China should be praised for achieving the most rapid poverty reduction in history. But most of this reduction was achieved in two waves – the first with the household responsibility system in the 1978 to 1985 period and the second, related to labor-intensive manufactures and exports and rural-urban migration, in the 1990 to 1996 period.

pollutionAir pollution has become a serious problem in China. Of the 30 most air-polluted cities in the world, 20 are in China. The air pollution results from the combination of (1) coal use for power, industry, and home heating and (2) growing motorization.

EnergyEnergy is another important factor in China’s development equation. While China is rich in coal, it appears so far to be scarce in oil and natural gas, which are important fuels for some aspects of industrialization and development. Over the past 15 years China oil imports have been growing rapidly, and it has emerged as the second largest importer behind the U.S. It is projected to emerge as the largest importer. Given the supply situation in the world and the fact that much oil and gas come from politically unstable countries, this is clearly a risk factor for the country’s future.

China’s recent growth has also involved use of natural resources – water, energy, and clean air – at a rate that is not sustainable. Again, improving efficiency of natural resources use is good for China and good for the global environment. Finally, China’s rapid growth in the past decade has produced less employment, poverty reduction, and social improvement than it could have.

China has been the most successful developing country over the past two decades, growing rapidly and achieving the fastest poverty reduction in history. While there are good reasons to think that China could continue to grow rapidly for two more decades, the country also faces some serious challenges.

How Did Cooperative Behavior Evolve? -- Pennisi 309 (5731): 93 -- Science: "Modern researchers have discovered that a good memory is a prerequisite: It seems reciprocity is practiced only by organisms that can keep track of those who are helpful and those who are not. Humans have a great memory for faces and thus can maintain lifelong good--or hard--feelings toward people they don't see for years. Most other species exhibit reciprocity only over very short time scales, if at all."

How Did Cooperative Behavior Evolve? -- Pennisi 309 (5731): 93 -- Science: "Generosity is pervasive among humans. Indeed, some anthropologists argue that the evolution of the tendency to trust one's relatives and neighbors helped humans become Earth's dominant vertebrate: The ability to work together provided our early ancestors more food, better protection, and better childcare, which in turn improved reproductive success."

How Are Memories Stored and Retrieved? -- Miller 309 (5731): 92 -- Science: " A key insight from this work has been that short-term memory (lasting minutes) involves chemical modifications that strengthen existing connections, called synapses, between neurons, whereas long-term memory (lasting days or weeks) requires protein synthesis and probably the construction of new synapses."

What Genetic Changes Made Us Uniquely Human? -- Culotta 309 (5731): 91 -- Science: "With the human genome in hand and primate genome data beginning to pour in, we are entering an era in which it may become possible to pinpoint the genetic changes that help separate us from our closest relatives. A rough draft of the chimp sequence has already been released, and a more detailed version is expected soon. The genome of the macaque is nearly complete, the orangutan is under way, and the marmoset was recently approved. All these will help reveal the ancestral genotype at key places on the primate tree."

What Determines Species Diversity? -- Pennisi 309 (5731): 90 -- Science: "The challenge is daunting. Baseline data are poor, for example: We don't yet know how many plant and animal species there are on Earth, and researchers can't even begin to predict the numbers and kinds of organisms that make up the microbial world. Researchers probing the evolution of, and limits to, diversity also lack a standardized time scale because evolution takes place over periods lasting from days to millions of years. Moreover, there can be almost as much variation within a species as between two closely related ones. Nor is it clear what genetic changes will result in a new species and what their true influence on speciation is."

What Determines Species Diversity? -- Pennisi 309 (5731): 90 -- Science: "In some places and some groups, hundreds of species exist, whereas in others, very few have evolved; the tropics, for example, are a complex paradise compared to higher latitudes. Biologists are striving to understand why. The interplay between environment and living organisms and between the organisms themselves play key roles in encouraging or discouraging diversity, as do human disturbances, predator-prey relationships, and other food web connections. But exactly how these and other forces work together to shape diversity is largely a mystery."

How and Where Did Life on Earth Arise? -- Zimmer 309 (5731): 89 -- Science: "Working backward, paleontologists have found fossils of microbes dating back at least 3.4 billion years. Chemical analysis of even older rocks suggests that photosynthetic organisms were already well established on Earth by 3.7 billion years ago. Researchers suspect that the organisms that left these traces shared the same basic traits found in all life today. All free-living organisms encode genetic information in DNA and catalyze chemical reactions using proteins. Because DNA and proteins depend so intimately on each other for their survival, it's hard to imagine one of them having evolved first. But it's just as implausible for them to have emerged simultaneously out of a prebiotic soup."

