Deadly wildfires in Hawaii, which caused the biggest death toll in more than a century in the US and forced thousands to evacuate from their homes, expose the incompetence of the US government, said analysts, with many local residents who survived the disaster posting videos on social media criticizing the problematic response of local authorities and poor early warning system. Residents also criticized US mainstream media reports, saying this was not just a natural disaster, but also a man-made calamity. 

Chinese analysts and web users are paying attention to the horrible tragedy that Americans have suffered, as the hashtags on Sina Weibo about "Hawaii wildfires" have received more than 71.52 million views on Tuesday. Experts said the response of the US government made the US look "unlike a developed country."

A massive blaze destroyed much of the town of Lahaina, on Maui over the weekend. As of Monday afternoon, officials confirmed 99 people have died. Hawaii Governor Josh Green told the media that the death toll would likely increase "very significantly" and could "double or even triple" over the next 10 days, according to CNN.

Green said on Sunday that there was "very little left" of Lahaina, and some 1,300 people remained missing, according to CBS News.

Many people including survivors uploaded videos to break the silence on social media networks to heavily criticize the incompetence of the government and the problematic response and early warning system. Some questioned reports by the mainstream media and said it was not a natural disaster, and the death toll could be far greater than reported.

Some of them said warning sirens did not sound and people received no warning about the wildfire, and they were not informed about evacuation. Some complained about the disorganized response and poor traffic system that trapped the people who wanted to escape and the rescue personnel who wanted to enter the island, and that donations have not been handed to the people in need. Some relief materials were looted as local authorities failed to restore public order.

Hawaii has got a massive outdoor public safety early warning system, with more than 400 sirens to remind people of threats like tsunamis, and Maui has 80 of these sirens, according to the Xinhua News Agency.

In 2018, the system mistakenly informed the people of Hawaii state that "a ballistic missile is coming" due to human error, and in 2019, the system went wrong again and caused panic among locals. But this time, it failed to warn people effectively, and the state attorney has vowed to investigate, Xinhua reported on Tuesday.

The Washington Post reported on Saturday that "Residents of Lahaina, the historic former Hawaiian capital that became an inferno," have criticized what they called inadequate warnings of the sudden firestorm and said they are now being left to fend for themselves in its wake.

"I feel like the citizens of this island have been called upon, maybe by a higher power, to actually help because no one else is helping," said Kai Lenny, a professional surfer, according to the Washington Post.

Many Chinese netizens do not understand why the powerful US military force can allow Americans to feel helpless during the disaster when the Pacific Fleet is right there in Hawaii. A comment said "why don't US military troops go to rescue their people in the disaster area?" In China, the military, police and other professional rescue forces will respond immediately to rescue people every time when disasters occur in any location in China.

Lü Xiang, an expert on US studies and a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times that the response of the US military or national guards this time has no comparison to their fast reaction after the Capitol Hill attack in 2021, and this means the decision makers of the country did not pay enough attention to this disaster that caused huge casualties. 

"From the early warning system to the response after the disaster, the performance of the US government this time just makes the US look unlike a developed country," Lü said.

US President Joe Biden was in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, over the weekend and was asked during a bike ride on Sunday morning whether he would go to Maui to assess the devastation. He replied, "We're looking at it." After a visit to the beach later that day, Biden was asked about the rising death toll on the island and replied, "No comment," according to US media.

The comment sparked a backlash, Fox News reported, including by former Hawaii state representative Mark Kaniela Ing, a Democrat who now serves as national director of the Green New Deal Network. "I campaigned for you. Now, when I lose dozens of my friends, family, and neighbors. This?" Kaniela Ing wrote in a now-deleted post.

Kaniela Ing told Fox News Digital in a phone interview Monday that he found Biden's remark "shocking" and out of character.

This kind of disaster is closely related to climate change but the Biden administration shows limited sincerity in restoring international cooperation to handle climate change issues, said analysts, adding that a disaster like the Hawaii wildfires has not received enough attention from mainstream US media, and people from other states do not seem to care much what is happening in Hawaii.

Lü said "when I open the websites or apps of US mainstream media like The New York Times and CNN, the headline story today is about [former president] Donald Trump's legal issues, and other prominent news stories are about Ukraine, but the reports about the most deadly wildfire in more than a century in the US, while the death toll is keep updating, can only be found at the bottom."

The worst flood that hit the Haihe River Basin in North China since 1963 has exposed  weaknesses in monitoring and forecasting capabilities for floods, said China's Ministry of Water Resources (MWR) on Monday.

