Latest news with #Ding
Borneo Post
an hour ago
- Business
- Borneo Post
China's economy on steady upward trajectory amid external challenges: official
This photo taken on June 21, 2023 shows the Drum Tower as seen from the Jingshan Park in Beijing, capital of China. — Xinhua photo BEIJING (June 6): Building on a positive start in the first quarter of 2025, China's economy is continuing to make steady progress, said Ding Lin, an official with the National Development and Reform Commission. Speaking on the latest episode of China Economic Roundtable, an all-media talk show hosted by Xinhua News Agency, Ding noted that despite a complex external environment, China's economy has remained resilient. Notably, key indicators like industrial production, the service sector, domestic demand and exports have shown robust growth. Ding emphasized China's innovative dynamism, citing 10-percent growth in the high-tech manufacturing sector in April, nearly 4 percentage points higher than the country's overall industrial growth rate. Ding also highlighted the accelerated development of industries such as drones, new energy vehicles, artificial intelligence and humanoid robots. 'In general, as pro-growth measures are swiftly implemented, their effects will continue to emerge, further promoting the country's high-quality economic development,' Ding added. China's GDP grew by 5.4 percent year on year in the first quarter of 2025. – Xinhua China Ding Lin World Economic Forum
Yahoo
12 hours ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Worm towers are all around us
Biologists estimate that four out of five animals on Earth are nematodes (AKA roundworms).The tiny, wriggling, transparent invertebrates are the most abundant creatures on the planet and are found nearly everywhere–from permafrost to the deep ocean. More than one million species make up this ubiquitous group, which includes parasites, decomposers, predators, and more. 'They're not about to take over the world, because they already did,' says Serena Ding, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany tells Popular Science. 'Global worming has already happened.' Yet despite their ubiquity in the environment and in research labs (where the nematode C. elegans is a common model organism), a new discovery highlights that there's still a lot left to learn about these worms. Humble roundworms put cheerleaders' pyramid-building skills to shame. In order to disperse and explore their environment, wild nematodes self-assemble into tower-shaped superorganisms, according to a new study led by Ding and published June 5 in the journal Current Biology. Together, groups of the one-millimeter long worms can act as hyper-coordinated construction squads, with their living bodies providing the raw material for functional, temporary structures. It's a biological feat that even humans struggle to accomplish. This is also the first time that scientists have formally documented the nematode phenomenon occurring in nature. Worm towers– sometimes called swarms– 'were kind of just whispered about in the worm community,' says Ding. Previously, there were anecdotal reports and documented observations of these multi-nematode assemblages in labs and other artificial settings, but it wasn't certain if the formations happened naturally. Now, it's clear that nematodes do, indeed, form towers without artificial interference.'They do exist at high densities, they're interacting, and they're doing something together.' says Ding, who studies collective behavior. 'This was the most exciting thing for me.' One tower can contain thousands of worms in a single aggregation, which looks like a cohesive drop of wiggly gelatin. The impressive team effort enables nematodes to hitch rides on passing insects to more favorable habitats and bridge otherwise untraversable gaps, Ding and her co-authors suggest. Studying this behavior could offer insights into the evolution of social animals and how group decision making unfolds. Only a handful of organisms are known to form collective assemblages for the purpose of dispersing, similar to the nematode towers. 'It's actually super rare,' says Ding, noting that there are just three other, well-documented examples. Slime molds, which are technically single-celled amoebas, often take on multicellular forms, aggregating to make fruiting bodies that send out spores or moving from place to place in a group. Fire ants are known to form rafts with their bodies to get through flood waters, and arrange themselves into towers and bridges to navigate the landscape. Groups of spider mites weave themselves up with silk into a ball that can be carried to distant frontiers on the wind. With the new findings, nematodes gain membership to an exclusive group of evolutionary odd-balls. But though superorganism behavior is uncommon across the tree of life, worm towers themselves are surprisingly commonplace. To track them down in the wild, the researchers didn't have to travel far. They started by looking at fallen fruit beneath trees on their university campus with a digital microscope. On rotting apples and pears, they found dozens of nematode towers wiggling at the edges and points of the fruits' fleshy topography. The scientists also documented the behavior among nematodes found at a mushroom farm. Then, they devised a method of reliably recreating it in the lab. Here's their recipe for