How Can a Skin Cell Become a Nerve Cell? -- Vogel 309 (5731): 85 -- Science: "Scientists are just beginning to understand how cues interact to guide a cell toward its final destiny. Decades of work in developmental biology have provided a start: Biologists have used mutant frogs, flies, mice, chicks, and fish to identify some of the main genes that control a developing cell's decision to become a bone cell or a muscle cell. But observing what goes wrong when a gene is missing is easier than learning to orchestrate differentiation in a culture dish. Understanding how the roughly 25,000 human genes work together to form tissues--and tweaking the right ones to guide an immature cell's development--will keep researchers occupied for decades. If they succeed, however, the result will be worth far more than its weight in gold."

How Can a Skin Cell Become a Nerve Cell? -- Vogel 309 (5731): 85 -- Science: "What actually happens inside the oocyte to reprogram the nucleus is still a mystery, and scientists have a lot to learn before they can direct a cell's differentiation as smoothly as nature's program of development does every time fertilized egg gives rise to the multiple cell types that make up a live baby."

How Much Can Human Life Span Be Extended? -- Couzin 309 (5731): 83 -- Science: "Then there's the issue of fairness: If antiaging therapies become available, who will receive them? How much will they cost? Individuals may find they can stretch their life spans. But that may be tougher to achieve for whole populations, although many demographers believe that the average life span will continue to climb as it has consistently for decades. If that happens, much of the increase may come from less dramatic strategies, such as heart disease and cancer prevention, that could also make the end of a long life more bearable."

What Is the Biological Basis of Consciousness? -- Miller 309 (5731): 79 -- Science: "Ultimately, scientists would like to understand not just the biological basis of consciousness but also why it exists. What selection pressure led to its development, and how many of our fellow creatures share it? Some researchers suspect that consciousness is not unique to humans, but of course much depends on how the term is defined. Biological markers for consciousness might help settle the matter and shed light on how consciousness develops early in life. Such markers could also inform medical decisions about loved ones who are in an unresponsive state."

What Is the Biological Basis of Consciousness? -- Miller 309 (5731): 79 -- Science: "The discourse on consciousness has been hugely influenced by Ren� Descartes, the French philosopher who in the mid-17th century declared that body and mind are made of different stuff entirely. It must be so, Descartes concluded, because the body exists in both time and space, whereas the mind has no spatial dimension.
Recent scientifically oriented accounts of consciousness generally reject Descartes's solution; most prefer to treat body and mind as different aspects of the same thing. In this view, consciousness emerges from the properties and organization of neurons in the brain. But how? And how can scientists, with their devotion to objective observation and measurement, gain access to the inherently private and subjective realm of consciousness?"

Why Do Humans Have So Few Genes? -- Pennisi 309 (5731): 80 -- Science: "That finding goes a long way toward explaining how so few genes can produce hundreds of thousands of different proteins. But how the transcription machinery decides which parts of a gene to read at any particular time is still largely a mystery."...The same could be said for the mechanisms that determine which genes or suites of genes are turned on or off at particular times and places. Researchers are discovering that each gene needs a supporting cast of hundreds to get its job done. They include proteins that shut down or activate a gene, for example by adding acetyl or methyl groups to the DNA.

Why Do Humans Have So Few Genes? -- Pennisi 309 (5731): 80 -- Science: "When leading biologists were unraveling the sequence of the human genome in the late 1990s, they ran a pool on the number of genes contained in the 3 billion base pairs that make up our DNA. Few bets came close. The conventional wisdom a decade or so ago was that we need about 100,000 genes to carry out the myriad cellular processes that keep us functioning. But it turns out that we have only about 25,000 genes--about the same number as a tiny flowering plant called Arabidopsis and barely more than the worm Caenorhabditis elegans."

CNN.com - Science's greatest questions revealed - Jul 5, 2005: "Genetic issues also command attention. Following the discovery that we have just 25,000 genes -- four times fewer than was originally imagined -- scientists are urged to investigate how so few genes can account for the intricacies of human biology, and to consider the nature of the genetic changes made us human."

