An aerial view of Baijitan National Desert Park in Lingwu county, Ningxia Hui autonomous region. [Photo/Xinhua] China will continue to boost cooperation in prevention and control of desertification with other nations, especially with those involved in the Belt and Road, through sharing technology, facilities and professional training, a senior official said on Tuesday. Beijing is encouraging the application of the secretariat of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification for project funding from the China South-South Cooperation Fund, according to Zhang Jianlong, head of the National Forestry and Grassland Administration. The project aims to prevent and control desertification and its negative effects, such as severe sandstorms that cause problems along transportation arteries in eight countries in Central Asia and Africa, Zhang said. Without giving the names of the countries, he said the investment under discussion is about $2 million. Zhang spoke at the intersession meeting of 13th session of the Conference of the Parties to the UNCCD in Guiyang, Guizhou province, which started Tuesday. Part of the fund will be used to plant trees and grasses along transportation arteries for sand control, said Sun Guoji, director of the department of combating desertification with the National Forestry and Grassland Administration. Sun, speaking on the sidelines of the meeting, declined to give more details, saying the project is still under discussion. Zhang said strengthening policy communication, sharing experiences and carrying out practical cooperation is needed in order to achieve the UN's Sustainable Development Goal of achieving land degradation neutrality by 2030. The goal means that the amount and quality of land would remain stable or increase. In the future, more effective and innovative mechanisms of cooperation will be taken to face challenges, he said. Desertification is a challenge for many countries and regions. In 1994, the General Assembly of the UN adopted its convention to fight the phenomenon. China has made great efforts and achieved remarkable results in the control of desertification in recent decades, officials said. Desert areas in China have shrunk by 2,424 square kilometers annually during the past decade, the administration said. Ibrahim Thiaw, UNCCD's executive secretary, praised China's achievements on Tuesday, especially in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region and Guizhou province, adding that he hoped China would continue to share its experiences and practices globally. A knowledge management center was established by the UNCCD secretariat and the Ningxia Hui autonomous region's forestry and grassland bureau during the meeting on Tuesday in order to share technologies and train professionals from developing countries. The center will be based in Yinchuan, Ningxia. custom bar braceletcustom sports braceletscustom logo wristbandsde securite pour personne ageeembossed wristbandscolorfilled wristbandsembossed printed wristbandsdual layer wristbands
(From left) Mr Duan Xin, Dr Lin Xudong, Dr Shi Peng, Professor Cheng Shuk Han and Dr Wang Xin. [Photo/City University of Hong Kong] HONG KONG - A research team led by the City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has developed a new platform to enhance the prediction of effectiveness of medicines treating brain diseases, the university told reporter on Monday. The result came after five years of collaboration between CityU's Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) and Department of Biomedical Sciences (BMS), and Harvard Medical School, the United States, aiming to provide a platform to predict compounds that have the potential to be developed into new drugs to treat brain diseases. The research team generated the maps from the brains of thousands of zebrafish larvae, each treated with a clinically used CNS drug. The maps showed the corresponding brain regions that reacted to those drugs. By employing machine learning strategy, the team predicted that 30 out of those 121 new compounds had anti-seizure properties. To validate the prediction, the research team randomly chose 14 from the 30 potential anti-seizure compounds to perform behavioral tests with induced seizure zebrafishes. The result showed that 7 out of 14 compounds were able to reduce the seizures of the zebrafish without causing any sedative effects, implying a prediction accuracy of around 50 percent. Shi Peng, Associate Professor of CityU's BME, said that the team used robotics, microfluidics and hydrodynamic force to trap and orient an awake zebrafish automatically in 20 seconds, which allowed the imaging for many zebrafishes to be carried out in one go. More importantly, our platform can immobilize the fish without anaesthesia, thus avoiding interference, he added. With this high-speed in vivo drug screening system combined with machine learning, Shi said that a shortcut is provided to help identify compounds with significantly higher therapeutic potentials for further development, hence speed up the drug development and reduce the failure rate in the process. The research is published in the scientific journal Nature Communications.