encouraging worm towers: place a few thousand nematodes on a food-free petri dish that's flat except for a single tooth brush bristle pointing upwards. Then, wait for a couple of hours. It's that simple. In hundreds of trials, the worms clustered into their writhing tower formation around the bristle more than 90 percent of the time. The longest towers in these experiments were well over a centimeter long (more than 10x a nematode's body length). Prior observations have noted towers about five centimeters–or almost two inches–high. In additional experiments with fruit flies and with a plastic probe, the researchers showed that worm towers strategically move towards any object that touches them or brushes by. The quick collective action allows the towers to shift fast enough to glom onto the leg of a passing insect. Previous research has documented individual nematodes hitchhiking on insects. However, through tower building, it seems that hundreds of worms can grab a ride at once, making the unwitting bug more akin to a subway train than a single passenger vehicle. The scientists also recorded two instances of the towers probing around and forming bridges to reach new locations, like the petri dish lid. Both observations support the leading hypothesis that nematodes build towers to access new, more suitable habitats. Using worms tagged with a fluorescent protein, Ding and her colleagues further found that nematodes building a tower all tend to orient themselves in the same direction. The worms point their heads upwards, and their bodies undulate in time with one another. Yet how they coordinate this intricate collaboration remains unclear. Many of the new observations prompt more confusion than clarity. For instance, in the wild groups, towers were exclusively made up of larvae. In the lab, nematodes of all ages collaborated to build. What accounts for the age difference is unknown. Ding and her colleagues didn't note any apparent competition for the top spots at the tip of the tower, where a worm is most likely to catch a ride. But it's unclear if a less genetically homogenous group of worms might be more competitive. The researchers also don't yet understand why the worms opt to disperse collectively instead of solo. Nor do they know how worms decide to begin forming a tower or the neural or sensory mechanisms that enable it. The basic physics of how thousands of tiny, slimy bodies manage to form something so coordinated and solid remains unresolved as well. 'There are the sorts of questions that we want to address,' says Ding. Ultimately, she hopes to use nematode towers to better understand animal cooperation across species. For so long in science, nematodes have been seen as little more than a microbiology model system, allowing researchers to test genetic modifications, understand cells, and map neurons. But, in looking so closely at the worms, generations of scientists may have missed the bigger picture. Nematodes have complex behaviors that are the product of millions of years of evolution. Learning more about what they do could shed light on how animals large and small work together, says Ding. 'It pays a lot to think about them as real animals,' she adds. 'They're everywhere, they're important, and they do things.'
Yahoo
12 hours ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Worms Use Their Bodies to Build Towers as a Wild Survival Strategy
Under the clinical sterility of glassware, life can do some rather curious things. Whether such behaviors are exclusive to laboratory environments or represent a common survival strategy is often a topic for heated debate. One bizarre activity glimpsed in past lab experiments has now been recorded under natural conditions, proving once and for all that some worm species will construct towers from their own squirming bodies to catch a ride out of town when the going gets tough. Positioning a digital microscope over rotting fruit, researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany watched the itty-bitty scavengers feed until it was time to migrate to greener pastures by climbing atop one another and stretching for the sky. "I was ecstatic when I saw these natural towers for the first time," says animal behaviorist and senior author Serena Ding. "For so long natural worm towers existed only in our imaginations. But with the right equipment and lots of curiosity, we found them hiding in plain sight." Though rare, there are a few examples of animal collectives that link their bodies in creative ways to move around. Ants can make bridges and rafts, for example. Spider mites will sacrifice themselves in the centers of silk balls to help siblings flee on the breeze. Tales of nematodes cooperating to rise above their rotting substrate to latch onto a passing fly have emerged from a handful of semi-natural observations and laboratory experiments. As tempting as it is to simply accept worms into the exclusive club of meat architects, Ding and her colleagues felt evidence of the craft required a less synthetic setting. So the researchers collected the decaying remains of apples and pears around the University of Konstanz in late summer and autumn, and took a close look at the species of Caenorhabditis nematodes squirming through the mush. Their recordings captured the activity of a life stage known as a dauer – an alternative developmental condition that allows worms to