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Three research, which haven’t but been peer-reviewed, reveal intriguing clues about how the COVID-19 pandemic began. Two of the stories hint the outbreak to an enormous market that bought reside animals in Wuhan, China. A 3rd signifies that the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 spilled over from animals — probably these bought on the market — into people at the least twice in November or December 2019. Final Could, virologist Michael Worobey, an writer on two of the papers, led a letter printed in Science during which he and different researchers pressed the scientific neighborhood to maintain an open thoughts about whether or not the pandemic stemmed from a laboratory leak. Now, converging proof strengthens the concept the pandemic’s origins lay in wild animals bought as merchandise, he says. “If you take a look at the entire proof, it’s clear that this began on the market,” says Worobey.

Nature | 8 min learn

References: Analysis Sq. preprint, Zenodo preprint 1 & Zenodo preprint 2

The US Division of Justice introduced on 23 February that it’s going to successfully terminate the China Initiative, a programme that sought to guard US laboratories and companies from espionage. As a substitute of specializing in China, the programme might be broadened to cowl different nations of concern, and might be renamed. Critics of the initiative mentioned it was biased in opposition to researchers of Chinese language descent and ruined lives over tangential issues, resembling incorrectly filled-in funding functions.

Nature | 6 min learn

Within the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Dmitry Rogozin, director of the Russian house company Roscosmos, took to Twitter to precise his anger at US sanctions concentrating on, amongst different issues, Russia’s house programme. “When you block cooperation with us, who will save the ISS from an uncontrolled deorbit and a fall on the US or Europe?” he wrote. Astronauts and cosmonauts have labored collectively in orbit throughout political upheaval previously, and so they say that professionalism — and deep friendships fashioned in coaching — usually maintain them above earthly politics. However until relations on the bottom enhance, the decommissioning of the Worldwide House Station (ISS) in 2031 may spell the top of US–Russian collaboration in house.

Scientific American | 8 min learn

Obtain figures for Sci-Hub, the favored however controversial web site that hosts pirated copies of scientific papers, reveal the place individuals are utilizing the positioning most. China tops the chart, with greater than 25 million downloads over the previous month, and the US is available in second place, with 9.3 million downloads. However the figures embrace solely downloads from authentic Sci-Hub web sites, not any duplicate or ‘mirror’ website, and digital personal networks, which are sometimes used to bypass bans in nations resembling the UK, can skew the outcomes by making it seem that customers are in a special nation.

Nature | 4 min learn

The place I work

Wansheng Jiang research the Chinese language large salamander (Andrias davidianus), which is native to the Yangtze River Basin of central China. “This explicit species is critically endangered within the wild owing to habitat loss and overcatching — a selected downside is their use in conventional Chinese language medication,” says Jiang. The quiet, nocturnal animals reside in distant areas, which makes them difficult to trace, entice and examine. “We’ve learnt to be affected person and have fun each small success we’ve got,” says Jiang. “Finding out Chinese language large salamanders has additionally taught me an essential life lesson: adapt to thrive. When meals is ample, the salamanders develop quickly; when meals is scarce, they’ll go as much as 11 months with out feeding. In my private life and work, I’ve skilled successes and failures, and taking up that lesson has been helpful.” (Nature | 3 min learn)