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The European Union on Wednesday failed to pass a controversial law that would hold big companies responsible for human rights and environmental abuses in their suppliers after some opposite voices see it as “administrative burden” and “fear of an uneven playing field on the global stage,” South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported.

The legislation itself lacks credibility and appears to be an attempt to use human rights and environment issue to suppress China, which is doomed to fail, experts said.

The rules would have required EU firms with more than 500 staff and €150 million ($162.7 million) net turnover worldwide to conduct detailed audits of their suppliers and partners, including those in China. 

A Wednesday vote of the bloc’s 27 members in Brussels fell short of the qualified majority required to adopt the proposed rules.

Big member states including Germany and Italy abstained along with 10 other countries, diplomatic sources confirmed, while Sweden voted against the rules – leaving them below the required threshold of 14 member states with populations representing at least 65 percent of the union’s citizens, SCMP reported.

An EU diplomat said that members abstained for reasons that included the “administrative burden” and “fear of an uneven playing field on the global stage.”

Pro-business political parties around Europe were also concerned about the administrative burden the rules may require. Companies had also warned the laws would have left them disadvantaged when competing against firms that do not have to comply.

The fact that the law did not pass shows that politicizing economic and trade activities is not in line with the agreements of most EU member states, Cui Hongjian, a professor from the Academy of Regional and Global Governance with Beijing Foreign Studies University, told the Global Times on Thursday.

Those countries holding opposing views must also consider that keeping on this path will only further deteriorate the China-EU economic and trade cooperation, Cui said.

"The biggest problem facing Europe right now is the increasing contradiction between its desire to make a political impact and the need to consider its actual interests. If Europe does not change this trend, it will be difficult for it to achieve its goals," Cui said.

The controversial law is actually another form of so-called decoupling, Li Yong, a senior research fellow at the China Association of International Trade, told the Global Times on Thursday.

It is not surprising that  it has not succeeded. Trying to prevent Chinese companies from cooperating with the EU or European countries by distorting facts would only add meaningless costs to economic and trade, Li said. 

Chinese authorities have been rejecting EU accusations of so-called human rights violation. The groundless accusation on China’s human rights conditions, spreads disinformation, tarnishes China’s image and gravely violates China’s internal affairs, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning told a press conference in December.

China is committed to propelling economic and trade cooperation with Egypt, supporting Chinese enterprises to invest in the country, particularly in the emerging fields, Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao said at a meeting with Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly.

During the meeting on Wednesday, Wang said that China is willing to enhance China-Egypt economic and trade cooperation. He highlighted the potential for collaboration in emerging sectors such as information and telecommunication technology, smart cities, e-commerce, green development, and high-tech industries.

Wang noted the continuous expansion of China-Egypt relations and the high level of bilateral economic and trade cooperation. He stated that China's modernization offers vast opportunities for other economies, including Egypt, and China welcomed Egypt's active participation in the high-quality construction of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Madbouly acknowledged the long-standing friendship between Egypt and China and thanked China for its valuable support over the years. He looked forward to the development in the relations between the two countries in various fields, including economy and trade. Egypt is keen to continue participating in BRI cooperation and welcomes Chinese enterprises to invest in Egypt.

Wang emphasized the importance of close communication and cooperation between China and Egypt within the frameworks of China-Arab and China-Africa cooperation.

Following the meeting, Wang and Egyptian Minister of International Cooperation Rania Al-Mashat signed a handover certificate for a project to support Egypt's satellite assembly and testing.

Egypt is an important trading partner for China in Africa. According to the General Administration of Customs, China-Egypt bilateral trade reached 111.2 billion yuan ($15.5 billion) in 2023.

Wang's visit is among the latest developments in China-Africa cooperation. On Wednesday, China and the Republic of Sierra Leone signed a joint statement on deepening their comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership, As Sierra Leone's President Julius Maada Bio is on a state visit to China from Tuesday to Saturday, highlighting the ongoing engagement between China and African nations.

Back in 2004, archaeologists excavated two pits in northern China that looked a lot like homebrewing operations. Constructed between 3400 and 2900 B.C. by the Yangshao culture, each pit contained the remnants of a stove and assorted funnels, pots and amphorae.

