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This is Special English. I&`&m Mark Griffiths in Beijing. Here is the news.
Chinese scientist Yuan Longping is leading a research team to cultivate new strains of high yield "sea rice".
The research team plans to spend three years developing a breed that can withstand water with a salinity of up to 0.8 percent, and with a yield of 450 kilograms per hectare.
Yuan is a renowned scientist known for his research and development of hybrid rice.
China has around 700 million hectares of saline-alkaline soil. Yuan said it will be of great significance to convert the soil into arable land by developing sea rice with a high salinity tolerance.
More than half of the world&`&s population relies on rice as staple food, while the proportion is over 60 percent in China.
If China uses 70 million hectares of land to grow sea rice, it could produce an extra 30 billion kilograms of rice a year, enough to feed an extra 80 million people.
Sea rice is found in saline-alkaline soil at the junctures where rivers join the sea. Sea rice is resistant to pests and diseases, and does not need fertilizer to grow. Currently, the most advanced sea-rice breed in China can only be grown in water with a salinity less than 0.3 percent.
A sea-rice research center, with Yuan as the chief scientist, has been set up in Shandong Province. With dozens of breeds brought in from worldwide, the researchers will use gene sequencing technology to cultivate new strains of sea rice.
Over the decades, Yuan and his team have worked on new approaches to significantly increase rice yields.
This is Special English.
More of the world is getting into the spirit of China&`&s biggest holiday, the Lunar New Year. The Lunar New Year, or Spring Festival, falls on January 28th this year, and the celebration lasts around two weeks.
China&`&s Ministry of Culture, in cooperation with local Chinese cultural organizations, will present around 2,000 cultural events for the holiday across the world.
The ministry says a variety of activities, including performance shows and shopping events, will serve as the flagship of China&`&s cultural relations with other countries.
Since 2001, the ministry has been organizing shows overseas during the Spring Festival period. In 2009, the ministry launched the more comprehensive "Happy Spring Festival" program to offer a greater diversity of celebrations.
In 2010, the program saw 65 events in 40 countries. It further expanded last year to include 2,000 events in more than 400 cities across the world, and more than 200 million people joined in the events worldwide. The ministry says this year&`&s program will essentially match that scale.
The Spring Festival is one of the major holidays for 10 other countries, including Canada, Malaysia and Mauritius. The ministry says different activities are held in different countries.
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
A new study has found that pregnancy affects not only a woman&`&s body, but also changes parts of her brain too.
When researchers compared brain scans of women before and after pregnancy, they spotted some differences in 11 locations in the brain. They also found hints that the alterations help women prepare for motherhood.
For example, they might help a mother understand the needs of her infant. The women were also given memory tests, and they showed no signs of decline.
Neuroscientists at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain presented the results in a paper released by the journal Nature Neuroscience.
The study included data on 25 Spanish women scanned before and after their first pregnancies, along with 20 women who didn&`&t get pregnant during the study. The brain changes in the pregnancy group emerged from comparisons of the two groups.
The results were consistent. A computer program can tell which women get pregnant just by looking at results of the MRI scans.
The changes, first documented an average of 10 weeks after giving birth, were mostly still present two years after childbirth. That&`&s based on a follow-up with 11 study participants.
Scientists say the brain is being shaped all the time, and hormones are part of the whole orchestra of processes that change the brain structurally.
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A link between human exposure to aluminum and Alzheimer&`&s disease has been suspected for over half a century and recent research may confirm that the metal does play a role in causing this devastating brain disease.
Chris Exley, a professor in bioinorganic chemistry at Keele University in Britain, revealed the new findings from his latest study on medical-blogging website The Hippocratic Post.
Many scientists say aluminum cannot be blamed for causing Alzheimer&`&s disease because there is not enough evidence. However, Exley said the latest research from his group makes the link even more compelling.
He added that the findings are unequivocal in their confirmation of a role for aluminum in some if not all causes of Alzheimer&`&s disease.
Scientists have known for some time that individuals who developed Alzheimer&`&s disease in their late sixties and older have accumulated more aluminum in their brain tissue than individuals of the same age without the disease.
Exley&`&s research shows that Alzheimer&`&s disease has a much earlier age of onset in individuals who have been exposed to unusually high levels of aluminum in their daily lives.
As aluminum is widely used in people&`&s daily lives, Exley suggests that people should take all possible precautions to reduce the accumulation of aluminum in their brain tissue and start to do this as soon as possible.
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British scientists say the belief that humans may have inherited kindness from its close relative the chimpanzee is wrong.