From July 28 to August 1, some 22 rivers in the basin experienced above-warning level flooding, and eight rivers reported the largest floods ever recorded, said MWR officials at a news conference. The disaster has caused 61 deaths, and millions of people were impacted. 

At present, the water levels in active flood storage and retention areas within the basin are gradually retreating and residents are gradually returning home, officials said.

Liu Weiping, a vice minister of the MWR, said reservoirs in the region have played a key role. Eighty-four large and medium-sized reservoirs were mobilized to intercept 2.85 billion cubic meters of floodwater, while the comprehensive role of the basin's flood control system was fully utilized to minimize the impact and losses caused by the floods.

These reservoirs have prevented 500,000 hectares of farmland in 24 townships from being flooded, said Liu. More than 4.6 million people would have been evacuated if not for the reservoirs.

Although the flood control system has played an important role in combating this flooding in the Haihe River Basin, which is the major water system with an area of about 320,600 square kilometers in North China,  many loopholes have been exposed, said MWR officials. 

The nation is still relatively weak in terms of monitoring and forecasting floods, said Zhang Xiangwei, an official from the Department of Planning and Programming of the MWR.

Weaknesses include insufficient flood storage capacity in some the rivers, insufficient flood capacity to meet requirements, lagging behind in the construction of stagnant flood storage areas and inadequate flood entry and exit facilities, Zhang said.

These weaknesses are particularly evident in the forecast of small river floods, which needs to be further improved both in meteorological and hydrological terms, Ma Jun, director of the Beijing-based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, told the Global Times on Monday.

Ma noted that the disruption of the network has led to transmission interruptions at some monitoring stations, which had a great impact on accurately predicting the trend of floods.

Given these weaknesses, Zhang said that the MWR will further strengthen the integrated management of the Haihe River Basin in collaboration with relevant departments and local authorities.

Ma called for a reassessment of the risk of meteorological disasters such as torrential rain and flash floods in the context of climate change, as well as corresponding urban planning.

In response to the floods in the Haihe River Basin, the MWR has strengthened technical guidance and provided support for post-disaster reconstruction. A total of 26 working groups and expert teams have been dispatched to provide targeted guidance of flood prevention and risk management efforts.

Moreover, China's Ministry of Finance has allocated 1.15 billion yuan ($157.35 million) to support the timely repair of water conservancy facilities in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region. 

Additionally, 1.5 billion yuan for compensation in flood storage and detention areas has been allocated to support the affected areas and people in quickly restoring production and their livelihoods, said Liu.

According to media reports, the post-disaster reconstruction in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region is being carried out in an orderly manner. Beijing's Mentougou district is accelerating cleaning of the Yongding River to ensure subsequent rainfall flood flow is at safe levels, said Zhang Hewei, an official from the Mentougou district government.

A total of 16 teams from institutes of city planning and design have been sent to the Mentougou district to analyze the occurrence of geological disasters and the situation in terms of risk prevention and control. 

Some 15,000 grassroots officials and agricultural technicians in Hebei have been organized to assist farmers in post-disaster production recovery, as well as 12 robotic vehicles in the city of Zhuozhou have been deployed for underground garage dredging, according to media reports.

Noting that the flood season is still ongoing, with severe and complicated floods and droughts still expected, Liu said the ministry will continue to strengthen all prevention measures.

China’s security ministry lashed out against a new US Intelligence Strategy on Monday by exposing four dangerous, ill-suited and parasitic modes of thinking emerging from the US intelligence community – Cold War mentality of targeting China, zero-sum thinking, hegemonic thinking and confrontational thinking. 

The Ministry of State Security (MSS) said in a statement that the policy orientation set by the US National Intelligence Strategy is aimed at deterring China and is merely a new iteration of the “China threat theory,” also a clear declaration of the US intelligence community to open an era of “targeting China.”  

The new US National Intelligence Strategy, unveiled on August 10, aims to better prepare the US for a range of threats that are no longer limited to traditional nation-state competitors such as China and Russia or terrorist groups such as al-Qaida and the Islamic State group, VOA reported.

China’s security ministry in the statement advised the US intelligence community to take a sober approach toward the present-day China and the international landscape. Immersing itself in backward and misguided notions will only result in self-inflicted harm and undermine its own interests, the ministry warned. 

The MSS firstly revealed the Cold War mentality behind the US National Intelligence Strategy, saying though it has been over 30 years since the Cold War has been ended , some individuals in the US intelligence community have only adapted to the new multipolar world physically, while their mindset remains stuck in the bipolar confrontation of the Cold War era. 