Vital Signs Facts: "Firing up the Barbie": As Meat Consumption Rises, More Consumers Demanding Organic, Grass-fed and Humanely-Raised Products: "By 2020, people in industrialized countries will consume 90 kilograms of meat a year�the equivalent of a side of beef, 50 chickens, and one pig. Worldwide meat production continues to grow, with an estimated 258 million tons produced in 2004, a two-percent increase from 2003. Since the 1970s, meat production has more than doubled because of higher demand and the introduction of large-scale production processes. "

Foreign Policy: Your portal to global politics, economics, and ideas: "Two billion people around the world live in vulnerable and insecure states, according to the first annual Failed States Index, produced by FOREIGN POLICY, in collaboration with the Fund for Peace. "

Institutional set-up of global governance.The global economy is going through a major process of restructuring. The power shift towards Asia, most notably China and India, and other emerging economies such as Brazil and South Africa, is not yet reflected\ in the institutional set-up of global governance. The G7/G8 summit arrangements of the leading Western nations do not any longer include all relevant global players, as was the case when this forum was established 30 years ago. Even with the addition of Russia, the G7/G8 is far from representative and suffers from an increasingly apparent legitimacy and efficiency gap.

Good governance is also an issue on the “supply side”However, Feachem (2004) in his capacity as Director of the Global Fund, has noted that it is now becoming increasingly obvious that good governance is also an issue on the “supply side”: competing interests and agencies within the United Nations and multilateral aid system; between different donor governments; and between a plethora of non-governmental organisations, is producing inefficiencies and a lack of coordinatedactivity.

People's Daily Online -- China, Russia call for multilateralism in world affairs: "The international community should completely renounce the mentality of confrontation and alliance; there should be no pursuit of monopoly or domination of world affairs; and countries of the world should not be divided into a leading camp and a subordinate camp, said the joint statement. "

BBC - Ouch! - Features: "Birth 2053
Here in 2053, making babies is different. Really different. Rather than leaving it all to chance, the DNA of embryos is tested at conception, or in the first weeks of pregnancy. Prospective parents are given print-outs of many of the physical and personality characteristics of their potential children. Of course, the scientists warn that these are not definitive guides, only rough estimates. But people still want to know. A whole profession of 'genome interpretation' - a bit like the old astrology - has developed to predict how the genetic make up might affect the future person. It's still a bit controversial: of course, no one disputes the fact that parents should avoid illnesses and impairments in their offspring. After all, children have the right to sue their parents if they fail to take obvious precautions. But the media is full of discussion about the rights and wrongs of choosing personality traits, physiques, or even talents like musical or intellectual ability. "

BBC - Science & Nature - Genes - A Personal Perspective: "Throughout human history, people have influenced what genes their children inherit through their choice of partner. With our new DNA knowledge, we have the potential to screen pregnancies and IVF embryos to avoid the birth of disabled children. These powers of prediction and selection raise difficult dilemmas. It may be appropriate to avoid the birth of a child with a terminal disease, but is it right to use the same technology to avoid the birth of girls? Can we draw a line between this 'designer baby' approach, and allowing those who can afford it to exercise 'consumer choice' over the characteristics of their future children?

If parents can effectively choose the genes of their child, then perhaps they will be increasingly blamed for making the wrong choices. IVF pioneer Bob Edwards has suggested that in future it will be a 'sin' to have a disabled baby. Bio-ethicists suggest that the choices of parents have to be balanced against the rights of a potential child. In our brave new world, your responsibility for your children begins before they do. "

BBC - Science & Nature - Genes - A Personal Perspective: "When it comes to disability, genetics is actually a small part of the picture. Only about 1% of births are affected by congenital abnormality, while about 12% of the UK population are disabled. The idea of reducing the number of people with disability through �genetic cleansing� is flawed. First, we are all genetically damaged and second, there will always be people disabled as a result of accident, disease or the ageing process. "

BBC - Science & Nature - Genes - A Personal Perspective: "Yet the variations - about 1 in every 1300 DNA letters - are what make us individual. Except for identical twins, no one has the very same combination. Our unique genetic endowment, together with our unique life experiences, interact to produce our distinctive and unrepeatable combination of physical and behavioural characteristics. "