Instead, the new study found that unlike humans, chimpanzees are entirely "selfish creatures" who act in their own interests, turning conceived wisdom on its head.
The team includes academics from the universities of Manchester, Birmingham, and St Andrews, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. The researchers say humans were unlikely to have inherited the trait of kindness from their primate cousins.
They found that chimpanzees are unlikely to take an interest in each other unless there is an anticipated benefit.
They said in the journal Nature Communications that previous research implying helpful behavior in chimps was likely to be a by-product of the way the experiments were designed.
The team worked with a group of 16 chimpanzees at the Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary, in Uganda.
Using two ingenious experiments, the team discovered chimpanzees were no more likely to help feed each other as they were to block access to a box of peanuts.
One of the principle investigators, Dr. Keith Jensen from the University of Manchester, said the evolution of social behavior and what drives individuals to act altruistically, is an important and active area of debate.
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Mark Griffiths in Beijing. You can access the program by logging on to newsplusradio.cn. You can also find us on our Apple Podcast. If you have any comments or suggestions, please let us know by e-mailing us at mansuyingyu@cri.com.cn. That&`&s mansuyingyu@cri.com.cn. Now the news continues.
A new scientific report has found that man-made climate change played some role in two dozen extreme weather events in 2015 but not in several other weird weather instances around the world.
An annual report released by the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that climate change was a factor in 24 of 30 strange weather events. They include 11 cases of high heat, as well as unusual winter sunshine in the United Kingdom, Alaskan wildfires and odd "sunny day" flooding in Miami.
The study documented climate change-caused weather in many parts of the world including Alaska, the southeastern United States, Europe, China and Africa.
Stephanie Herring, co-editor of the report, said weather has to be measurable, but in many cases, the scientists could not detect climate change&`&s effects.
Herring highlighted the Miami flooding in September 2015. Because of rising sea levels and sinking land, extremely high tides flooded the streets with 22 inches of water.
She said it is just remarkable because there were no clouds in the sky before the event occurred, and this type of flooding is clearly becoming more frequent.
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Scientists have used a laser to tickle atoms of antimatter and make them shine, a key step towards answering one of the great riddles of the universe.
Theory predicts that the Big Bang produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter. Since they cancel each other out, scientists have been trying to find out why a relatively small amount of matter remained, allowing the stars, planets and ultimately life to come about, and antimatter vanished.
It took researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, decades to work out how to create an antimatter version of the most basic atom, hydrogen, and trap it for long enough to perform tests.
In a paper published online by the journal Nature, they reported the first cautious result from an experiment with anti-hydrogen. It turns out that when it&`&s stimulated with a laser, anti-hydrogen appears to produce light on the same ultraviolet frequency as its nemesis in the world of matter, hydrogen.
A physicist who wasn&`&t involved in the study said scientists had been eagerly awaiting the results of the CERN experiment for years, and successfully discovering a difference between matter and antimatter would be worthy of a Nobel Prize.
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
Volunteers of the Bird Watchers Association in Zhuhai in Guangdong Province have found a black-faced spoonbill inhabiting and foraging at a forest area of the city.
Zhuhai is located along the East Asia-Australia route of bird migration, one of the top eight such routes around the globe. The city attracts a large number of migratory birds in early winter every year. Egrets, teals, and sandpipers are often seen flying in flocks at Qi&`&ao Mangrove Forest, which has a favorable ecological environment.
The black-faced spoonbill gets its name from its flat spoon-like beak. It is also called the black-faced angel or dancer because of its elegant posture. The species is one of the most endangered in the world.
The newly established Zhuhai Bird Watchers Association was invited to take part in the worldwide survey of the bird. Members of the association spotted a young black-faced spoonbill at Qi&`&ao Mangrove Forest, the first time such a sighting has been made in the city.
Experts predict that more of the bird and other species are likely to be found this winter in the same area.
This is Special English.
A new study shows that non-lethal methods of predator control can be highly effective in protecting livestock from predators and in turn, saving predators from people.
The study has been published in the Wildlife Society Bulletin. It addresses the issue that top predators such as wolves, bears, lions and tigers have declined dramatically around the world over the past century and one major driver of these declines is retaliatory killing by people following predator attacks on domestic livestock.
The researchers examined 66 published, peer-reviewed research papers that measured how four categories of lethal and non-lethal mitigation techniques influenced attacks on livestock. They found that the most consistently effective tools were guard dogs, electric fencing, shock collar, and removal of predators, which includes both killing and relocation to other places.
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