Now, Jiajing Wang of Stanford University and colleagues report that the pottery shards contain residue and other evidence of starches, chemicals and plant minerals from specific fermented grains. The ancient beer recipe included broomcorn millet, barley, Job’s tears and tubers — that probably gave the beer a sweet flavor, the team writes May 23 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The findings predate the earliest evidence of barley in China by around 1,000 years. Beer may have been consumed at social gatherings, and brewing, not agriculture, spurred the introduction of barley to China, the researchers argue.

Climate commotion
In “Changing Climate: 10 years after An Inconvenient Truth” (SN: 4/16/16, p. 22), Thomas Sumner reported on the progress scientists have made revising forecasts of the far-reaching effects of climate change — from extreme temperatures and sea level rise to severe drought and human conflict — in the decade since the Oscar-winning film’s release.

Reader response to the article was overwhelming, with hundreds of online comments. Some people enjoyed the in-depth look at climate change science, while others expressed skepticism about humans’ contribution to climate change and a general distrust of climate scientists.

“One of my goals for this article was to highlight that climate change research has itself changed over the last decade,” Sumner says. Scientists are still working to understand how the consequences of atmospheric warming will play out in the coming centuries. But one big message from the last decade of research is that the fundamentals have held up: Natural variability exists, says Sumner, but human activities are largely responsible for the current warming trend.
“The question now is what impact will human contributions have down the line and what should we do to prevent and mitigate those effects,” he says.
Plastic feast
Sarah Schwartz wrote about the discovery of a microbe, Ideonella sakaiensis, that chows down on a hard-to-degrade polymer in “This microbe makes a meal of plastic” (SN: 4/16/16, p. 5).
Online commenters were amazed by this new plastic-gobbling organism. “This is great news,” Dan said. “Our world would be doomed if there wasn’t a microbe able to do this.” Chuckawobbly wondered how long it takes I. sakaiensis to digest the plastic. And Jean Harlow was concerned about the potential by-products of worldwide plastic digestion. “The waste product would be a significant amount … of what?” she asked.

Researchers observed that I. sakaiensis almost completely degraded a thin film of polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, after six weeks in a laboratory. But when extracted from the bacterium, the proteins used to break down plastic begin working in about 18 hours.

I. sakaiensisappears to break PET into smaller molecules, like amino acids and carbon dioxide, says coauthor Kenji Miyamoto of Keio University in Yokohama, Japan. But it would probably be hard for the microbe to break down plastic in the outdoors because of its specific growth requirements, he says. Miyamoto envisions that it could be possible to use the specialized proteins in a closed environment to break PET down into molecules such as terephthalic acid— one of the plastic’s main building blocks, which seems benign in the environment.

Prairie dog predators
Herbivorous prairie dog mothers routinely kill baby ground squirrels that encroach on their territories, researchers found. Competition for resources may be a contributing factor to the killings, Susan Milius reported in “Killer prairie dogs make good moms” (SN: 4/16/16, p. 14).

One reader had other ideas. Audrey Boag wondered if prairie dog moms kill ground squirrels to protect their pups from predation or from diseases carried by the squirrels. “In either case, minimizing the number of ground squirrels would pay in lifetime biological fitness,” she wrote.

“We never observed a ground squirrel kill or injure an adult or juvenile prairie dog,” says study coauthor John Hoogland. “Perhaps such attacks sometimes occur underground.” Hoogland notes that the majority of ground squirrels killed by prairie dogs were juveniles, which are too small to be a threat.

One threat, however, is a species of disease-carrying flea that infests both animals. Hoogland found that prairie dog killers and their offspring had fewer fleas than nonkillers and their offspring, “but this trend was not significant,” he says.

Microscopy Masters asks one thing of citizen scientists: Find proteins in electron microscope images. The task will probably give participants new appreciation for biologists who decipher the structures of teeny, tiny molecules. It’s not easy.

The goal of the online project, created by researchers at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., is to improve biologists’ ability to construct detailed, three-dimensional models of proteins.

