the same gas that fills balloons at children’s birthday parties. Helium-4 can be chilled and pressurized to produce a superfluid or a solid. Supersolid helium would have been a mixture of these two states.

Previous claims of detecting supersolid helium-4, however, didn’t hold up to scrutiny (SN Online: 10/12/2012). So, says Nikolay Prokof’ev of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, “now we have to go to the artificial quantum matter.” Unlike helium-4, Bose-Einstein condensates can be precisely controlled with lasers, and tuned to behave as scientists wish.

The two groups of scientists formed their supersolids in different ways. By zapping their condensate with lasers, the MIT group induced an interaction that gave some of the atoms a shove. This motion caused an interference between the pushed and the motionless atoms that’s similar to the complex patterns of ripples that can occur when waves of water meet. As a result, zebralike stripes — alternating high- and low-density regions — formed in the material, indicating that it was a solid.
Applying a different method, the ETH Zurich team used two optical cavities — sets of mirrors between which light bounces back and forth repeatedly. The light waves inside the cavities caused atoms to interact and thereby arrange themselves into a crystalline pattern, with atoms separated by an integer number of wavelengths of light.

Authors of the two studies declined to comment on the research, as the papers have been submitted to embargoed journals.

“Experimentally, of course, these are absolutely fantastic achievements,” says Anatoly Kuklov of the College of Staten Island. But, he notes, the particles in the supersolid Bose-Einstein condensates do not interact as strongly as particles would in supersolid helium-4. The idea of a supersolid is so strange because superfluid and solid states compete, and in most materials atoms are forced to choose one or the other. But in Bose-Einstein condensates these two states can more easily live together in harmony, making the weird materials less counterintuitive than supersolid helium-4 would be.

Additionally, says Prokof’ev, “some people will say ‘OK, well, this does not qualify exactly for supersolid state,’” because the spacing of the density variations was set externally, rather than arising naturally as it would have in helium.

Still, such supersolids are interesting for their status as a strange and new type of material. “These are great works,” says Kuklov. “Wide attention is now being paid to supersolidity.”

SAN FRANCISCO — Disrupting the Zika enzyme NS3 could help stop the virus. NS3 causes problems when it gloms on to centrioles, structures inside cells needed to divvy up chromosomes when cells divide, Andrew Kodani, a cell biologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, reported December 6 at the American Society for Cell Biology’s annual meeting.

Zika, dengue and other related viruses, known as flaviviruses, all use a version of NS3 to chop joined proteins apart so they can do their jobs. (Before chopping, Zika’s 10 proteins are made as one long protein.) But once NS3 finishes slicing virus proteins, it moves to the centrioles and can interfere with their assembly, Kodani and colleagues found. Something similar happens in some genetic forms of microcephaly.

Kodani and colleagues found that small amounts of a chemical called anthracene can prevent NS3 from tinkering with the centrioles. So far the work has been done only in lab dishes.