The returner of the Chang'e-6 lunar probe is opened during a ceremony at the China Academy of Space Technology under the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation in Beijing, capital of China, June 26, 2024. The returner of the Chang'e-6 lunar probe was opened at a ceremony in Beijing on Wednesday afternoon. During the ceremony at the China Academy of Space Technology under the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, researchers opened the returner and examined key technical indicators. Photo: Xinhua As the US space industry recently faced yet more delays and stagnation with key components including manned spacecraft and space suits "going wrong," NASA has once again resorted to its "sour grapes" rhetoric upon seeing China's successful retrieval of fresh lunar soils from the far side of the moon, by claiming that China did not directly invite its scientists to participate in the lunar soil research. This behavior is a typical blame-shifting trick, Chinese experts said, noting it is clear to all that it is the US' own laws, not China, that are restricting space cooperation between the two sides. Instead of deceiving themselves by distorting the truth, the US should face up to its own problem of overall weakening engineering capability and the lack of long-term planning in its space industry. After the Chang'e-6 samples, weighing nearly 2 kilograms, were safely transported to a special laboratory for further study on Friday, NASA spokesperson Faith McKie told media that while China worked with the European Space Agency, France, Italy and Pakistan on this mission, "NASA wasn't invited to take part in the moon probe." NASA also didn't get "any direct invitation" to study China's moon rocks, after it welcomed all scientists from around the world to apply to study them, McKie told NatSec Daily. Responding to the remarks, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning told the Global Times on Monday that China is open to having space exchanges with the US, and we also welcome countries around the world to take part in the study of lunar samples. "However, the US side seems to have forgotten to mention its domestic legislation such as the Wolf Amendment. The real question is whether US scientists and institutions are allowed by their own government to participate in cooperation with China," Mao said. "The existence of the Wolf Amendment has basically shut the door to space collaboration between the two countries," Wang Yanan, chief editor of Beijing-based Aerospace Knowledge magazine, told the Global Times on Monday. Even if research institutions of the US have the willingness to work with China on opportunities such as lunar sample research, institutions there must obtain special approval from the US Congress due to the presence of this amendment, Wang explained. Currently, no such "green light" is in sight from the Congress. Furthermore, China's collaboration with international partners is based on equality and mutual benefit, leveraging their respective scientific resources, facilities, and expertise. However, the US only wants what it doesn't have, and its engagement with China would be advantageous only to itself, Wang noted. NASA has found itself embroiled in a number of thorny issues recently, with the latest being Boeing's Starliner manned spaceship experiencing both helium leaks and thruster issues during a June 6 docking with the International Space Station (ISS), which led to an indefinite delay for its crew's return to Earth, despite NASA's insistence that they are not "stranded" in space. The return of the Starliner capsule, while has already been delayed by two weeks, will be put on hold "well into the summer" pending results of new thruster tests, which are scheduled to start Tuesday and will take approximately two weeks or even more, per NASA officials. Previously on June 24, NASA cancelled a spacewalk on the ISS following a "serious situation," when one of the spacesuits experienced coolant leak in the hatch. While being broadcast on a livestream, the astronauts reported "literally water everywhere" as they were preparing for the extravehicular activity, space.com reported. The report said that this is the second time this particular spacewalk was postponed, after a June 13 attempt with a different astronaut group was pushed back due to a "spacesuit discomfort." The recurring issues with the spacesuits are due to their much-extended service lifespan, media reported, as the puffy white ones US astronauts currently wear were designed more than 40 years ago. Despite the pressing need to replace them, NASA announced recently that it is abandoning a plan to develop next-generation spacesuits, which had been committed to be delivered by 2026, CNN reported on Thursday. One of the root causes for such problems is that the US has developed many large technology conglomerates, which for a long time have benefited significantly from government orders and industry monopolies. Consequently, in many complex engineering fields, the level of attention given is greatly insufficient, Wang noted. It also reflected the US' lack of long-term strategic planning for its manned space program. For instance, the ageing spacesuits should have been replaced a decade ago to ensure that operational suits remain in usable condition. Failure to address this issue results in a hindrance to the space station's necessary maintenance tasks and even poses life-threatening risks to astronauts in emergency situations, experts said. The issues with Boeing's spacecraft and the spacesuits are not isolated problems, but reflected a systemic issue in the US space industry - the overall weakening of engineering capabilities, they noted.

