Taiwan billionaire and Foxconn founder Terry Gou Tai-ming announced on Monday that he will run in the 2024 elections for Taiwan's regional leader, making next year's vote a complicated four-way race. Analysts said that this is likely to further divide the island's opposition camp in favor of secessionist ruling party candidate Lai Ching-te. 

According to the latest polls conducted in mid August by Taiwan media outlets and institutions, without Gou's participation, ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate Lai, who is currently the deputy leader of the island, is now the front-runner with 37 to 42 percent, while Taiwan People's Party candidate Ko Wen-je ranks second with 25 to 28 percent, and Hou Yu-ih of the major opposition party Chinese Kuomintang (KMT) getting 20-22 percent. 

According to Taiwan polls that include Gou,  with Gou's participation, Lai's front-runner position is virtually unaffected while the opposition candidates are impacted significantly, as Ko gets only about 16-17 percent, KMT's Hou gets 15-16 percent, and Gou has only 12 percent. 

Analysts said this doesn't mean the DPP is popular, as most polls show that Taiwan residents who want to end the DPP rule are in the majority, as the combined support of opposition candidates is more than Lai's, but the problem is that the opposition camp is becoming divided due to the power struggle between the two opposition parties, and now the independent candidate Gou is dividing the field further. 

The three opposition candidates are yet to reach a consensus on forming an alliance to run in the elections. Even if they do reach agreement on running together, which is very unlikely as they all refuse to give in and serve as deputy candidate, Lai is very likely to win, and unfortunately, the will of the majority on the island to end the DPP rule might not be realized, Li Fei, a professor at the Taiwan Research Center at Xiamen University, told the Global Times on Monday.

"If Lai gets elected, cross-Taiwan Straits relations will be in danger, so the mainland is preparing for any possible scenario, including the worst one," Li noted. "But there are still a few months to go, and it would still be too early to say who can win eventually." 

In an apparent response to Gou's announcement to run, the KMT said in a post on its Facebook account Monday, after his announcement without mentioning him, that "if we share similar values, then we can work together," but vowed that mainstream public opinion will not accept any act that "hurts comrades and favors adversaries." 

Gou has been labeled by Taiwan media as a pro-mainland figure who has deep business relations in the mainland, and in order to preserve and resume cross-Straits cooperation that significantly benefit Taiwan, he also supports peace and opposes secessionism. However, experts said that his decision driven by political ambition is in fact helping the DPP authorities.

However, many Chinese mainland netizens and pro-reunification Taiwan residents have an interesting theory: If the DPP's Lai wins next year, this could speed up the reunification process, as the mainland will find it easy to completely abandon "the illusion of peaceful reunification" and make tough decisions to solve the Taiwan question immediately. Therefore, these people welcome Gou's act to run for the election, as they believe this will consolidate Lai's advantage.

Zheng Bo-yu, manager of the Vstartup Station of Taiwan, a company serving Taiwan youth seeking to study, work and launch startups on the mainland, said, "Many friends of mine in Taiwan who support cross-Straits cooperation and exchanges made a joke about the current election: Why don't we just vote for Lai and let the DPP win, so that the mainland will have an easier time making the decision to solve the Taiwan question once and for all, so that we don't need to be worried about the uncertain cross-Straits tension and US intervention anymore."

Li said the Chinese mainland has enough measures available to deter and counter secessionists and foreign interference forces, but the mainland is still making great efforts and showing great patience to seek peaceful reunification. 

"But it's possible that, if Lai eventually wins, deeper and more reckless collusion between the DPP and the US will wipe out the possibility of peaceful reunification, and the mainland will be forced to take action," Li warned. 

Got questions about Zika virus? Mosquito-borne diseases? Genetically engineered mosquitoes? Three Science News reporters will be answering questions Friday, March 4, as part of Reddit’s Ask Me Anything series.

Staff writer Meghan Rosen, molecular biology writer Tina Hesman Saey and biology writer Susan Milius will be responding to questions from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. Eastern at this link.

See Science News’ coverage of these topics in our Zika Virus Editor’s Pick and Mosquitoes & Disease Editor’s Pick.

If some of the most bizarre zoo animals merged into one cartoonish creature, it might look something like the “Tully monster.”

Fossils of Tullimonstrum gregarium, a soft-bodied animal that lived roughly 300 million years ago in what is now Illinois, feature wide-set eyes like a hammerhead shark, a nose like an elephant, and a mouth that could pass for a crab claw with teeth. It’s one of the “weird wonders” of its time, and for more than 50 years, it has stymied scientists debating its identity.
Now, an analysis of more than 1,200 museum specimens, reported March 16 in Nature, says the Tully monster was a vertebrate (not a slug, or a worm, or an arthropod). A long, thin tube running down the creature’s back, for example, was not part of the gut, as some scientists had suggested, but a notochord, a structural hallmark of vertebrates.

