Two Chinese nationals have been accused of smuggling a fungus into the US that officials describe as a “dangerous biological pathogen”.
Yunqing Jian, 33, and Zunyong Liu, 34, have been charged with conspiracy, smuggling goods, false statements, and visa fraud, the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Michigan announced on Tuesday…
The fungus called Fusarium graminearum can cause a disease in wheat, barley, maize and rice that can wipe out crops and lead to vomiting and liver damage if it gets into food.
If the accusation is true the agents should be charged with biological warfare and espionage. They are being held on relatively minor charges until the major ones can be developed.
Wendy
FBI has accused Chinese spies of targeting a wide range of U.S. innovations — including Covid vaccines, computer chips, nuclear power plants, wind turbines and smartphones, for example.
Last November a Chinese intelligence officer, Xu Yanjun, was convicted of trying to steal closely guarded technology developed by GE aviation for making jet engine fan blades from composite materials. Investigators said he helped hackers in China get access to company computers and tried to persuade a GE engineer to travel to China.
Cutting funding to Harvard means Chinese students can study at home instead and build up Chinese tech. Not to mention the US falling backward in the process of doing next to zero research.
Are we sure about this? Is this another “yellow cake” letter? Is this another “tubes for uranium centrifuges”? In the current environment, we need to wonder if this is more anti-China propaganda.
Chinese espionage is nothing new. The article I linked from 2022 said there were 2,000 cases pending at that time. A number of Chinese academics have been expelled over the years. Further back, there was the Chinese espionage at Los Alamos.
Chinese Spy Scandal in U.S. Nuclear Lab / Bomb-making secrets stolen at Los Alamos https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Chinese-Spy-Scandal-in-U-S-Nuclear-Lab-2943427.php Working with nuclear secrets stolen from a U.S. government laboratory, China has made a leap in the development of nuclear weapons: the miniaturization of its bombs, according to administration officials.
Until recently, China’s nuclear weapons designs were a generation behind those of the United States, largely because Beijing was unable to produce small warheads that could be launched from a single missile at multiple targets. Such warheads form the backbone of any modern nuclear force.
But by the mid-1990s, China had built and tested such small bombs, a breakthrough that officials say was accelerated by the theft of U.S. nuclear secrets from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
China in April began requiring companies to apply for permission to export magnets made with rare-earth metals, including dysprosium and terbium. The country controls roughly 90% of the world’s supply of these elements, which help magnets to operate at high temperatures. Much of the world’s modern technology, from smartphones to F-35 jet fighters, rely on these magnets.
Ah a strategic reason to gin up an excuse for a war.
So if they can “study at home” and build up Chinese tech what was the point of them going to Harvard? To grace the US with their great knowledge and help improve US tech?
Or where they going there to learn?
Tesla is going (back) to EV motors with no rare earth elements
Originally, Tesla used AC induction motors in its vehicles, which did not need rare earth elements. In fact, this is where the company got its namesake – Nikola Tesla was the inventor of the AC induction motor. But then when the Model 3 came out, the company introduced a new permanent magnet motor and eventually started using these motors in its other vehicles as well.
Tesla stated today that, between 2017 and 2022, it managed to reduce rare earth usage in these new Model 3 drive units by 25% as it increased the efficiency of the drivetrain.
But now it looks like Tesla is trying to get the best of both worlds: a permanent magnet motor, but without rare earth elements.
China isn’t the only one spying on the US. Remember the rhubarb, some years ago, about a USian caught spying on the US, for Israel?
And then there is commercial espionage. Companies spying on other companies. That is why we hear, from time to time, companies suing companies for “theft of trade secrets”. as well as the more open “patent infringement”, “copyright infringement”, and “trademark infringement”.
The laws of physics are open to everyone. Whether information stolen from the US, or UK, or France, or the USSR, accelerated the development, or not, knowing it can be done, the Chinese would have kept at it, until they figured it out.
China has been the current regime’s whipping boy, for a long time. Don’t overlook the possibility of this being another “mobile bio-weapons lab”.
Not to mention other “regimes” such as those run by Mr. B (see upthread) or Mr. O. I had a long, multi-year thread on the old boards about Chinese espionage. The following is from Science in 2014:
Seedy tale: Chinese researchers stole patented corn https://www.science.org/content/article/seedy-tale-chinese-researchers-stole-patented-corn-us-prosecutors-allege The court documents read like something out of a Coen brothers film. Employees of the Chinese agricultural company Dabeinong Technology Group Co. (DBN) and a subsidiary sneaked through midwestern cornfields, U.S. prosecutors allege, stealthily gathering patented corn that they attempted to smuggle out of the United States in microwave popcorn boxes. Over a span of years, the associates allegedly came up with various ways of stealing coveted seed lines developed by agricultural giants DuPont Pioneer, Monsanto, and LG Seeds—a feat that, had it succeeded, would have sidestepped years of research…
Plant breeding research elsewhere in the world has benefited from advances in genomics and molecular markers, but plant breeding scientists in China do not work closely with researchers in those areas, says Carl Pray, an agriculture, food, and resource economics expert at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, who has worked in China…
In 2012, a court document alleges, Mo Hailong and two other defendants “attempted to ship approximately 250 pounds of corn seed, packaged in 42, 5-gallon zip-lock bags contained in 5 separate boxes,” from Illinois to a logistics company in Hong Kong. Another defendant is said to have stashed “374 small manila envelopes each containing small quantities of corn seed within two boxes of Pop Weaver brand microwave popcorn,” which he stowed in his checked luggage on a flight to Beijing.
Which doesn’t lead one to another ‘bio-weapons lab’ conclusion.
Chinese Scientist Sentenced to Prison in Theft of Engineered Rice https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/chinese-scientist-sentenced-prison-theft-engineered-rice Evidence at trial established that Zhang worked as a rice researcher for Ventria Bioscience in Junction City, Kansas. Ventria develops genetically programmed rice to express recombinant human proteins, which are then extracted for use in the therapeutic and medical fields. Zhang has a master’s degree in agriculture from Shengyang Agricultural University in China and a doctorate from Louisiana State University.
According to trial evidence, Zhang acquired without authorization hundreds of rice seeds produced by Ventria and stored them at his residence in Manhattan…
Trial evidence demonstrated that in the summer of 2013, personnel from a crop research institute in China visited Zhang at his home in Manhattan. Zhang drove the visitors to tour facilities in Iowa, Missouri and Ohio. On Aug. 7, 2013, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers found seeds belonging to Ventria in the luggage of Zhang’s visitors as they prepared to leave the United States for China.
I am not familiar with all the EU Universities and their recent biotech-related Nobel prize winners, I guess. But I have heard of Stanford, CalTech, Berkeley that have produce a few.
The h-index for Nobel Prize winners generally ranges from 30 to 139, with a significant portion of laureates having an h-index of at least 30. The average h-index for Nobel Prize winners in physics is around 34.5, while in chemistry, it’s approximately 65.17, and in economics, it’s around 67.31. It’s important to note that the h-index values can vary depending on the specific citation database used (e.g., Scopus, Google Scholar, Web of Science).