They have been constantly searching for a “perfect adversary” to showcase their skills, treating China as a “toolbox” to leverage their own value domestically and as a scapegoat for disguising security challenges internationally. 

From establishing the “China Mission Center” to advocating for the reconstruction of intelligence networks in China, from launching “witch-hunt operations” against Chinese scholars to pressuring countries to “decouple” from China, the US intelligence agencies have skillfully employed strategies from the Cold War era, erecting a new “Iron Curtain” to hinder global prosperity and development, the ministry wrote in a statement. 

The ministry pointed out that the zero-sum thinking over “absolute security” is apparent in its National Intelligence Strategy, which lists numerous new security threats but fails to propose effective strategies for deepening international security cooperation. 

Pursuing its own security while neglecting common security of the world countries and viewing competition and cooperation among nations as a simple zero-sum game, this is where the entrenched malady of the “US security concept” persists, the MSS said. 

Even in the 21st century, the US continues to follow the law of the jungle, where only one side can win at the expense of others. This approach only leads countries into a “prisoner’s dilemma” of mutual distrust and ultimately makes the US itself less secure. “America First” has become the root cause of turmoil and suffering in the world, the ministry said. 

As the sole superpower, imposing its own will on the world is an inherent logic of American hegemony. Citing “American values” and referring to the “international security order,” the US only aims to uphold the “US-centered international order,” the ministry pointed out. 

As early as World War II, the Office of Strategic Services (a predecessor to the CIA) proposed implementing propaganda and subversive actions to shape the post-war world order. In 1948, the CIA launched the “Operation Gladio” and interfered in elections in Italy. In 1953, the CIA carried out the “Operation Ajax” to overthrow the Mossadegh government in Iran, the MSS said. 

Starting in 2003, a series of “color revolutions” occurred in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, with the US intelligence department being regarded as important behind-the-scenes actors, it added. 

The ability to shape security in line with global hegemony is a persistent goal that the US has been pursuing, however, its unilateralism and egotism are triggering increasingly strong criticism and opposition from the international community, the security ministry said. 

Placing importance on leveraging allies is the biggest difference that the Biden administration self-proclaims as part of its foreign policy compared to the Trump administration. But the truth is that the so-called “alliances and partnerships” is essentially the act of coercing other countries to take sides and firmly binding them to the US intelligence apparatus. 

The security ministry referenced the Russia-Ukraine conflict, to solidify anti Russia alliance, the US intelligence community has been hyping up over on the European energy supply chain and the Nord Stream pipeline issue remains shrouded in mystery to this day.

While in the Asia-Pacific region, the US has aggressively promoted the “Indo-Pacific strategy” and rallied the “Five Eyes alliance,” “Quad mechanism,” and “trilateral security partnerships” to create intelligence cliques, pressuring countries to join in an anti-China chorus, the ministry stated. 

However, being an intelligence ally of the US not only requires willingly acting as a “pawn” but also accepting the meticulous “special care” of the “big brother’ at all times, the ministry said.

Citing media reports, the ministry pointed out that the US National Security Agency has long monitored the heads of state and government of allied nations, also established technical eavesdropping bases covering neighboring countries in a certain European country, and even demanded the country’s intelligence agency assist the US in monitoring its own government officials. 

Such absurd demands can only come from a “peculiar ally” like the US, the ministry added. 

Radiation from the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant contaminates most Japanese seafood at low levels, researchers estimate February 29 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

For aquatic foods, data on lingering concentrations of cesium is limited in terms of the number of species sampled and the levels that surveys can even detect. To fill in the blanks, a team of researchers in Japan drew from survey measurements from April 2011 to September 2015 and devised a way to predict cesium contamination in different aquatic species across Japan.

The analysis provides mixed news: Overall, cesium contamination is pretty low. But, some species retain higher levels than others. Larger fish near the top of the food web tended to have the highest levels of contamination. The researchers predict that such factors put some wild freshwater species like the whitespotted char (Salvelinus leucomaenis leucomaenis) and the Japanese eel (Anguilla japonica) at higher risk for contamination.

This could be embarrassing for rattlesnakes and other vipers: Their long-standing reputation as the snakes with the fastest strikes on Earth just got bit by the common Texas rat snake.

In lab tests biting a stuffed glove, Western rattlesnakes averaged speeds of 2.95 meters per second and Western cottonmouths averaged 2.98 m/s, says functional morphologist David Penning of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. But Texas rat snakes, familiar farmyard chasers of pest rodents, averaged 2.67 m/s. Statistically that’s a three-way tie, Penning and his colleagues report March 16 in Biology Letters.

