Wandering Adventure Party

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/45810913

Cows are not usually credited with thinking on the hoof. They eat, they chew, they stand in fields performing an activity that may look like contemplation but is generally written off as digestion.

They are not typically thought to plan, let alone solve problems. A new study suggests we may have underestimated them.

The research describes what experts claim is the first documented case of flexible, multi-purpose tool use in cattle, observed in a cow named Veronika.

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Veronika is a Swiss brown cow kept not for milk or meat but as a pet by Witgar Wiegele, an organic farmer and baker in Austria. More than a decade ago he noticed her using a long-handled brush, holding it in her mouth to scratch awkward parts of her body.

When video footage of this behaviour reached Alice Auersperg, a cognitive biologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, it struck her as unusual, largely because Veronika used the brush in different ways to scratch different parts of her body.

“It was immediately clear that this was not accidental,” Auersperg said. “This was a meaningful example of tool use in a species that is rarely considered from a cognitive perspective.”

Auersperg and her colleague Antonio Osuna-Mascaró conducted a series of trials. They placed a long-handled brush on the ground and recorded how Veronika used it.

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When scratching broad, thick-skinned regions such as her back or rump, Veronika tended to use the bristled end, applying it with sweeping, forceful movements. When targeting softer, more sensitive areas of her lower body, she switched to using the handle to scratch herself, moving more slowly.

Because Veronika directs tools at her own body, researchers describe this as egocentric tool use, which is usually regarded as less complex than tool use aimed at external objects. Even so, flexible, multi-purpose use of a single tool is rare. Outside humans, it has previously been demonstrated convincingly only in chimpanzees, the researchers say in their paper.

They wrote in a study published in the journal Current Biology that the findings “invite a reassessment of livestock cognition”.

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The researchers suspect that Veronika’s life circumstances have played a role in the emergence of this behaviour. Most cows do not reach her age and they are rarely given the opportunity to interact with a variety of potentially useful objects.

Her long lifespan, daily contact with humans, and access to a rich physical landscape probably created favorable conditions, they said. If that is true, there may be nothing very exceptional about Veronika, other than the opportunities she has been given to exercise her brain.

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Archive link

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/41671286

Archived version

The European Commission is preparing to block Chinese institutions from significant portions of its €95.5 billion ($110 billion) Horizon Europe research program, citing intellectual property risks and links between Chinese universities and Beijing’s military.

A draft document for the Horizon Europe “main” work program for 2026/2027 proposes excluding Chinese entities from three of the six research areas: civil security and society; health; and digital, industry and space technologies.

The proposals have not yet been adopted or endorsed by the European Commission, although they are clearly being considered.

The restrictions respond to lack of progress on an EU-China cooperation roadmap established at the 2019 Innovation Cooperation Dialogue. The Commission points to persistent concerns about protecting trade secrets and potential transfer of knowledge to China’s military, which it says are “supported rather than deterred” by Beijing’s policies.

“In view of the persistent lack of progress in the discussions on the Roadmap and the substantive concerns in relation to the undesired transfer of IP to China supported by both legislative and policy initiatives, cooperation involving entities established in China needs to be calibrated accordingly,” it states.

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cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/44213958

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/40624764

The European Commission and Japan have successfully concluded negotiations on Japan’s association to Horizon Europe, the EU’s flagship €93.5 billion research and innovation funding programme. The agreement, expected to be signed in 2026, represents the closest form of collaboration offered by the EU to global partners in this field. It will enable Japanese researchers to lead and coordinate their own research and innovation projects under the programme, to apply and receive funding, and to seek closer collaboration with partners in the EU and other associated countries.

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China wanted to outbuild Europe and the United States by launching the Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC), a colossal ring that would dwarf CERN’s famous Large Hadron Collider under the fields near Geneva. The idea was simple to state and insanely hard to realize: construct the biggest, cleanest “Higgs factory” on Earth, then follow it with a proton-proton collider that would push deeper into the unknown. Physicists around the world quietly redid their career plans around that dream.

Then came the bill. As cost estimates climbed into the multi‑billion, then tens‑of‑billions range, the tone in official Chinese statements cooled. Internal debates surfaced about whether a giant collider delivered enough value compared to quantum computing, AI, fusion, or simply shoring up the economy. The CEPC, once floated as a flagship national prestige project, slipped into a diplomatic grey zone. No cancellation speech, no ribbon‑cutting either — just delay, silence, recalibration. For a project built on speed and ambition, this slow fade spoke louder than any press conference.

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Scientists in China like to tell the story of how the original CEPC concept emerged from small, late‑night workshops in 2012 and 2013. Back then, the Higgs boson had just been confirmed at CERN, and the feeling worldwide was that the next step should be bolder, cleaner, bigger. In those early talks, the question wasn’t if China could lead, but how fast.