The creature was probably an ancestor of lampreys, jawless fish that can latch onto prey like a vacuum cleaner hose with teeth, study coauthor Victoria McCoy of Yale University and colleagues suggest.

Even among lampreys, the Tully monster stands out. With its stubby body and potentially tail-propelled swimming style, the creature’s place in the lamprey family tree might be best likened to yet another zoo animal: black sheep.

Hobbits disappeared from their island home nearly 40,000 years earlier than previously thought, new evidence suggests.

This revised timeline doesn’t erase uncertainty about the evolutionary origins of these controversial Indonesian hominids. Nor will the new evidence resolve a dispute about whether hobbits represent a new species, Homo floresiensis, or were small-bodied Homo sapiens.

Hobbits vanished about 50,000 years ago at Liang Bua Cave on Flores, an island situated between Borneo and Australia’s northern coast, say archaeologist Thomas Sutikna of the University of Wollongong, Australia, and his colleagues.
Cave sediment dating to about 12,000 years ago, which lies just above soil that yielded H. floresiensis remains, provided an initial estimate of when these diminutive hominids died out. But that sediment washed into the cave long after H. floresiensis was gone, covering much older, hobbit-bearing soil, the researchers report online March 30 in Nature.

Using the initial age estimate, researchers had previously concluded that hobbits survived for tens of thousands of years after Homo sapiens passed through Indonesia and reached Australia around 50,000 years ago. It now appears that hobbits instead hit an evolutionary dead end around that time, Sutikna’s group says.

The centerpiece of hobbit finds, a partial skeleton, comes from an individual who lived well before then, the scientists add. Measurements of the decay of radioactive elements in an arm bone from the partial skeleton indicate that the find dates to between 86,900 and 71,500 years ago. Until now, researchers suspected these bones were only about 18,000 years old.
Based on the new dates, “there was possibly no overlap or interactions between H. floresiensis and H. sapiens on Flores,” says paleoanthropologist Richard Potts of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
Hobbits disappeared before the earliest skeletal evidence of humans on Flores, says paleoanthropologist and study coauthor Matthew Tocheri of Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Canada. H. sapiens bones date to around 11,000 years ago on the Indonesian island. That undermines a controversial argument that a partial hobbit skeleton comes from a human with a developmental disorder (SN: 11/18/06, p. 330), Tocheri says.

Paleoanthropologist Russell Ciochon of the University of Iowa in Iowa City agrees. H. floresiensis probably descended from a large-bodied Asian Homo erectus group that reached Flores roughly 1 million years ago, he says. On islands, large-bodied mammals tend to become smaller, presumably in response to limited food sources and other factors.

But in a joint e-mail to Science News, two researchers who regard hobbits as humans — and the partial hobbit skeleton as displaying signs of Down syndrome — stick to their guns. Regardless of the new dates from Liang Bua Cave, hobbit bones fall within the range of skeletal sizes and shapes observed in people today, assert Robert Eckhardt of Penn State and Maciej Henneberg of the University of Adelaide in Australia. H. sapiens could have reached Flores and nearby islands (SN: 2/6/16, p. 7) when Sutikna’s group says hobbits were alive, they claim.

It’s not known whether humans or other Asian hominids, such as Denisovans (SN Online: 3/17/16), reached Flores more than 50,000 years ago at a time of lowered sea levels and possible drought on the island, Potts says. If they did, intruding species might have pushed an already reeling hobbit population to extinction.

Liang Bua Cave excavations also suggest that other Flores animals, including vultures, giant marabou storks and an extinct elephant relative, vanished around the same time that the hobbits did.

Annual excavations from 2007 through 2014 clarified how sediment accumulated in the cave. A thick soil deposit containing hobbit remains had substantially eroded before being covered by soil layers that washed into the cave starting around 20,000 years ago. Techniques for dating soil, rock, volcanic ash and bone indicated that hobbits’ skeletal remains ranged in age from 100,000 to 60,000 years ago. Stone tools probably made by hobbits dated to between around 190,000 and 50,000 years ago.

Liang Bua Cave preserves a late slice of H. floresiensis life on an island probably reached by toolmaking hobbit ancestors around 1 million years ago (SN: 6/3/06, p. 341), Tocheri says.

Researchers don’t know what happened during the roughly 800,000 years between hobbit ancestors’ arrival on Flores and hobbits’ last evolutionary stages. “If there was a book that chronicled the evolutionary history of H. floresiensis, we would have only a few tattered and torn pages with the rest missing,” Tocheri says.