BBC - Science & Nature - Genes - A Personal Perspective: "The Human Genome has been described as the 'autobiography of the species', because our combination of 3 billion DNA �letters� is what makes us human. But humans share a lot, in DNA terms, with other species. 51% of our sequence is shared with the humble yeast. 57% is shared with cabbage. And a whopping 98% with the chimpanzee, our nearest relative. Given those similarities, it's clear that the differences between human beings are very minor indeed. "

BBC - Science & Nature - Genes - Life is a Lottery: "It's a lottery that's drawn when the chromosome pairs line up before division. The new egg cells could receive either member of each chromosome pair and the selection is random. That leads to a staggering 8, 388, 608 possible combinations of the different chromosomes. You just don't know which of mum's genes are coming your way.

The shuffling of chromosomes before they are halved in the egg production factory is only half of the story in terms of the shuffling of genes that goes on as they are handed down through families. "

BBC - Science & Nature - Genes - Handing Down Genes: "The night your parents �decided to turn off the television� was the most important of your life. When sperm and egg met, a brand new cell was created with the proper number of chromosomes restored. Each chromosome found a new partner but from a different body. Half of your chromosomes came from your mother and the other half came from your father. "

BBC - Science & Nature - Genes - Handing Down Genes: "A human being cannot be created out of 23 chromosomes. It needs 46. Sperm and egg must get together - and they frequently do."

BBC - Science & Nature - Genes - Handing Down Genes: "Genes are carried on special structures called chromosomes. In humans there are 23 different chromosomes, each of them carrying thousands of genes lined up in a row.
Take your partner
In virtually every cell in the body the 23 chromosomes have a partner - they come in pairs. Two copies of each chromosome making 46 in all. The only cells without the full set of 46 chromosomes are red blood cells which don�t have room for them - and sperm and eggs which only have 23"

BBC - Science & Nature - Genes - Inheriting Genes: "How do genes make us look similar?
Genes do something very simple. They are the recipe for building another molecule called a protein. Almost everything in your body is either made of a protein or has been put together with the help of one. They are the crucial building blocks which underly the formation of just about everything from the colour of your skin to the precise layout of neurons in your brain.
Your genes are a gift from your parents.
A hand me down list of recipes for making endless proteins which together shape your body.
If you can spot similarities in the faces of your family then you are seeing the end products of your shared genes."

BBC - Science & Nature - Genes - Future of Reproduction: Intro: "Humanity has begun to seize control of its evolutionary future. Where this will ultimately carry us is unclear, but within a decade, screening to avoid most genetic diseases may be commonplace, and genetic selection of embryos for various non-disease traits - not just gender - may have begun. In two decades, selection for non-disease traits may be common, and in vitro fertilisation (IVF) could become a more routine form of conception, even for those not suffering from infertility. In three or four decades, direct genetic manipulation of human embryos for select qualities may begin greatly to extend the power of genetic screening. Thus, within a matter of a few generations, we may come to view a child�s conception as simply too important to leave to random, unmonitored meetings of sperm and egg. "

BBC - Science & Nature - Genes - Future of Reproduction: Intro: "News articles about cloning and designer children lead us to wonder how couples of the future will make babies. Will they rely on sex as our parents and grandparents did, or will some suite of science-fiction technologies supplant what we think of as �natural� human reproduction, largely moving it out of the bedroom and into the laboratory?"

BBC - Science & Nature - Genes - Tools of the Trade: "This is the oldest and most widely-used way of genetically modifying animals. It usually involves injecting a fertilised egg with a foreign gene (although an unfertilised egg or sperm may also be used). The fertilised egg is then placed in a foster mother to develop. When the baby animal created by this technique is born, it carries the foreign gene in every one of its cells. Later, when the young animal grows up to reproduce, it will pass the new gene onto its offspring. "

BBC News | SCI/TECH | Comets could have seeded life on Earth: "'This impact scenario provides the three ingredients believed necessary for life: liquid water, organic material and energy,' she added.
Though it has been estimated that in Earth's early history only a few percent of comets or asteroids arrived at low enough angles, the bombardment would have been heavy enough to deliver a significant amount of intact organic material and water, Blank said. "

