Both countries are expecting
results from Obama-Xi summit


When President Barack Obama and Chinese leader Xi Jinping hold an informal summit today and Saturday in California, it will be their first get-together since  Xi became China’s president.

The meeting comes at a time when growing mistrust, concerns about cyber attacks and the question of how to deal with North Korea are among a range of issues testing ties. Despite those challenges, expectations are high in China that the meeting will be a crucial if not historic moment for the two countries to put relations on more stable footing. 
 
Coming into this week’s meeting, both China and the United States are talking up the importance of ties and the need to find ways to better work together. The United States has a list of concerns it wants to address. China does too, but Beijing is putting more of its emphasis on a vision it has for U.S.-China relations.
 
Talking about that vision earlier this week, China’s Ambassador to the United States, Cui Tiankai, said the upcoming meeting would be strategic and historic. According to a Xinhua news report, Cui says the talks will include in-depth discussions on major issues about how to build ties and a new type of great power relationship between the two countries. China feels that by publicly recognizing each other as great powers, one emerging and the other an established power, the two can avoid conflict.
 
Pang Zhongying, a political scientist at Renmin University in Beijing, said: “I think this is a very important opportunity, because the meeting is very informal and candid and casual. Perhaps this is just happening by chance, or perhaps they’re making history. I do hope they’re making history, but I don’t know if they’ll be able to grab this chance or they’ll let it go.”
 
White House officials say they want to cover as many issues as possible during the meetings and focus on forging a working relationship. U.S. officials have given China’s new idea some attention, mentioning it in speeches, but their focus more often than not has been on other issues.
 
“Sometimes the Americans like to give a name to China-U.S. relations. Strangely, this time the Chinese also care about how to define China-U.S. relations. But once they've discuss the definition, the Americans want to talk concrete issues,” Pang said.
 
Not all believe the meeting will achieve groundbreaking results.
 
Xie Tao, a professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University, said he believes the meeting is more about developing personal trust. He said it is an opportunity for the two leaders to get a sense of whether they can be friends.
 
“I think that’s why it’s set up in such an informal and private setting, unlike the previous couple of summits between Chinese and American leaders,” Xie said. "So the expectation is that the two leaders they will build up personal trust and that trust probably will spill over to the other areas. And so that will help the lower level officials, the real bureaucrats who deal with U.S.-China relations on a day-to-day basis."
 
U.S. officials say the two leaders will have ample time to talk and Washington is eager to discuss what hopes will be a broad agenda. Unlike state visits which allow only limited time for in-depth discussions, the two leaders will have a meeting on Friday, a private dinner and then more talks on Saturday before wrapping up around midday. The United States says it wants to talk about human rights, North Korea and cyber attacks that it says originated in China and the impact they are having on U.S. businesses.
 
Wu Riqiang, an associate professor at the School of International Studies, Renmin University of China, said that before there are ways the U.S. and China could cooperate on cyber security, but added that more clarity is needed about the different types of hacker attacks that exist.
 
He said the U.S. has yet to give enough information about the first type of attacks, economic losses because of hacker attacks.
 
“On the second type of hacking, which has to do with intelligence, we cannot do anything, because every one is acting the same way in this regard. China is stealing information about the U.S., and the U.S. is also stealing information from China," Wu said.

"Nobody is a good guy here, everyone is a crook. The third type of hacking has to do with technical infrastructure which is a common interest for both the U.S. and China, and that is the realm where we can cooperate on how to protect banks system so that there is no breach, or protect our power grid so that it does not collapse," Wu added.
 
Xie Tao said North Korea is likely to be a key topic of discussion as well. He said that while China’s position hasn’t made an about face, it has changed significantly.
 
“We cannot afford to have a country that is a dictatorial, is unpredictable to test nuclear weapons. And besides, close association with a regime like this does no good at all to China, I think eventually our leaders realize that, we need to change our course," he said. "Many people don’t like the word abandon but I think we’re changing our course.”
 