A newly discovered microbe chows down on polluting plastic.

For humans, polyethylene terephthalate, also known as PET, is a stiff, strong plastic fiber that’s the main ingredient in polyester clothing and disposable bottles. But for the bacterium Ideonella sakaiensis, PET is dinner.

Researchers in Japan discovered the bacterium living in samples of soil, wastewater and recycling plant sludge, all contaminated with PET particles. PET is very stable, and few known microbes can break it down. But I. sakaiensis can use PET as its main food source, the scientists report in the March 11 Science. Tests revealed that the bacterium latches onto PET particles and releases a protein that decomposes the plastic into molecules the bacterium can munch on (SN: 2/20/16, p. 20).

Millions of tons of PET are manufactured yearly, and the long-lasting plastic can pose an environmental threat as it builds up in ecosystems. With its appetite for this environmental hazard, I. sakaiensis might be valuable in plastic waste cleanup, the researchers say.

Information may seem ethereal, given how easily we forget phone numbers and birthdays. But scientists say it is physical, and if a new study is correct, that goes for quantum systems, too.

Although pages of text or strings of bits seem easily erased with the press of a button, the act of destroying information has tangible physical impact, according to a principle proposed in 1961 by physicist Rolf Landauer. Deleting information is associated with an increase in entropy, or disorder, resulting in the release of a certain amount of heat for each erased bit. Even the most efficient computer would still output heat when irreversibly scrubbing out data.
This principle has been verified experimentally for systems that follow the familiar laws of classical physics. But the picture has remained fuzzy for quantum mechanical systems, in which particles can be in multiple states at once and their fates may be linked through the spooky process of quantum entanglement.

Now a team of scientists reports April 13 in Proceedings of the Royal Society A that Landauer’s principle holds even in that wild quantum landscape. “Essentially what they’ve done is test [this principle] at a very detailed and quantitative way,” says physicist John Bechhoefer of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada, who was not involved with the research. “And they’re showing that this works in a quantum system, which is a really important step.” Testing Landauer’s principle in the quantum realm could be important for understanding the fundamental limits of quantum computers, Bechhoefer says.

To verify Landauer’s principle, the researchers used a system of three qubits — the quantum version of the bits found in a typical computer — made from trifluoroiodoethylene, a molecule which has three fluorine atoms. The nuclei of these three fluorine atoms have a quantum property known as spin. That “spin” can be clockwise or counterclockwise, serving the same purpose as a 0 or 1 for a standard bit.

The first qubit, which researchers called the “system,” contains the information to be erased. According to Landauer’s principle, when the information is erased, heat will be generated and energy will flow to the second qubit, known as the “reservoir.” Just as computer scientists can perform operations on the bits in a typical computer (adding or subtracting numbers, for instance), the researchers can apply operations to the fluorine qubits by using pulses of radio waves to tweak the nuclear spins.

But making measurements of quantum systems is tricky, says physicist Lucas Céleri of Federal University of Goiás in Brazil, a leader of the research team. “In a quantum world, every time you measure the system, you interact with it,” thereby changing it. So the researchers used a work-around. The third qubit is coupled to the reservoir and can be used to measure the heat generated without mucking up the qubits of interest.
When the researchers erased information, they found heat was generated as expected from Landauer’s principle. They looked at the average of multiple measurements, because quantum fluctuations mean that any single trial won’t necessarily conform to the principle. “It’s a very nice demonstration of Landauer’s principle in a quantum system, cleverly conceived and well carried out,” says quantum physicist Seth Lloyd of MIT, who was not involved with the research.

But some researchers suggest there is more work to be done. “It is a carefully executed experiment with three interacting qubits,” physicists Jukka Pekola of Aalto University in Finland and Jonne Koski of ETH Zurich wrote in an e-mail. But in a traditional test of Landauer’s principle, the reservoir would not be a single qubit, but a large “heat bath” of many particles. The researchers therefore had to account for additional entropy introduced as a result of their single-particle reservoir. The next step, Pekola and Koski say, would be to investigate a qubit that interacts with a reservoir consisting of more particles to perform a more conventional test of Landauer’s principle at the quantum level.

Some researchers believe that when memories are called to mind, they enter a fragile, wobbly state during which they are vulnerable to being weakened or changed. One way to erode old memories is to learn something new just after recalling the older memory, scientists reported in 2003 (SN: 10/11/2003, p. 228).

But that result itself is wobbly, scientists report April 25 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In an attempt to replicate the original finding, experimental psychologist Tom Hardwicke of University College London and colleagues didn’t see any memory alterations in people who learned a new sequence of finger taps shortly after recalling an old sequence. Nor did the researchers turn up signs of this memory interference in other tests.