An artificial intelligence (AI) team at Stanford University apologized for plagiarizing a large language model (LLM) from a Chinese AI company, which became a trending topic on the Chinese social media platforms, where it sparked concern among netizens on Tuesday. We apologize to the authors of MiniCPM [the AI model developed by a Chinese company] for any inconvenience that we caused for not doing the full diligence to verify and peer review the novelty of this work, the multimodal AI model Llama3-V's developers wrote in a post on social platform X. The apology came after the team from Stanford University announced Llama3-V on May 29, claiming it had comparable performance to GPT4-V and other models with the capability to train for less than $500. According to media reports, the announcement published by one of the team members quickly received more than 300,000 views. However, some netizens from X found and listed evidence of how the Llama3-V project code was reformatted and similar to MiniCPM-Llama3-V 2.5, an LLM developed by a Chinese technology company, ModelBest, and Tsinghua University. Two team members, Aksh Garg and Siddharth Sharma, reposted a netizen's query and apologized on Monday, while claiming that their role was to promote the model on Medium and X (formerly Twitter), and that they had been unable to contact the member who wrote the code for the project. They looked at recent papers to validate the novelty of the work but had not been informed of or were aware of any of the work by Open Lab for Big Model Base, which was founded by the Natural Language Processing Lab at Tsinghua University and ModelBest, according to their responses. They noted that they have taken all references to Llama3-V down in respect to the original work. In response, Liu Zhiyuan, chief scientist at ModelBest, spoke out on the Chinese social media platform Zhihu, saying that the Llama3-V team failed to comply with open-source protocols for respecting and honoring the achievements of previous researchers, thus seriously undermining the cornerstone of open-source sharing. According to a screenshot leaked online, Li Dahai, CEO of ModelBest, also made a post on his WeChat moment, saying that the two models were verified to have highly similarity in terms of providing answers and even the same errors, and that some relevant data had not yet been released to the public. He said the team hopes that their work will receive more attention and recognition, but not in this way. He also called for an open, cooperative and trusting community environment. Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Christopher Manning also responded to Garg's explanation on Sunday, commenting "How not to own your mistakes!" on X. As the incident became a trending topic on Sina Weibo, Chinese netizens commented that academic research should be factual, but the incident also proves that the technology development in China is progressing. Global Times

US politicians are advocating for steep tariffs, echoing the protectionist Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922. Despite potential international retaliation, risks to global economic rules and a shift from post-World War II principles, US politicians have promised to increase trade barriers against China, causing concerns for the sustainability of global economic harmony. A century ago, the Republican Congress passed the Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922. This post-World War-I effort to protect the US from German competition and rescue America's own businesses from falling prices sparked a global wave of tariff hikes. While long forgotten, echoes of Fordney-McCumber now reverberate across the US political landscape. Once again, politicians are grasping the tariff as a magic talisman against its own economic ills and to contain the rise of China. The Democratic Party of the 1920s opposed tariffs, because duties are harmful to consumers and farmers, but today both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump favor national delivery through protectionism. Trump promised that his second term, if elected, would impose 60-percent tariffs on everything arriving from China and 10-percent tariffs on imports from the rest of the world, apparently including the imports covered by 14 free trade agreements with America's 20 partners. He initially promised 100-percent tariffs on electric vehicles (EVs), but when Biden declared that he was hiking tariffs on EVs from China to 100-percent, Trump raised the ante to 200-percent. On May 14, 2024, the White House imposed tariffs ranging from 25 percent (on items such as steel, aluminum and lithium batteries) to 50 percent (semiconductors, solar cells, syringes and needles) and 100 percent (electric vehicles) on Chinese imports. US government officials offer "national security" and "supply chain vulnerability" as the justification for levying high tariffs. To deflect worries about inflation, US Trade Representative Katherine Tai declared, "first of all, I think that that link, in terms of tariffs to prices, has been largely debunked." Contrary findings by the United States International Trade Commission and a number of distinguished economists, as well as Biden's own 2019 statement criticizing Trump's tariffs - "Trump doesn't get the basics. He thinks tariffs are being paid by China… [but] the American people are paying his tariffs" - forced Tai's office to wind back her declaration. The fact that prohibitive barriers to imports of solar cells, batteries and EVs will delay the green economy carries zero political weight with Trump and little with Biden. Nor does either of them worry about the prospects of Chinese retaliation and damage to the fabric of global economic rules. Historical lessons - unanticipated consequences of the