China has repeatedly urged North Korea to reform its economy and return to the six-party talks on ending its nuclear weapons programs. In a briefing earlier this week, White House officials say that even as it has been raising concerns about cyber issues, Beijing and Washington have had pretty constructive cooperation on North Korea.


Swimming and movie star
Esther Williams dies at 91


Esther Williams, whose experiences as a young swimming champion led to a career of Hollywood aqua-musicals designed just for her, died Thursday in Beverly Hills, California, at the age of 91, her spokesman said.
 
Williams, one of the biggest box-office stars of the 1940s and 1950s, died peacefully in her sleep and had been in declining health due to old age, spokesman Harlan Boll said.
 
Williams became known as Hollywood's Mermaid and The Queen of the Surf. At her peak, the woman with the wide smile and bright eyes was second in earnings only to Betty Grable and often in the top 10 box-office draws.
 
Williams' aqua-musicals were escapist comedies in lush color with lavish song and watery dance numbers and lots of footage of synchronized swimming. They were so popular that some credited her with a jump in the popularity of home swimming pools.
 
A typical finale featured Williams diving into a pool or lagoon and surfacing to a crescendo of music with water drops glistening on her smiling face and sleek body.
 
She dismissed her talent, saying “I can't act, I can't sing, I can't dance. My pictures are put together out of scraps they find in the producer's wastebasket.”
 
After watching the films decades later, she softened that self-deprecating assessment, saying: “I look at that girl and I like her. I can see why she became popular with audiences. There was an unassuming quality about her. She was certainly wholesome.”
 
Williams was born in the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood on Aug. 8, 1921. As a young swimmer, she set what were then world records in the 100-meter freestyle and 880-yard relay. She also worked as a model.
 
In her later career, Williams did a few 1960s television specials and hosted swimming events for ABC-TV's coverage of the 1984 Olympic Games.

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Image from Hinode mission shows lower regions of sun’s atmosphere.



WASHINGTON — The U.S. space agency NASA is preparing to launch a new mission to study the sun. The Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, will observe the way solar material gathers energy and heats up as it moves through the sun's lower atmosphere.

The upper layer of the sun's atmosphere, known as the corona, is thousands of times hotter than the sun's surface. 

Scientists want to figure out how that happens, so they are preparing a mission to study the sun's so-called interface region, the area between the sun's photosphere and its corona. 

Energy and plasma that flow through the interface region have an impact on those on Earth. That region is the source of the sun's ultraviolet emission, which has an effect on the planet's climate, as well as the near-Earth space environment. Energy that seeps through the interface region drives solar wind.   

That's where NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, mission comes into play. IRIS is a small satellite with the ability to perform complex solar observations.

Alan Title, the IRIS principal investigator based at Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Center in California, spoke to reporters about the mission's importance.

"What we want to discover is what the basic physical processes are that transfer energy and material from the surface of the sun out to the outer atmosphere to the corona," he explained. "And, remember, the corona extends throughout the heliosphere. We live in the sun's outer atmosphere."

IRIS will provide high-resolution images that even will show individual structures of energy as they rapidly stretch away from the sun. The U.S. space agency says IRIS images will be three-to-four times as detailed as those from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. 

IRIS also will provide spectra, data that reveals information about multiple wavelengths of light at once.

NASA says IRIS will observe a range of temperatures from about 5,000 to 65,000 degrees Celsius, and up to about 10 million degrees Celsius during solar flares. But IRIS will not be observing the sun from up close.

"IRIS flies around the Earth so it only gets about 600 kilometers closer to the sun than we are here on Earth, and that's about 92 million miles away," said principal investigator Alan Title. "So it's really not very much closer to the sun."

The $181 million mission is set to last two years, but scientists say the solar explorer could function much longer. 

IRIS is set to launch aboard a Pegasus XL rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California  June 26.

