Construction on China's first deep-sea multi-functional scientific investigation and cultural relic archaeological vessel officially began in Nansha, Guangzhou, South China's Guangdong Province on Sunday. The ship is expected to be completed and put into operation in 2025, CCTV reported on Monday.

According to the report, the ship has a total design length of approximately 103 meters, a designed displacement of approximately 9,200 tons, a maximum speed of 29.63 kilometers per hour, a reach of 15,000 nautical miles, and can accommodate up to 80 crew members. 

The vessel is a new type of multi-functional scientific research vessel capable of conducting deep-sea scientific investigations and cultural relic excavations, as well as polar sea area investigations in summer. 

The ship has a number of iconic features, including unrestricted waterway navigation, manned diving, deep-sea detection and heavy-duty safety payload capabilities, providing the necessary sample and environmental data for forefront geological, environmental, and biological sciences research in the deep and remote ocean. 

It also provides related discipline guidance and underwater operations support for deep-sea archaeology, while supporting sea trial and use of core deep-sea equipment.

In the future, the vessel will become an open and shared maritime platform for multi-system integration, interdisciplinary crossover, and collaborative innovation in China, which is of great significance for strengthening China's substantial presence in the global deep-sea research, enhancing China's deep-sea archaeological capabilities, and realizing full-scale access to the global deep sea.

Song Jianzhong, a researcher at the National Centre for Archaeology, told the Global Times on Tuesday that the ship would provide solid support for Chinese deep-sea archaeology.

Two ancient ships carrying numerous cultural relics were discovered in October 2022 in the South China Sea at a depth of about 1,500 meters, and are currently undergoing excavation work. 

He Guangwei, deputy chief engineer at the Guangzhou Shipyard International Company Limited, stated that there is currently no ship in China capable of conducting manned deep-sea scientific investigations in polar regions. The construction of this vessel will fill this gap.

This ship is designed to conduct manned deep-sea scientific investigations in polar regions while also being able to carry out cultural relic archaeology and operations in the South China Sea. The ship has many key technologies, including icebreaking capabilities and anti-freezing materials for polar environments, and related operating and detecting equipment for scientific investigations in polar regions.

A fossil from a new species of dinosaur is helping to bridge a crucial 20-million-year gap in tyrannosaur evolution.

The key fossil is a 90-million-year-old, grapefruit-sized partial skull from Uzbekistan’s Bissekty Formation. This tyrannosaur braincase, the first well-preserved one found from the mid-Cretaceous period, shows that, although still small, tyrannosaurs of the time already had brain and ear features of later tyrannosaurs. Researchers have dubbed the in-betweener Timurlengia euotica, meaning “well-eared.” They describe the new species in a paper to appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The braincase sheds light on a long-standing mystery: how tyrannosaurs evolved in the gap from 100 million to 80 million years ago from an “average Joe” horse-sized predator in the Early Cretaceous to the huge apex predators they became in the Late Cretaceous. “Our study is the first to show that the sophisticated brain and hearing of big tyrannosaurs evolved in smaller-bodied species, long before tyrannosaurs got giant,” says study coauthor Stephen Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh. These advantages, he adds, may have helped tyrannosaurs become such successful — and eventually enormous — predators.
Analyzed against a database of other tyrannosaur skulls, the braincase shows that Timurlengia’s brain and ear “are almost identical to T. rex, just smaller,” Brusatte says. In particular, the dinosaur’s long cochlea, a part of the inner ear, is a signature of bigger, badder Late Cretaceous tyrannosaurs. “The long cochlea would have meant better sensitivity to low-frequency sound,” Brusatte explains. That sensitivity would have enabled Timurlengia to detect very subtle or distant sounds, giving the dinosaur clear advantages over other predators.

“Timurlengia fills an important gap in both time and evolution,” says Lawrence Witmer, a paleontologist at Ohio University in Athens who was not involved in the study. “Charles Darwin couldn’t have scripted it any better.”

The next step is to determine if the braincase is typical of a mid-Cretaceous tyrannosaur, or just one oddball data point. “We’ve analyzed the heck out of each scrap of Bissekty tyrannosaur bone,” Brusatte says, “so the thing that could move us forward is the discovery of new specimens in other middle Cretaceous rock units in other parts of the world.”

The mysteries of the Zika virus are slowly but surely succumbing to the scientific method. Last week, scientists revealed the virus’ structure, gleaned further insight into its ties to the birth defect microcephaly and found out just how little some people seem to know about Zika. Public health researchers at Harvard University released the results of a poll related to Zika awareness on March 29, and lots of respondents flunked. In a survey of 1,275 adults, 23 percent were unaware of Zika’s association with microcephaly and 42 percent did not know the virus could be transmitted sexually.