foolish Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922 and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 - are seen as irrelevant by the candidates and their advisers. The US' lurch from its post-World War II free trade principles offers China a golden opportunity. On the world stage, China will espouse open free trade and investment. China will encourage EV and battery firms to establish plants in Europe, Brazil, Mexico and elsewhere, essentially daring the US to damage its own alliances by restricting third country imports containing Chinese components. Whether the fabric of global economic rules that has delivered astounding prosperity to the world will survive through the 21st century remains to be seen. Much will depend on the decisions of other large economic powers, not only China but also the European Union and Japan, as well as middle powers, such as Australia, Brazil, Chile, ASEAN and South Korea. Their actions and reactions will reshape the rules of the 21st century. If others follow America down this costly path, the world will become less prosperous and vastly more unpredictable. If they resist, the US risks being diminished and more isolated. The author is a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute of International Economics. bizopinion@globaltimes.com.cn

In a groundbreaking discovery, researchers from the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have found a desert moss species, known as Syntrichia caninervis, that has the potential to survive in the extreme conditions on Mars. The Global Times learned from the institute that during the third Xinjiang scientific expedition, the research team focused on studying the desert moss and found that it not only challenges people's understanding of the tolerance of organisms in extreme environments, but also demonstrates the ability to survive and regenerate under simulated Martian conditions. Supported by the Xinjiang scientific expedition project, researchers Li Xiaoshuang, Zhang Daoyuan and Zhang Yuanming from the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography and Kuang Tingyun, an academician from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, concentrated on studying the "pioneer species" Syntrichia caninervis in an extreme desert environment, according to the institute in an article it sent to the Global Times on Sunday. Through scientific experiments, the researchers systematically proved that the moss can tolerate over 98 percent cell dehydration, survive at temperatures as low as -196 C without dying, withstand over 5000Gy of gamma radiation without perishing, and quickly recover, turn green, and resume growth, showcasing extraordinary resilience. These findings push the boundaries of human knowledge on the tolerance of organisms in extreme environments. Furthermore, the research revealed that under simulated Martian conditions with multiple adversities, Syntrichia caninervis can still survive and regenerate when returned to suitable conditions. This marks the first report of higher plants surviving under simulated Martian conditions. The research team also identified unique characteristics of Syntrichia caninervis. Its overlapping leaves reduce water evaporation, while the white tips of the leaves reflect intense sunlight. Additionally, the innovative "top-down" water absorption mode of the white tips efficiently collects and transports water from the atmosphere. Moreover, the moss can enter a selective metabolic dormancy state in adverse environments and rapidly provide the energy needed for recovery when its surrounding environment improves. Based on the extreme environmental tolerance of Syntrichia caninervis, the research team plans to conduct experiments on spacecraft to monitor the survival response and adaptation capabilities of the species under microgravity and various ionizing radiation adversities. They aim to unravel the physiological and molecular basis of the moss and explore the key life tolerance regulatory mechanisms, laying the foundation for future applications of Syntrichia caninervis in outer space colonization.

Samsung Electronics expects its profits for the three months to June 2024 to jump 15-fold compared to the same period last year. An artificial intelligence (AI) boom has lifted the prices of advanced chips, driving up the firm's forecast for the second quarter. The South Korean tech giant is the world's largest maker of memory chips, smartphones and televisions. The announcement pushed Samsung shares up more than 2% during early trading hours in Seoul. The firm also reported a more than 10-fold jump in its profits for the first three months of this year. In this quarter, it said it is expecting its profit to rise to 10.4tn won ($7.54bn; £5.9bn), from 670bn won last year. That surpasses analysts' forecasts of 8.8tn won, according to LSEG SmartEstimate. "Right now we are seeing skyrocketing demand for AI chips in data centers and smartphones," said Marc Einstein, chief analyst at Tokyo-based research and advisory firm ITR Corporation. Optimism about AI is one reason for the broader market rally over the last year, which pushed the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq in the United States to new records on Wednesday. The market value of chip-making giant Nvidia surged past $3tn last month, briefly holding the top spot as the world's most valuable company. "The AI boom which massively boosted Nvidia is also boosting Samsung's earnings and indeed those of the entire sector," Mr Einstein added. Samsung Electronics is the flagship unit of South Korean conglomerate Samsung Group. Next week, the tech company faces a possible three-day strike, which is expected to start on Monday. A union of workers is demanding a more transparent system for bonuses and time off.