survive harsh conditions. The tough teens of one nematode species had gathered around fine projections extending from the fruit's rotting flesh and stretched their bodies, swaying in unison or 'nictating' back and forth. Selecting and placing towers in petri dishes for easier manipulation revealed it was not only possible for these structures to breach gaps in the fruit, but that dauers at the summits of the writhing scaffolds could grab onto landing fruit flies and take to the air. "A nematode tower is not just a pile of worms," says biologist and lead author Daniela Perez. "It's a coordinated structure, a superorganism in motion." Knowing at least some species of Caenorhabditis can work together to escape overcrowding or famine blurs the lines further between social organisms like bees, ants, and even ourselves. With improvements in genetics tools and detailed knowledge of the conditions in which this collaboration arises, the researchers hope to study the complexity of the towers themselves, potentially even revealing degrees of diversity between those at the base and the high-flying penthouse dauers at the top. "Our study opens up a whole new system for exploring how and why animals move together," says Ding. This research was published in Current Biology. Elusive LSD Fungus Finally Discovered on Flower We've Finally Seen The Skyscraper Tsunami That Shook Earth For 9 Days Astronauts Reveal The Shocking Beauty of Lightning From Space
Borneo Post
a day ago
- General
- Borneo Post
China's young kitchen wizards establishing careers as on-demand chefs
This photo taken on May 18, 2025 shows dishes cooked by Xia Lu (not her real name) for her clients in Beijing, capital of China. – Xinhua photo BEIJING (June 5): A wok sizzled as garlic chives and Chinese kale hit hot oil, while pork rib and lotus root soup simmered with a bubbling sound on a stove. In addition, a whole fish, steamed and doused in soy sauce, could be spotted on the kitchen counter, neighboring a pile of spicy crawfish coated in chili oil. Ding Yuqing, 23, juggled preparation of these dishes while navigating an unfamiliar kitchen. A college student in Wuhan, capital of central China's Hubei Province, she was making a hometown feast for a family who hired her to cook in their home. 'I love cooking,' she said. 'Such home-cooking visits have improved my skills, and I really enjoy cooking for others.' Ding is part of a rising wave of young Chinese embracing a new gig, that of on-demand chef. Often students, office workers or freelancers, they offer homemade meals to time-starved urbanites seeking the likes of health, comfort and a taste of home. On social media, the trend is hot. Hashtags related to 'on-demand chefs' have amassed over 1.45 billion views on Douyin and more than 35 million on 'rednote,' an app better known as Xiaohongshu. Notably, last month, a viral story about a woman earning nearly 20,000 yuan (about 2,784 U.S. dollars) a month cooking six meals a day rocketed to the top of Sina Weibo's trending list. Health on the menu For Ding, it all began with a few food photos. Over the winter break last year, she posted snapshots of her home-cooked dishes online. To her surprise, requests started rolling in, asking: 'Can you come cook for me?' 'At first, I was nervous cooking in someone else's kitchen,' she admitted. 'Now it's second nature.' She currently offers services within a 10-kilometer radius on weekends and during school breaks. Before each visit, she discusses taste preferences with her clients and asks them to supply ingredients and seasonings. After preparing meals, she also tidies up, washes dishes and even takes out the trash for her clients. For a typical order of three dishes and one soup, Ding receives a payment of 80-100 yuan. Most of her clients, she noted, are young people juggling hectic schedules. One repeat customer, a 30-year-old office worker, has hired her more than 30 times. 'This customer and her husband are both too busy to cook,' Ding explained. This photo taken on April 29, 2025 shows dishes cooked by Xia Lu (not her real name) for her clients in Beijing, capital of China. – Xinhua photo China's busy urban workers have long relied on the country's sprawling food delivery sector, which employs over 10 million scooter-riding couriers, but Ding's case may reflect a consumption upgrade, with a sizable number of urbanites willing to dig deeper into their pockets for healthier and bespoke alternatives to takeout. Li Xiaoyang, a 30-year-old from Wuhan, said this new type of service became essential for him after a bad experience with takeout left him sick for a week. 'Having someone cook for you means personalized dishes, better hygiene and a more relaxed atmosphere, whether it's a family dinner or a classmate reunion,' Li said. Entrepreneurs have taken notice of this booming market. Hu Quanyu, founder of Chef51, an on-demand platform that connects professional chefs with customers, said the service now operates in over 50 cities across China and works with more than 1,500 chefs. Hu plans to launch a new platform aimed at part-time cooking enthusiasts, allowing them to pick up orders posted by users. The system will provide basic checks like ID and health certificates. 