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China could release emergency pork reserves after losing 100 million pigs to swine fever

African swine fever has wiped out a third of China’s pig population. Now government officials are discussing dramatic steps to stabilize the world’s largest pork market.

Pork is a huge deal in China. The country is home to half of all the pigs on the planet. The meat is a staple of the Chinese diet, which means its scarcity could damage China’s social stability. The outbreak of swine fever also threatens to upend the global pork supply chain.

While Chinese authorities have already made plans to shore up the pig market — including subsidies for pig farms and families who may struggle with soaring prices — they’re stepping up efforts to deal with the crisis.

Study finds billions of quantum entangled electrons in ‘strange metal’

In a new study, U.S. and Austrian physicists have observed quantum entanglement among “billions of billions” of flowing electrons in a quantum critical material.

The research, which appears this week in Science, examined the electronic and magnetic behavior of a “strange metal” compound of ytterbium, rhodium and silicon as it both neared and passed through a critical transition at the boundary between two well-studied quantum phases.

The study at Rice University and Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) provides the strongest direct evidence to date of entanglement’s role in bringing about quantum criticality, said study co-author Qimiao Si of Rice.

Elon Musk Says He’ll Put A Million People on Mars By 2050

Musk: “There will be a lot of jobs on Mars!”


According to Musk, you’ll need a crazy amount of cargo capacity to build a human colony on a faraway planet.

“Megatons per year to orbit are needed for life to become multiplanetary,” he tweeted.

Each Starship could deliver more than 100 tons per flight, meaning that every ten ships could “yield one megaton per year to orbit,” Musk calculated.

Quantum properties of water discovered — water is like a hologram

Water is special even based on its simple physical properties since it is the only substance on earth that can be found in all three states (liquid, solid, gas). However, scientists at the US Department of Energy Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have discovered new properties of water that go beyond the known laws of classical physics says the phys.org scientific news portal.

Passes through solid walls.

Common foods can help ‘landscape’ the jungle of our gut microbiome

Researchers at San Diego State University have found a new way to harness food as medicine, which has far reaching implications to control harmful microbes in our gut while balancing microbial diversity by fostering the growth of beneficial bacteria.

Foods we eat commonly affect our gut microbiota. New research shows they do so by triggering the production of bacteriophage—viruses that infect and replicate inside bacteria. Compounds in these foods have an antimicrobial effect which causes the phage to replicate.

The researchers began by identifying which foods were antimicrobial, then analyzed them before narrowing it down to a shortlist. When examining growth curves of bacteria, they observed that while bacteria multiply over time, eventually their numbers plateau. However, if phages are activated, then bacterial growth stops altogether and their numbers drop dramatically until they’re depleted.