Using cryo-electron microscopy — which involves freezing, then imaging a sample — the researchers have taken thousands of photos of their current target, a protein complex involved in breaking down other, unwanted proteins. Each image contains 10 to 100 copies of the complex. It takes that many images to capture a protein from every angle. Once the 2-D images are stitched together, researchers can reconstruct the protein’s globular, 3-D shape at near-atomic resolution.
Microscopy Masters enlists volunteers to do the necessary first step of combing through the photos to find the protein molecules — a time-consuming job that people do better than computers. The task may feel daunting, as each black-and-white image resembles a fuzzy TV screen. Only some of the dark smudges in any given image will be molecules of interest; others will be actual smudges or globs of proteins too jumbled to be of use. Fortunately, a practice tutorial offers a crash course in protein identification. And each image will be classified by many users, alleviating some of the pressure of worrying about marking the wrong thing.

Data from the project will help researchers improve protein-picking computer algorithms, says project member Jacob Bruggemann. That way computers can take over the painstaking work.

SAN DIEGO — On some planets that orbit whirling stars, spring and autumn might be the best time to hit the beach, whereas summer offers a midyear respite from sweltering heat. These worlds’ orbits can take them over regions of their sun that radiate wildly different amounts of heat.

“Seasons on a planet like this must be really strange,” says Jonathon Ahlers, a graduate student at the University of Idaho in Moscow, who presented his findings June 15 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
Some stars spin so fast that they bulge in the middle. That bulge pushes the equator away from the blazing core, making it much cooler than the poles. A fraction of these stars also host planets that travel on cockeyed orbits, which take these worlds alternately over the poles and equator of their sun.

Ahlers developed computer simulations to see how the differences in solar energy combined with the tilted orbits might affect a planet’s seasons. The outcome depends on how the planet’s axis is tipped relative to its orbit. For a world whose north and south poles periodically face the star’s equator, “you get a cooler summer than normal and an extremely cold winter, but spring and autumn can be hotter than summer,” says Ahlers. “You get two distinct hottest times of the year.”

How that plays out depends on how the planet is built: an atmosphere or oceans could mitigate climate extremes. Ahlers has yet to work out those details. “It’s doing a lot,” he says, “but what, I don’t really know yet.”

Plastic cling wrap with nano-sized pores could give “cool clothes” a new meaning.

The material lets heat escape, instead of trapping it like traditional fabrics, Stanford University materials scientist Yi Cui and colleagues report in the Sept. 2 Science. It could help people keep cool in hot weather, Cui says, and even save energy by reducing the use of air conditioning.

“It’s a very bold new idea,” says MIT physicist Svetlana Boriskina, who wrote an accompanying commentary. Demand for the new material could be far-reaching, she says. “Every person who wears clothes could be a potential user of this product.”
Current cooling devices include wearable fans and wicking fabrics; both rely on evaporation to cool human skin. But skin also sheds heat in another way — as infrared radiation. Clothing holds this heat close to the body, Cui says. If infrared radiation could instead pass through fabric, he reasoned, people would feel a lot cooler.

But the fabric would have to be transparent only to infrared wavelengths. To visible light, it would need to be opaque. Otherwise, the clothing would be see-through.

Cui found just one material that satisfied both requirements: a commercially available plastic used in lithium-ion batteries. The material, called nanoporous polyethylene, or nanoPE, is a cling wrap‒like plastic that lets infrared radiation through. But unlike cling wrap, the material isn’t clear: It blocks visible light.

Tiny pores speckled throughout the fabric act as obstacles to visible light, Boriskina says. When blue light, for example, hits the pores, it scatters. So do other colors. The light “bounces around in different directions and scrambles together,” she says. To human eyes, the resulting color is white.

The pores scatter visible light because they’re both in the same size range: The diameters of the pores span 50 to 1,000 nanometers, and the wavelengths of visible light range from 400 to 700 nanometers. Infrared light emitted by the body has a much larger wavelength, 7,000 to 14,000 nanometers, so the plastic’s tiny pores can’t block it. To infrared light, the pores are barely bumps in the road, not barriers.
The pores are kind of like small rocks at a beach, Boriskina says. They’ll interfere with the motion of small waves, but big waves will wash right over.