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NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission is shifting gears. The Curiosity rover is going to take a break from drilling into Martian bedrock and analyzing rock samples to do what Mars rovers are made to do: drive across the terrain.

The U.S. space agency says this will be the biggest turning point since Curiosity landed on the Red Planet last August.

Curiosity is exploring within a deep, 150-kilometer-wide depression called Gale Crater so that scientists can learn about the area's environmental history. The rover soon will shift into distance-driving mode to make the 8-kilometer trek to the base of a Martian peak called Mount Sharp. Scientists picked this target because they expect the mountain's layers to offer clues about the way the Martian environment evolved.

The journey to Mount Sharp is expected to take many months, and mission scientists note that the rover will investigate interesting features along the way.

Members of the Mars Science Laboratory team based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California gave reporters an update about the rover's activities.

Joy Crisp, the deputy project scientist, described the decision to stop sampling and start moving as one of the classic struggles the science team faces.

"The team has decided that it really is a good time now to turn around and start making progress to Mount Sharp," she said.   

The mission's main objective - to see if ancient Mars had environmental conditions that could have supported micro-organisms - already has been accomplished. Earlier this year, scientists said a rock sample from an area known as Yellowknife Bay contained some key chemical ingredients needed for life, including oxygen, hydrogen and carbon. Martian bedrock showed evidence of multiple periods of wet conditions.

The nuclear-powered Curiosity is investigating Martian geology, weather and radiation levels during its two-year, $2.5 billion mission.


China seen as big consumer
that will affect prices


A report from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development says China's appetite for food imports will soar in the next few years. The report comes on the heels of large mergers and acquisitions in the agribusiness industry between China and the United States.

Demand is rising in China for food, and the country is set to increase its imports of grains, oil seeds and meat during the next 10 years. But as China's need for food imports grows, global food production is on the decline, said Angel Gurria of the  Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development . 
 
“In the last 10 years agriculture grew by 2.1 percent. Now we’re saying the next 10 years its going to grow 1.5 percent.  So about a third less. That’s pretty big.  A third less accumulated over time, that’s a big difference, and that has to be taken into consideration," he said.
 
Mean imports to China are expected to increase by 3 percent a year to 1.7 million tons by 2022.  Beef is set to become the fastest growing import sector with a growth rate of 7 percent a year.  China's imports of coarse grains, used to feed animals, are expected to double by 2022, and soybean imports are expected to grow 40 percent.  The country's imports of oilseeds, also used in animal feed, are set to rise 41 percent over the next decade. 

China's economic growth is fueling its appetite for imports, and the country is already having a huge impact on global food markets, Gurria said.
 
“You cannot understand the world of agriculture and the production of agriculture if you don’t have China front and center because of their importance in production, because of their importance in consumption, because of their importance in the shifts and changes of the market," he said.

To meet this growing demand for food, Jose Graziano Da Silva, director general of the Food and Agriculture Organization, said the waste of food in global production must be reduced. 
 
“We are still losing 30 percent to half of what we are producing now," he said. "This is unbelievable, and this is a lack of investment in food storage, in food transportation, in better rural conditions.”

The rise in the Chinese demand for food is expected to help fuel commodity prices, and companies have already started to capitalize on China's impact on global food trade. Meat processing firm Shuanghui of China announced a $7 billion bid for American pork company Smithfield last week.

China is already the world's biggest importer of milk and soybeans and is expected to become the world's biggest consumer of pork within a decade.  The two agencies estimate that international pork prices will rise 5 to 8 percent as a result.


Breast feeding shows impact
in brains of youngsters


A new study by researchers from Brown University finds more evidence that breast feeding is good for babies’ brains.

The study made use of specialized, baby-friendly magnetic resonance imaging to look at the brain growth in a sample of children under the age of 4. The research found that by age 2, babies who had been breastfed exclusively for at least three months had enhanced development in key parts of the brain compared to children who were fed formula exclusively or who were fed a combination of formula and breast milk. The extra growth was most pronounced in parts of the brain associated with language, emotional function, and cognition, the research showed.