'The new service of on-demand home cooking is more affordable and flexible for budget-conscious young consumers,' he said, adding that the trend reflects changing consumption habits among China's younger generation, who, fueled by rising incomes, are increasingly investing in health, convenience and quality of life. A report by Zhiyan Consulting underscored this shift. It showed that the value of China's health and wellness market surpassed 1 trillion yuan in 2023 — with people aged 18 to 35 accounting for 83.7 percent of this market. Side hustle turns serious China's 'on-demand economy' has diversified rapidly in recent years, with services ranging from in-home elderly care to space organization within homes. These offerings have been hailed for meeting personalized consumer demands, thus promoting consumption, but also for creating much-needed new job opportunities. Back in 2022, the Chinese government issued a guideline aimed at improving gig economy services to boost employment. The number of flexible workers in China exceeded 265 million in 2024, including 175 million engaged in platform-based gig work, according to an industry report by Hangzhou-based Gongmall, a digital solutions provider for the gig sector. By 2050, total wages in the sector are expected to exceed 50 trillion yuan. Still, the fast-growing on-demand chef industry is not without risks and shortcomings. While recognizing its contribution to flexible employment and urban lifestyles, Hu Junjie, a lawyer based in Hubei, said safety and liability concerns remain due to a lack of regulations governing this novel service. The lawyer thus called for a clearer legal framework, better protection for workers, and more oversight from relevant platforms and authorities. 'That said, China already has similar platform services like food delivery and taxi-hailing, management of which is quite mature, and thereby serves as a useful reference,' he added. For some, like Xia Lu (not her real name), the on-demand chef role has evolved from a side hustle to a full-time profession. Burned out from long working hours, the 27-year-old native of southwest China's Sichuan Province, known among her social media followers for her fiery, flavor-packed cooking, quit her job with a foreign-owned company in Beijing in late 2023. She now charges at least 128 yuan per home-cooking trip and handles up to three clients a day. While her current income, about 7,000 yuan a month, is lower than her previous job, Xia relishes the greater freedom it offers her. 'When the weather's good, I go hiking. When it rains, I rest,' she said. 'I've never felt so free and fulfilled.' She's planning to leave Beijing next summer to open a private kitchen in Yunnan, a southwestern province known for its beautiful scenery, slower pace of life and constant flow of hungry tourists. For Ding Yuqing, meanwhile, the momentum is only just beginning. 'I believe the on-demand chef industry will continue to grow,' she said. 'It not only meets the evolving needs of health-conscious consumers, but also gives passionate cooks like me a meaningful and flexible career path.'
NDTV
3 days ago
- Health
- NDTV
Paralysed Chinese Woman Marries 'Doctor' During Her Rehab. This Happens Next
A paralysed Chinese woman, who fell in love with and married a "doctor" during her rehabilitation, suffered the betrayal of her life when he disappeared with a loan amount of over Rs 3.5 crore (US$420,000). Li Shangxuan, 31, from the northern Chinese province of Hebei, shared the tragic story of deceit, detailing how her husband fled with more than three million yuan, leaving her all alone to raise their child, the South China Morning Post reported. Li Shangxuan was involved in a car accident in 2013. It left her paralysed from the waist down. During her rehabilitation, Li met a man with the surname Ding. On social media, he claimed to be a surgeon, who studied medicine and once interned at a hospital. The man actively pursued Li after they connected on social media and fell in love almost instantly. Soon after, he proposed, and Li felt things were finally improving in her life. When Li got pregnant, Ding assured her that she would have access to superior healthcare because he had quit the hospital to launch a business. Li and her parents, who were once well-off courtesy of their business, trusted Ding. Once they got married, Ding made frequent demands for money on the pretext of business obligations. Li claimed that Ding verbally and physically abused her and forced her into taking out a debt of more than three million yuan. Ding was arrested by the police for suspected rape only two months after the marriage. He borrowed money from Li and was eventually set free. The two divorced soon after the birth of their son, and Ding relinquished his custody. Soon after, he disappeared and severed all communication with Li and her family. Their youngster has never met his father and is currently being raised entirely by Li. The 31-year-old single mother later learned that Ding had no medical degree or license and was kicked out of his hospital internship for sexual harassment. He was already in debt when they were married, and the company he claimed to run was a scam. Li chose to share her story publicly on social media on May 22 to caution other women against con artists of the same kind. She has filed a lawsuit against Ding, and the trial is set to begin in June. She could also file charges for abandonment and domestic abuse. Li Shangxuan now supports herself and her child by live-streaming and selling home goods online.