The survey highlights some general confusion about the facts of Zika, and the latest new tidbits show how quickly researchers are learning new things about this virus. So, let’s take a look at what people are saying about Zika and set the record straight .

Yes, in the case of microcephaly, Zika looks very, very guilty. No, pesticides and vaccines do not cause microcephaly.
A few different things, including viruses, can cause microcephaly, a birth defect in which babies have abnormally small heads and brain damage, as Meghan Rosen notes in the April 2 Science News. At the moment, there’s no smoking gun to convict Zika as the perpetrator behind Brazil’s uptick in microcephaly, but it’s not looking good for the virus. In Brazil, more microcephaly cases have appeared in places with more Zika cases. Zika has also been detected in the amniotic fluid, placenta and brain tissue of fetuses with microcephaly. It attacks specific cells related to fetal development. Zika infection during pregnancy has been linked to miscarriages and placental problems, plus other neurological conditions, including the rare autoimmune disease Guillain-Barré syndrome.

WHO officials noted in their March 31 situation report: “Based on observational, cohort and case-control studies there is strong scientific consensus that Zika virus is a cause of [Guillain-Barré syndrome], microcephaly and other neurological disorders.”

The evidence against other suspects is much less compelling. Still, a report by a group in Argentina calling themselves “Physicians Against Fumigated Towns” sent the Internet into a tizzy in February with the claim that the larvicide pyriproxyfen, not Zika, was to blame for microcephaly cases. The WHO has since reviewed toxicology studies and widespread use of the pesticide and found no evidence that the chemical interfered with human pregnancy or development. Similar rumors that vaccines or genetically modified mosquitoes caused Brazil’s microcephaly uptick simply lack any evidence, the WHO says.
Yes, you can get Zika by having sex with an infected person.
Though Aedes mosquitoes serve as the primary vector for Zika, researchers have had suspicions for a while that Zika could be sexually transmitted. In 2008, a U.S. researcher developed Zika infection symptoms after returning home from studying mosquitoes in Senegal and transmitted the virus to his wife through sex. This was the first documented sexually transmitted case of Zika.

Since then, more sexually transmitted cases have emerged in the U.S., as well as in Italy, France, Argentina, Chile and New Zealand. Thus far, only men have transmitted the virus, and whether women can also transmit the virus to their sexual partners is unknown. Researchers suspect that the virus may linger longer in semen than in blood — another potential source of transmission currently being investigated. (On March 30, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a screening test for Zika in blood donatons.) To prevent the spread of Zika between sexual partners, the CDC recommends the usual precautions.

No, there’s no vaccine for Zika, but people are working on it.
There is currently no vaccine against Zika, and vaccines against other viruses from the same family, like yellow fever, do not offer protection against Zika. That said, concern over Zika’s link to neurological disorders and growing case counts in the Americas has jump-started efforts to develop a vaccine. The idea of a chimeric vaccine that could combat Zika and other related viruses like dengue is an attractive research prospect. On March 31, a team reported the virus’ structure in Science, providing potential clues for vaccine development.

Sometimes Zika symptoms are obvious. Sometimes they’re not.
Only 20 percent of the people who get Zika actually notice symptoms. When they do, those symptoms include fever, rash, sore joints, pink eye and muscle pain. Sometimes Zika cases look a lot like dengue and chikungunya — meaning there’s potential for misdiagnosis.

No, sterilized mosquitoes do not increase the spread of Zika. In fact, they could help fight it.
There’s no evidence that sterilized mosquitoes aid and abet the spread of the virus. Some researchers would actually argue that they are our best chance of stopping it, Susan Milius notes in the April 2 Science News. Sterilization, by zapping males with radiation or genetically tweaking them, could reduce and theoretically wipe out a mosquito population. Meanwhile, gene drives likes CRISPR/Cas9 seem poised to make genetic sterilization methods a lot easier, too. Infecting mosquitoes with Wolbachia bacteria also cuts bloodsucker populations. If all else fails, El Salvador is using the tried and true method of deploying fish to eat all the larvae in mosquito breeding ponds. It goes without saying, but none of these control methods actually aid the spread of Zika.

Danger in ‘swimming hole’  — As warm weather approaches, the old swimming hole will again beckon boys and girls in farm areas. But disease germs lurk in waters exposed to cattle and other animals…. One “swimming hole disease” called leptospirosis is caused by water-borne Leptospira pomona…. Warm summer temperatures are ideal for maintaining leptospiral organisms in water, and heavy rains may transport the organisms downstream.  — Science News, May 14, 1966

UPDATE
An estimated 100 to 200 people get leptospirosis annually in the United States. The disease, which can cause fever, headache and vomiting, is most common in tropical and rural regions worldwide. Summertime swimming is also haunted by another single-celled terror that thrives in warm freshwater: the so-called “brain-eating” amoeba, Naegleria fowleri. The amoeba caused 35 reported infections in the United States from 2005 to 2014. If N. fowleri enters a person’s nose, it can travel to the brain, where swelling triggered by the immune system kills most victims (SN: 8/22/15, p. 14).