Strikes were over quickly but all species subjected their brains to impressive acceleration. Rat snakes accelerated their head more on average (190 meters per second2)
than what a fighter pilot experiences when taking off from an aircraft carrier (27 to 49 m/s 2 ).
Penning’s point is not that vipers are slow, but that other snakes also evolved a lightning strike. “They have to eat too,” he says. Startled mammals have been clocked activating a muscle in as little as 14 to 151 milliseconds. Snakes in Penning’s tests reached their targets in 50 to 90 milliseconds, literally before some creatures could move a muscle. And if you blink — for a human average of 220 milleseconds — you miss it all.

Once every 69 years, a nearby star dramatically dims for about three and a half years during the longest known stellar eclipse in our galaxy.

The star, called TYC 2505-672-1, is a red giant, about 10,000 light-years away in the constellation Leo Minor. The star is orbited by a dim, hot companion star that appears to be enveloped by a thick cloud of dust roughly one to three times as wide as Earth’s orbit. The cloud, reported in an upcoming Astronomical Journal, blocks much of the red star’s light from reaching Earth for a good long time.

Researchers already knew that TYC 2505-672-1 had drastically faded recently. But astronomer Joseph Rodriguez of Vanderbilt University in Nashville and colleagues scoured data from many telescopes — including a Harvard University photograph archive dating back to 1890 — and found that the starlight dipped and rebounded not only between 2011 and 2015 but also in the 1940s. The previous eclipse record holder was Epsilon Aurigae, a star 2,000 light-years away that dims for about 24 months every 27 years.

Editor’s Note: This story was updated on April 27, 2016, to correct distances and the name of the previous eclipse record holder.

NEW YORK — Cells in a brain structure known as the hippocampus are known to be cartographers, drawing mental maps of physical space. But new studies show that this seahorse-shaped hook of neural tissue can also keep track of social space, auditory space and even time, deftly mapping these various types of information into their proper places.

“The hippocampus is an organizer,” says neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum of Boston University.

Neuroscientist Rita Tavares described details of one of these new maps April 2 at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. Brain scans had previously revealed that activity in the hippocampus was linked to movement through social space. In an experiment reported last year in Neuron, people went on a virtual quest to find a house and job by interacting with a cast of characters. Through these social interactions, the participants formed opinions about how much power each character held, and how kindly they felt toward him or her. These judgments put each character in a position on a “social space” map. Activity in the hippocampus was related to this social mapmaking, Tavares and colleagues found.
It turns out that this social map depends on the traits of the person who is drawing it, says Tavares, of Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. People with more social anxiety tended to give more power to characters they interacted with. What’s more, these people’s social space maps were smaller overall, suggesting that they explored social space less, Tavares says. Tying these behavioral traits to the hippocampus may lead to a greater understanding of social behavior — and how this social mapping may go awry in psychiatric conditions, Tavares said.

The work emphasizes that the hippocampus is not just a mapper of space, Tavares says. Instead, it is a mapper of relationships. “It’s relational learning,” she says. “It’s everything in perspective.”

Other research, discussed at a meeting in February, revealed a role for the hippocampus in building a very different sort of map — a map of sounds. Stationary rats were trained to “move” through a soundscape of different tones, pushing a joystick to change the sounds to reach the sweet spot — the target tone. As the rats navigated this auditory world, nerve cells in their hippocampus were active in a way that formed a map, Princeton University neuroscientist Dmitriy Aronov reported in Salt Lake City at the annual Computational and Systems Neuroscience meeting.

Cells in the hippocampus can also map time, keeping count as seconds tick by, Eichenbaum has found (SN: 12/12/15, p. 12). All of these types of information are quite different, but Eichenbaum argues that they can all be thought of as memories — another mental arena in which the hippocampus plays an important role. Organizing these memories into a sensible structure may be the big-picture job description of the hippocampus, he says. “What’s being tapped in all of these studies is that we are looking at a framework, whether it’s a physical spatial framework, a social space framework, a pitch framework, or a time framework,” Eichenbaum says.

In narrow blood vessels, tumor cells go marching one by one.

By unfolding into a cellular chain, clusters of cancer cells can slide through capillary tubes less than 10 micrometers wide, Sam Au of Harvard Medical School and colleagues report April 18 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The cells pass through the tubes in single file, each squeezing into an oblong shape and clinging to a neighbor or two. After arriving in roomier quarters, the cells regroup into round clumps, the scientists report.
Clumps of cancer cells that break off tumors and travel through the bloodstream to new sites in the body are known to spread cancer more efficiently than single cells. Many scientists believed, though, that hefty cell clusters were unable to squeeze through the body’s narrowest blood vessels.