BBC News | SCI/TECH | 'Cells' hint at life's origin: "This new work suggests that the early chemical steps believed to be important for the origin of life do not require an already-formed planet.
Instead, they seem to take place in deep space long before planet formation occurs.
This implies that the vastness of space is filled with chemical compounds which, if they land in a hospitable environment like our Earth, can readily jump-start life.
Dr Monica Grady, from the Natural History Museum in London, who has analysed Martian meteorites for signs of life, said: 'We've known for a long time that the building blocks for life exist in outer space.'
The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "

BBC News | SCI/TECH | 'Cells' hint at life's origin: "'Scientists believe the molecules needed to make a cell's membrane, and therefore needed for the origin of life, are all over space. This discovery implies that life could be everywhere in the Universe,' said lead researcher Dr Louis Allamandola, "

ESA Portal - Focus On - Is life the rule or the exception? The answer may be in the interstellar clouds: "Max P. Bernstein from the United States team points out that the gas and dust in the interstellar clouds serve as 'raw material' to build stars and planetary systems such as our own. These clouds 'are thousands of light years across; they are vast, ubiquitous, chemical reactors. As the materials from which all stellar systems are made pass through such clouds, amino acids should have been incorporated into all other planetary systems, and thus been available for the origin of life.' "

ESA Portal - Focus On - Is life the rule or the exception? The answer may be in the interstellar clouds: "Amino acids are the 'bricks' of the proteins, and proteins are a type of compound present in all living organisms. Amino acids have been found in meteorites that have landed on Earth, but never in space. In meteorites amino acids are generally thought to have been produced soon after the formation of the Solar System, by the action of aqueous fluids on comets and asteroids - objects whose fragments became today's meteorites. However, new results published recently in Nature by two independent groups show evidence that amino acids can also form in space. "

ESA Portal - Focus On - Is life the rule or the exception? The answer may be in the interstellar clouds: "Is life a highly improbable event, or is it rather the inevitable consequence of a rich chemical soup available everywhere in the cosmos? Scientists have recently found new evidence that amino acids, the 'building-blocks' of life, can form not only in comets and asteroids, but also in the interstellar space.

This result is consistent with (although of course does not prove) the theory that the main ingredients for life came from outer space, and therefore that chemical processes leading to life are likely to have occurred elsewhere. This reinforces the interest in an already 'hot' research field, astrochemistry. ESA's forthcoming missions Rosetta and Herschel will provide a wealth of new information for this topic."

BBC - Science & Nature - Space - Life from a Comet?: "One theory of how life on Earth began is that it didn't start here at all. Life may have arrived from outer space on a comet. This is called the 'panspermia theory'.
During the early period of the Earth's history, collisions with comets were commonplace. Comets have been found which contain amino acids, the building blocks of life. So they could have brought life to Earth."

New Statesman - Stop making the planet history: "As increasing numbers of people are realising, climate change is not just another environmental issue: it is one that calls into serious question the very survival of most of humanity and other living species on a habitable planet. Politics-as-usual will not get us through this one. The hopeful sign is that we already hold the political key to survival in our hands. But if we do not make the contraction and convergence deal, we will not survive."

New Statesman - Stop making the planet history: "Last year, the world economy surged at a rate of 5 per cent, pushing consumption of grain, meat, steel and oil to all-time highs - again, thanks largely to China's boom. China's fuel consumption shot up by 15 per cent, and India's by 7 per cent. Not unrelatedly, last year also brought the largest-ever increase in climate-changing carbon emissions. As the Worldwatch Institute has pointed out: 'In terms of scale, it is as if all of Europe, Russia and North and South America were simultaneously to undertake a century's worth of economic development in a few decades.'"

New Statesman - Stop making the planet history: "Most of sub-Saharan Africa has per capita emissions between a tenth and a hundredth of the average British citizen's. "

New Statesman - Stop making the planet history: "G8: Climate change - The unpalatable truth is that raising people out of poverty worsens their impact on the earth. There is a potential solution, argues Mark Lynas, but will the west buy it?"

World Population Ageing: "This report was prepared by the Population Division as a contribution to the 2002 World Assembly on Ageing and its follow-up. The report provides a description of global trends in population ageing and includes a series of indicators of the ageing process by development regions, major areas, regions and countries. The report shows that:
Population ageing is unprecedented, without parallel in human history�and the twenty-first century will witness even more rapid ageing than did the century just past.
Population ageing is pervasive, a global phenomenon affecting every man, woman and child�but countries are at very different stages of the process, and the pace of change differs greatly. Countries that started the process later will have less time to adjust."