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That dream met a harsher reality after 2015, when Chinese growth slowed and the global mood turned more anxious. Giant infrastructure projects used to be easy political wins; you poured concrete, took photos, claimed progress. A collider is different. You bury billions in the ground and wait years for results the public can’t touch or hold. As budgets tightened and geopolitical tensions escalated, the collider’s price tag started to look less like a badge of leadership and more like a risky bet.

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There was never a single dramatic moment where a Chinese official walked to a podium and killed the CEPC on live television. Instead, the project drifted into the limbo where grand plans quietly go to sleep. Public roadmaps became vaguer. Key milestones slid into “future phases.” Teams that had spent a decade sharpening designs found themselves repackaging those same plans as “long-term options.” It’s the modern way of cancelling something without admitting defeat. You don’t say “never”. You say “not now”. And you let the silence do the work.

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At the heart of the decision is a brutally simple trade‑off: the cost per additional unit of knowledge. Pushing beyond the energies of the LHC doesn’t just require a slightly bigger ring. It demands new magnets, new materials, new cooling systems, and a small army of highly specialized engineers.

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When you’re a global superpower juggling aging populations, regional inequality, and a turbulent tech war, a multi‑decade moonshot suddenly looks like a luxury.

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There’s another layer, more subtle and just as real: prestige fatigue. For two decades, China has stacked up megaprojects — record‑breaking bridges, high‑speed rail, massive dams, space stations. A collider is different precisely because its victory is invisible to most citizens. No one rides a particle beam to work. And while discovering a new particle might one day change everything, it’s hard to sell that promise on a TV news segment between housing prices and local weather.

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Web archive link

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China’s leadership is moving further away from its promises, despite Xi [Jinping]’s claims of ostensible progress, asserting that Chinese women are now “participating in the entire process of national and social governance with unprecedented confidence and vigor,” and positioning them as “protagonists.” The clearest testament to this regression lies in Xi’s addresses to the All-China Women’s Federation (ACWF) – the official state women’s organization under the Communist Party – in 2013, 2018, and 2023. Across these speeches, Xi consistently advanced patriarchal narratives that cast women primarily as caretakers and moral anchors within the family. Yet his 2023 address marked a further step, urging the cultivation of “a new type of marriage and parenting culture” and the promotion of childbirth, effectively marginalizing women’s professional work and silencing their agency beyond domestic and reproductive roles.

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Women in STEM are celebrated as symbols of national progress [in China], yet this recognition often amounts to ideological instrumentalization. They are valued primarily as a labor force to drive national development goals and to project an image of modernity, progress, and national strength, rather than as fully empowered agents in their own right. Simultaneously, this exists in stark tension with the state’s enduring patriarchal and pro-natalist policies, driven by demographic concerns, which continue to frame women primarily as reproducers and custodians of family life.

This paradox is also exposed by the data which reveals that beneath the state’s celebration of women’s purported achievements in science and technology lies a persistent pattern of underrepresentation, pay disparities, and barriers that limit advancement. Official figures show that nearly 40 million women are employed in science and technology, making up 45.8 percent of China’s STEM workforce. Yet fewer than three million work in research and development.

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In 2022–23, women accounted for 63 percent of all new university entrants, but in elite institutions and STEM-focused majors, male dominance quickly reasserts itself. At the prestigious C9 universities (China’s top tier), female undergraduates make up only 37.7 percent, well below the national average. Disciplinary divides are even starker: physics departments in some universities record male-to-female ratios of 19:1, while women comprise only 25–30 percent of students in computer science and electronic engineering.

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Women also face systemic disadvantages in funding and visibility. They are underrepresented on peer review panels and high-level selection committees, reducing their chances of securing grants. Although women make up roughly half of university instructors, they occupy only one-third of master’s advisor roles and fewer than 17 percent of doctoral advisor positions. Pay disparities are substantial: across sectors and education levels, women earn on average only 71.6 percent of what men do. In high-prestige publishing, the imbalance is also stark: in 2023, only five of 101 corresponding authors with Chinese affiliations in “Nature” were women, highlighting their scarcity in global scientific leadership.

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Yet the challenges women face in STEM are not isolated – they reflect a longer history of gendered constraints and feminist activism in China. As early as the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Western feminism, rooted in liberal ideals of individual rights and autonomy, sought to affirm women as rational citizens entitled to legal and political recognition. Chinese feminism, by contrast, emerged in the context of national modernization and liberation from feudalism and imperialism. Following 1949, Mao Zedong’s famous dictum that “women hold up half the sky” reframed empowerment as a collective contribution to socialist nation-building rather than a pursuit of individual rights.

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