Experiments showed that human breast and prostate cancer cells used this single-file strategy to travel through lab-made tubes, human cell‒lined tubes and the blood vessels of live zebrafish. These results could offer insights into ways to foil cancer’s spread.

Fountains of gas from a handful of remote galaxies all seem to be pointing in roughly the same direction, a new study reports. If the result holds up, it puts a new twist on how galaxies and black holes arise from the larger cosmic web, though some researchers worry that the alignment might just be a chance occurrence.

Out of a group of 64 galaxies that are blasting out radio waves, about a dozen are spewing jets of gas that are roughly aligned with one another, astronomers report in the June 11 Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters. The galactic geysers are powered by supermassive black holes whose magnetic fields launch some infalling debris into intergalactic space. If the geysers are aligned, that means the black holes are all spinning in the same direction. And that means these galaxies, which are spread over roughly a hundred million light-years, might all have been influenced by the larger scaffolding from which they formed.
“Naively we expect that shouldn’t happen,” says Ryan Hickox, an astrophysicist at Dartmouth College who was not involved with this study. Black holes, even supermassive ones, are minuscule compared with filaments of galaxies that can span hundreds of millions of light-years. These filaments are the threads along which most matter in the universe congregates, branching through space like a cosmic spider web. Though galaxies live there, they are thought to form and develop independently of what the filaments are doing. A twisting filament should have no influence over what’s happening around one of its resident black holes.

And yet that’s the explanation favored by study lead Russ Taylor, an astrophysicist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. “What we’re seeing is the result of a very large region in the early universe spinning coherently in the same direction,” he says. If that’s true, it adds a “new wrinkle to explain how large-scale structure formed.”

Taylor and colleagues found the apparent alignment while probing a patch of sky in the constellation Draco with the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope in India. They don’t know the distances to the galaxies, but all seem to sit near a galactic supercluster whose light takes about 7.4 billion years to reach Earth — just over half the age of the universe.

Other researchers using different techniques have previously reported similar alignments among another set of galaxies (SN: 12/27/14, p. 6). Both studies, though, relied on a small number of galaxies, which means the alignment might not be statistically significant.

“If an alignment like this exists, it’s very interesting,” says astrophysicist Michael DiPompeo, also at Dartmouth. “But I’m not super convinced that it’s really there.” While Taylor and colleagues argue that the alignment is not a statistical fluke, DiPompeo did his own calculations that suggest otherwise. He simulated observations of 64 randomly oriented galaxy jets — the computer equivalent of repeatedly dropping a bunch of toothpicks on a table and noting where each was pointed. “I could pretty regularly get patterns that look like this,” he says.
It’s also hard to imagine how such an alignment, if it was present as the galaxies formed, could persist for billion of years, he says. “It’s not like [galaxies] form in the early universe and then just sit there blasting these jets.” Galaxies grow by colliding with other galaxies, which can change how the galaxies and their central black holes rotate.

Both DiPompeo and Hickox say it’s worth probing other galactic gatherings, though, before dismissing these alignments as a coincidence. If similar orientations appear in many galaxy clusters, then the researchers could be on to something. Hickox would also like to see distances to these galaxies. If it turns out the galaxies sit at wildly varying distances from Earth, he says, then the alignment is less likely to be real.

Taylor hopes to do just that. Colleagues are planning observations at other telescopes that will let them determine how far away these galaxies are. And Taylor is gearing up for a more thorough investigation over a much larger patch of sky with a new radio observatory in South Africa called MeerKAT, which should be ready for operation later this year.

In a bit of Irish luck, archaeologists have found evidence of the Emerald Isle’s earliest known humans. A brown bear’s kneecap excavated in 1903, featuring stone tool incisions, pushes back the date that humans set foot in Ireland by as many as 2,500 years.

Radiocarbon dating at two independent labs places the bone’s age between about 12,800 and 12,600 years old, say Marion Dowd of the Institute of Technology, Sligo in Ireland and Ruth Carden of the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin. Melting glaciers and milder temperatures in northwestern Europe at that time made it easier for humans to reach Ireland by boat to hunt game, at least for several weeks at a time, the researchers propose in the May 1 Quaternary Science Reviews.
Until now, the oldest signs of people on Ireland came from a hunter-gatherer camp dating to about 10,290 years ago.

Carden discovered the brown bear’s kneecap while studying bones that had been packed away in boxes in the 1920s, after the bones’ 1903 discovery at Ireland’s Alice and Gwendoline Cave.