Facebook out to woo Chinese firms
New York:Facebook has significantly ramped up its efforts to woo Chinese advertisers and draw more business in a country that banned the social networking site a few years ago along with micro-blogging site Twitter and other foreign social media services.
The aim behind intensifying its efforts is to some day enter China, Wall Street Journal reported.
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has raised his profile in China in recent months. In October last year, he spoke in Mandarin to a Chinese audience at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
He also met Chinese giants like Alibaba Group chief Jack Ma and Lei Jun, the chief executive of Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi Corp.
In December, he showed the visiting Chinese top internet regulator at Facebook’s headquarters in California that he keeps a book of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s thoughts on his desk, the report added.
The aim is to pitch to the Chinese companies the benefits of reaching Facebook’s 1.39 billion active monthly users beyond China’s borders.
Facebook is also seeking more Chinese clients such as Youzu Interactive Co., a Shanghai-based online game designer.
“Half of our players come from Facebook. It is our most important ad tool right now,” Liu Wanqin, manager for overseas advertising at Youzu was quoted as saying.
Analysts believe Chinese advertisers play a growing role in Asia ad revenue for the company.
Facebook’s fourth-quarter Asia ad revenue totalled $531 million, up 67 percent from a year earlier.
Chinese online retailer “Light in the Box” started purchasing ads on Facebook in 2013, in addition to advertising on Google.
The retailer now manages its own Facebook ads, the report added.(IANS)
China’s plantations reverses global forest loss
Melbourne: In heartening news for environmentalists, the total amount of vegetation globally has increased by almost four billion tonnes of carbon since 2003, according to an analysis of 20 years of satellite data. And this is despite ongoing large-scale deforestation in the tropics.
An Australian-led international team of scientists published the findings in Nature Climate Change, describing a range of causes for the increase.
“The increase in vegetation primarily came from a lucky combination of environmental and economic factors and massive tree-planting projects in China,” said lead author Yi Liu from University of New South Wales, Australia.
“Vegetation increased on the savannas in Australia, Africa and South America as a result of increasing rainfall, while in Russia we have seen the re-growth of forests on abandoned farmland.
“China was the only country to intentionally increase its vegetation with tree planting projects,” Liu said.
At the same time, massive vegetation loss is still occurring in many other regions.
The greatest declines have been on the edge of the Amazon forests and in the Indonesian provinces of Sumatra and Kalimantan.”We found unexpectedly large vegetation increases in the savannas of southern Africa and northern Australia.”The increase in Australia occurred despite ongoing land clearing, urbanization and big droughts across other parts of Australia,” said Albert van Dijk of the Australian National University.
The increased greening means that the total amount of carbon captured in Australia’s vegetation has increased.
“It’s important to recognise that global warming would be happening faster if some of our CO2 emissions were not captured by this vegetation growth,” the paper said.
About 50 percent of emissions from human activities stay in the atmosphere even after the other half is removed by terrestrial vegetation and oceans.
The only way to stabilize the climate system is to reduce global fossil fuel emissions to zero, the researchers noted.
(IANS)
Cancer breakthrough by Australian researcher
Sydney:An all-new generation of long-lasting drugs for melanoma, a type of skin cancer, may flow from a new discovery by an Australian researcher.
The University of Newcastle announced on Tuesday that Xu Dong Zhang had made the discovery which has excited other researchers around the world, Xinhua news agency reported.
Zhang found that a protein known as RIP1, previously linked to natural cell death in the body, has a pro-survival function in melanoma cells.
“We started investigating RIP1 from a perspective of necrotic cell death before finding that it actually plays an important role in regulating melanoma cell survival… We had to turn our entire thinking around,” Zhang said.
“It appears to be unregulated from the earliest stages of melanoma, so if we can inhibit the molecule’s survival mechanism we believe we’ll be able to kill melanoma cells, either alone or in combination with existing drugs.” (IANS)
Loony, to blame moon for things going haywire
New York:It’s loony to blame the full moon for things going crazy at hospital emergency rooms or in birth wards as moon has nothing to do with the timing of human births or hospital admissions, shows a research.The study reveals how intelligent and otherwise reasonable people develop strong beliefs that, to put it politely, are not aligned with reality. It’s lunatic.”It must be a full moon” is a common refrain when things appear more hectic than usual.
But the humble moon is innocent.”Some nurses ascribe the apparent chaos to the moon but dozens of studies show that the belief is unfounded,” said Jean-Luc Margot, professor of planetary astronomy at University of California – Los Angeles (UCLA) in a paper that appeared in the journal Nursing Research.The absence of a lunar influence on human affairs has been demonstrated in the areas of automobile accidents, hospital admissions, surgery outcomes, cancer survival rates, menstruation, births, depression, violent behaviour and even criminal activity.
Even though a 40-year-old UCLA study demonstrated that the timing of births does not correlate in any way with the lunar cycle, the belief in a lunar effect has persisted.
Margot re-analysed the data and showed that the number of admissions was unrelated to the lunar cycle.
Margot cited what scientists refer to as the “confirmation bias” – people’s tendency to interpret information in a way that confirms their beliefs and ignore data that contradict them.When life is hectic on the day of a full moon, many people remember the association because it confirms their belief.Perhaps, we can start by correcting our delusions about the moon, and work from there, the authors said. (IANS)