The new study focused specifically on new learning, but the findings cast suspicion on the legitimacy of other ways to interfere with people’s memories, Hardwicke says. Approaches such as brain stimulation or drugs might also be flawed, the researchers argue.

Echidnas are some of the oddest animals you’ll ever see, more closely related to a platypus than anything else, as the only other mammals that lay eggs. There are four living species: Short-beaked echidnas — about the size of a house cat and covered in spikes — are common throughout Australia and in Papua New Guinea, where three long-beaked species live.

One of those species, the western long-beaked echidna, which is larger and has fewer spines than the short-beaked variety, used to live in Australia. Scientists have found fossils of the species, and aboriginal people who lived near Darwin in north central Australia painted the echidnas on rocks more than 10,000 years ago. The long-beaked echidnas then disappeared sometime after that, scientists have thought.

There are hints, though, that the species still exists in Australia. In 2012, Kristofer Helgen of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and colleagues reported in Zookeys that an echidna skull and skin housed in the National History Museum in London belonged to a western long-beaked echidna collected by John Thomas Tunney, who gathered specimens for the Western Australian Museum in Perth at the turn of the last century.
According to the specimen’s tags, Tunney had collected the animal on November 20, 1901, at Mount Anderson in the Western Kimberley region of Australia. Originally identified as a short-beaked echidna, museum scientists decided it was a Zaglossus bruijnii , a western long-beaked echidna, after removing and examining the animal’s skull. They then put the skull and skin away in a drawer; the animal was forgotten for decades until Helgen happened upon it. He and his team then examined specimen and decided that, yes, it was indeed a western long-beaked echidna. And, after examining the documentation attached to the animal’s remains, they determined that the echidna wasn’t mislabeled; it had most likely had been collected by Tunney in Australia. Perhaps the species was still living on the continent, they posited.
That wasn’t their only evidence. The researchers also recounted the tale of an encounter that one member of the team, James Kohen of Macquarie University in Australia, had with an aboriginal woman in the Kimberley region in 2001: While walking together, they noticed some poop, which the woman correctly identified as belonging to an echidna. She then told the scientist that her grandmothers “used to hunt the other one,” a much larger echidna that had not been seen for ages. Perhaps that meant that the woman’s actual grandmothers had hunted long-beaked echidnas — or maybe it was a tale told over many generations, and it was long-ago ancestors. Or maybe no one hunted long-beaked echidnas at all.
“We realize that, despite our conclusions,” the team writes, “others may remain skeptical of this Zaglossus specimen’s association with Tunney’s tags. Additional studies of this remarkable specimen might include analyses of ancient DNA, stable isotopes, and trace elements to test its origins and the context of its collection.”

To truly confirm that the long-beaked echidna is roaming modern-day Australia, scientists would have to find the animals in Australia. Though maybe not, biologist Adrian Burton notes in the April Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

Tunney never found a second echidna specimen; if he had, it would have been in the museum because he was contracted to supply them with one. But finding it would have been a huge undertaking, Burton writes. “To acquire a second specimen, Tunney would have been doomed to work for hours on end, laying traps and seeking out the shuffling creature among the rocky gullies and evergreen rainforest patches around [Mount] Anderson. And he may never have come any closer than stumbling upon a few scats.”

Today, though, those scats would be all researchers would need, Burton suggests. They could compare the DNA in the echidna poop to the DNA of animals living in New Guinea and genetic material gathered from the specimen in the London museum. If they all matched, then that would be proof that the species still lives in Australia.

No scientists have managed to get funding, however, for an expedition to the region where Tunney collected his echidna, Burton notes. That probably shouldn’t be all that surprising. The evidence that the long-beaked echidna lives in Australia today is pretty iffy, and the country has experienced severe cuts in funding for science in recent years. Echidna enigmas aren’t a priority.

But perhaps, just perhaps, these spiky, worm-eating creatures are still hiding out in some forest, waiting for someone to find them — or at least their poop.

In the backwaters of the solar system beyond Pluto, lies the dwarf planet Makemake. And the tiny world has an even tinier moon, NASA announced April 26. The moon was spotted as a dark smudge orbiting Makemake in April 2015 images from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Researchers estimate that the moon, temporarily dubbed S/2015 (136472) 1, is roughly 160 kilometers wide; its home world, by comparison, is about 1,400 kilometers across. The satellite appears to trek around Makemake once every 12 days or more, though more observations are needed to nail down its orbit. The moon’s motion can help researchers determine the mass of Makemake, one of the largest known bodies in the Kuiper belt.