This isn’t the first study to suggest that breast feeding aids babies’ brain development. Behavioral studies have previously associated breast feeding with better cognitive outcomes in older adolescents and adults. But this is the first imaging study that looked for differences associated with breast feeding in the brains of very young and healthy children, said Sean Deoni, assistant professor of engineering at Brown and the study’s lead author.

“We wanted to see how early these changes in brain development actually occur,” Deoni said. “We show that they’re there almost right off the bat.”

The findings are in press in the journal NeuroImage and available now online.

Deoni leads Brown’s Advanced Baby Imaging Lab. He and his colleagues use quiet machines that image babies’ brains as they sleep. The technique Deoni has developed looks at the microstructure of the brain’s white matter, the tissue that contains long nerve fibers and helps different parts of the brain communicate with each other. Specifically, the technique looks for amounts of myelin, the fatty material that insulates nerve fibers and speeds electrical signals as they zip around the brain.

Deoni and his team looked at 133 babies ranging in ages from 10 months to 4 years. All of the babies had normal gestation times, and all came from families with similar socioeconomic statuses. The researchers split the babies into three groups: those whose mothers reported they exclusively breastfed for at least three months, those fed a combination of breast milk and formula, and those fed formula alone. The researchers compared the older kids to the younger kids to establish growth trajectories in white matter for each group.

The study showed that the exclusively breastfed group had the fastest growth in myelinated white matter of the three groups, with the increase in white matter volume becoming substantial by age 2. The group fed both breast milk and formula had more growth than the exclusively formula-fed group, but less than the breast milk-only group.

“We’re finding the difference is on the order of 20 to 30 percent, comparing the breastfed and the non-breastfed kids,” said Deoni. “I think it’s astounding that you could have that much difference so early.”

Deoni and his team then backed up their imaging data with a set of basic cognitive tests on the older children. Those tests found increased language performance, visual reception, and motor control performance in the breastfed group.

The study also looked at the effects of the duration of breast feeding. The researchers compared babies who were breastfed for more than a year with those breastfed less than a year, and found significantly enhanced brain growth in the babies who were breastfed longer — especially in areas of the brain dealing with motor function.

Deoni says the findings add to a substantial body of research that finds positive associations between breast feeding and children’s brain health.

“I think I would argue that combined with all the other evidence, it seems like breast feeding is absolutely beneficial,” he said.


Irish chronicles show impact
in Europe of tropical eruptions


Medieval chronicles have given an international group of researchers a glimpse into the past to assess how historical volcanic eruptions affected the weather in Ireland up to 1,500 years ago.

By critically assessing over 40,000 written entries in the Irish Annals and comparing them with measurements taken from ice cores, the researchers successfully linked the climatic aftermath of volcanic eruptions to extreme cold weather events in Ireland over a 1,200-year period from 431 to 1649.
 
Their study, which has been published Thursday, in the Institute of Physics Publishing’s journal Environmental Research Letters, showed that over this timescale up to 48 explosive volcanic eruptions could be identified in the Greenland Ice Sheet Project ice-core, which records the deposition of volcanic sulfate in annual layers of ice.

Of these 48 volcanic events, 38 were associated, closely in time, with 37 extreme cold events, which were identified by systematically examining written entries in the Irish Annals and picking out directly observed meteorological phenomena and conditions, such as heavy snowfall and frost, prolonged ice covering lakes and rivers, and contemporary descriptions of abnormally cold weather.

Lead author of the study, Francis Ludlow, from the Harvard University Center for the Environment and Department of History, said: “It’s clear that the scribes of the Irish Annals were diligent reporters of severe cold weather, most probably because of the negative impacts this had on society and the biosphere.

“Our major result is that explosive volcanic eruptions are strongly and persistently implicated in the occurrence of cold weather events over this long timescale in Ireland. In their severity, these events are quite rare for the country’s mild maritime climate.”