In many realms of science today, “statistical wisdom” seems to be in short supply. Misuse of statistics in scientific research has contributed substantially to the widespread “reproducibility crisis” afflicting many fields (SN: 4/2/16, p. 8; SN: 1/24/15, p. 20). Recently the American Statistical Association produced a list of principles warning against multiple misbeliefs about drawing conclusions from statistical tests. Statistician Stephen Stigler has now issued a reminder that there is some wisdom in the science of statistics. He identifes seven “pillars” that collectively provide a foundation for understanding the scope and depth of statistical reasoning.
Stigler’s pillars include methods for measuring or representing aggregation (measures, such as averages, that represent a collection of data); information (quantifying it and assessing how it changes); likelihood (coping with probabilities); intercomparison (involving measures of variation within datasets); regression (analyzing data to draw inferences); design (of experiments, emphasizing randomization); and residual (identifying the unexplained “leftovers” and comparing scientific models).

His approach is to identify the historical origins of these seven key pillars, providing some idea of what they are and how they can assist in making sense of numerical data. His explanations are engaging but not thorough (it’s not a textbook), and while mostly accessible, his writing often assumes a nontrivial level of mathematical knowledge. You’ll have to cope with expressions such as L(Θ)=L(Θ)|Χ and Cov(L,W)=E{Cov(L,W|S)}+Cov(E{L|S}, E{W|S}) every now and then.

While Stigler defends statistics from some of the criticisms against it — noting, for instance, that specific misuses should not be grounds for condemning the generic enterprise — he acknowledges that some issues are still a source of concern, especially in the new era of “big data” (SN: 2/7/15, p. 22). Using common statistical tests when many comparisons are made at once, or applying tests at multiple stages of an experimental process, introduces problems that the seven pillars do not accommodate. Stigler notes that there is room, therefore, for an eighth pillar. “The pillar may well exist,” he writes, “but no overall structure has yet attracted the general assent needed for recognition.”

Overuse of antibiotics in livestock can spread drug-resistant microbes — via farm workers or even breezy weather. But there’s more than one reason stay upwind of drugged cattle.

Dung beetles (Aphodius fossor) make their living on cattle dung pats, which are rich in nutritious microbes. To investigate the effects of cattle antibiotics on this smaller scale, Tobin Hammer of the University of Colorado at Boulder and his colleagues studied the tiny communities around tetracycline-dosed and undosed cows. Compared with untreated cows’ dung, microbes in dung produced by treated cows were less diverse and dominated by a genus with documented resistance, the researchers report May 25 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Beetles typically reduce methane gas wafting off dung, but pats from treated cows showed a 1.8-fold increase in methane output. How this might figure into greater cattle methane production remains to be studied, but Hammer and company speculate that the antibiotics may wipe out the bacterial competition for microbial methane factories.

Editor’s note: On May 3, 2017, Science retracted the study described in this article. Based on findings from a review board at Uppsala University, Science cites three reasons for pulling the study: The experiments lacked ethical approval, the original data do not appear in the paper and questions emerged about experimental methods.

Microscopic pieces of plastic rule Earth’s oceans, with numbers in the billions — possibly trillions. These tiny plastic rafts provide homes to microbes (SN: 2/20/16, p. 20), but their ecological effects remain murky.
In a lab at Uppsala University in Sweden, researchers exposed European perch (Perca fluviatilis) larvae to a microplastic called polystyrene to see how they might react. The exposure triggered a slew of potentially negative effects: Fewer eggs hatched, growth rates dropped and feeding habits changed, with some larvae preferring polystyrene to more nutritious food options. Exposed larvae were also sluggish in responding to scents that signal approaching predators in the wild, the team reports in the June 3 Science.

European perch, a keystone species in the Baltic Sea, have recently experienced a population dive. Because the drop has been linked to juvenile feeding issues, the researchers argue that microplastics could be to blame.

The surveillance video shows a peaceful city streetscape: People walking, cars driving, birds chirping.

“Then, abruptly, there’s the sound of gunfire,” said electrical engineer Robert Maher. “A big bang followed by another bang.”