Cui and colleagues tested nanoPE by laying it on a hot plate warmed up to human skin temperature — 33.5° Celsius. NanoPE raised the “skin” temperature by just 0.8 degrees(to 34.3° C). “But when you put on cotton, my God, it rose to 37,” Cui says. “It’s hot!”

The researchers also tried to make nanoPE more wearable than plastic wrap. They coated it with a water-wicking chemical, punched holes in it to make it breathable, and layered it with cotton mesh. Now, the team is working on weaving the fabric to make it feel more like traditional textiles.

“Within five years, I hope someone will start wearing it,” Cui says. “And within 10 years, I hope most people will be wearing it.”

Researchers have digitally unwrapped and read an ancient Hebrew scroll that’s so charred it can’t be touched without falling apart. It turns out the document contains the oldest known Biblical text outside of the roughly 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls, the investigators say.

Archaeologists discovered the scroll’s remnants in a synagogue’s holy ark during a 1970 excavation in Israel of En-Gedi, a Jewish community destroyed by fire around 600.

In a series of digital steps, slices from a 3-D scan of the En-Gedi scroll were analyzed to bring letters and words into relief on a pieced-together, virtual page. Those images revealed passages from the book of Leviticus written in ink on the scroll’s disintegrating sheets. Radiocarbon results date the scroll to approximately 300, making it the earliest copy of an Old Testament book ever found in a holy ark, scientists report September 21 in Science Advances.

This computerized recovery and conservation process can now be used to retrieve other ancient documents “from the brink of oblivion,” the researchers say.

DENVER — A period of skyrocketing global temperatures started with a bang, new research suggests.

Impact debris and evidence of widespread wildfires around eastern North America suggest that a large space rock whacked Earth around 56 million years ago at the beginning of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, also known as the PETM, a period of rapid warming and huge increases in carbon dioxide. The event is one of the closest historic analogs to modern global warming and is used to improve predictions of how Earth’s climate and ecosystems will fare in the coming decades.
Too little is known about the newfound impact to guess its origin, size or effect on the global climate, said geochemist Morgan Schaller of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. But it fits in with the long-standing and controversial proposal that a comet impact caused the PETM. “The timing is nothing short of remarkable,” said Schaller, who presented the discovery September 27 at the Geological Society of America’s annual meeting.

The impact may have contributed to the rapid rise in CO2 by stirring carbon up into the atmosphere, but it was hardly the sole cause, said Sandra Kirtland Turner, a geochemist at the University of California, Riverside. Her own environmental simulations suggest that the influx of carbon that flooded Earth during the PETM probably took place over at least 2,500 years, far too drawn out to be caused by a single event, she said at the same meeting.

During the PETM, a massive influx of carbon flooded the atmosphere (SN: 5/30/15, p. 15) and Earth warmed by 5 to 8 degrees Celsius to temperatures much hotter than today. That carbon dump altered the relative abundance of different carbon isotopes in the atmosphere and oceans, leaving a signal in the sedimentary record.

While searching for that signal in roughly 56-million-year-old sediments from sites up and down the U.S. East Coast, Schaller spotted microscopic glassy spheres about the size of a dust mite. These specks resemble those blasted from previously identified large impact events. After switching from a black to a white sorting tray to more easily see the black debris, one of Schaller’s Rensselaer colleagues, micropaleontologist Megan Fung, discovered abundant charcoal pieces in the mix. That charcoal formed when wildfires sparked by the impact raged across the landscape, she proposed.

More evidence of the impact will help researchers to better constrain its location, scope and possible relationship to the start of the PETM, Schaller said.

Two more teeny moons might be lurking around Uranus. That’s in addition to the 27 we already know about. Fluctuations in the density of two of the planet’s dark rings, seen in radio data from the 1986 flyby of the Voyager 2 spacecraft, could be caused by unseen moonlets, Robert Chancia and Matthew Hedman, astronomers at the University of Idaho in Moscow, report online October 9 at arXiv.org.

At probably just 4 to 14 kilometers wide, both moons would be very difficult to detect in Voyager 2 images, the researchers report. New observations with ground-based telescopes might have better luck.