Witnesses saw two shooters facing off, a few meters apart — one aiming north, the other south. But no one knew who shot first. That’s where Maher comes in. His specialty is gunshot acoustics, and he’s helping shore up the science behind a relatively new forensics field.
In the case of the two shooters, surveillance cameras missed the action, but the sounds told a story that was loud and clear.

A distinctive echo followed the first gunshot but not the second. The first gunshot’s sound probably bounced off a big building to the north, causing the echo, Maher concluded. So the first person to shoot was the person facing north, he reported May 24 in Salt Lake City at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America.

Maher has analyzed the booming echoes of gunshots in dozens of cases, but he’s also studying the millisecond-long sound of a bullet blasting out of the barrel — and finding differences from one type of gun to the next.

He and colleagues at Montana State University in Bozeman erected a semicircular aluminum frame studded with 12 microphones, evenly spaced and raised 3 meters off the ground. When someone standing on a raised platform in the center of the contraption shoots a gun — a 12-gauge shotgun, for example, or a .38 Special handgun — the microphones pick up the sound.

“Each of the different firearms has a distinctive signal,” he says. His team is building a database of sounds made by 20 different guns. To the ear, the gunshots seem alike, but Maher can chart out differences in the sound waves.
One day, investigators might be able to use the information to figure out what kind of guns were fired at a crime scene. Of course, Maher says, most crime scene recordings aren’t high quality — they often come from cellphones or surveillance systems. But his team will compare those recordings with ones made in his outdoor “lab” and try to figure out which aspects of crime scene audio they can analyze.

Maher, a music lover who plays the cello and sings in a choir, didn’t intend this career. “If I were really talented at music, that’s what I’d be doing full time,” he says. Instead, he has applied his skills in math and science to problems involving sound: studying humans’ contribution to noise in national parks, for example, and now, gunshot acoustics.

For him, it’s “a nice way to bridge the gap between the science and the sound.”

The brain doesn’t really go out like a light when anesthesia kicks in. Nor does neural activity gradually dim, a new study in monkeys reveals. Rather, intermittent flickers of brain activity appear as the effects of an anesthetic take hold.

Some synchronized networks of brain activity fall out of step as the monkeys gradually drift from wakefulness, the study showed. But those networks resynchronized when deep unconsciousness set in, researchers reported in the July 20 Journal of Neuroscience.
That the two networks behave so differently during the drifting-off stage is surprising, says study coauthor Yumiko Ishizawa of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. It isn’t clear what exactly is going on, she says, except that the anesthetic’s effects are a lot more complex than previously thought.

Most studies examining the how anesthesia works use electroencephalograms, or EEGs, which record brain activity using electrodes on the scalp. The new study offers unprecedented surveillance by eavesdropping via electrodes implanted inside macaque monkeys’ brains. This new view provides clues to how the brain loses and gains consciousness.

“It’s a very detailed description of something we know very little about,” says cognitive neuroscientist Tristan Bekinschtein of the University of Cambridge, who was not involved with the work. Although the study is elegant, it isn’t clear what to make of the findings, he says. “These are early days.”

Researchers from Massachusetts General, Harvard and MIT recorded the activity of small populations of nerve cells in two interconnected brain networks: one that deals with incoming sensory information and one involved with some kinds of movement, and with merging different kinds of information. Before the anesthetic propofol kicked in, brain activity in the two regions was similar and synchronized. But as the monkeys drifted off, the networks dropped out of sync, even though each networks’ own nerve cells kept working together.

Around the moment when the monkeys went unconscious, there was a surge in a particular kind of nerve cell activity in the movement network, followed by a different surge in the sensory network about two minutes later. The two networks then began to synchronize again, becoming more in lockstep as the anesthetic state deepened.

Some guys really know how to kill a moment. Among Mediterranean fish called ocellated wrasse (Symphodus ocellatus), single males sneak up on mating pairs in their nest and release a flood of sperm in an effort to fertilize some of the female’s eggs. But female fish may safeguard against such skullduggery through their ovarian fluid, gooey film that covers fish eggs.

Suzanne Alonzo, a biologist at Yale University, and her colleagues exposed sperm from both types of males to ovarian fluid from female ocellated wrasse in the lab. Nesting males release speedier sperm in lower numbers (about a million per spawn), while sneaking males release a lot of slower sperm (about four million per spawn). Experiments showed that ovarian fluid enhanced sperm velocity and motility and favored speed over volume. Thus, the fluid gives a female’s chosen mate an edge in the race to the egg, the researchers report August 16 in Nature Communications.

While methods to thwart unwanted sperm are common in species that fertilize within the body, evidence from Chinook salmon previously hinted that external fertilizers don’t have that luxury. However, these new results suggest otherwise: Some female fish retain a level of control over who fathers their offspring even after laying their eggs.