For the first time, a giant panda cub has been born in China after being conceived using frozen sperm, officials announced on Friday — an innovation that scientists hope will help the endangered species avoid extinction.
The new cub’s birth on Thursday means that breeders will no longer be forced to rely on semen from China’s few virile males, and may even be able to bring in sperm from zoos in San Diego, Mexico City or elsewhere.
This would be key to promoting a healthy panda population because inbreeding can lead to birth defects that would further threaten the survival of the species.
The new cub, born to You You, a female panda at the Wolong Giant Panda Research Center in Sichuan Province, is the 10th born at the breeding facility this year. It was You You’s third.
Just after dawn, on footage broadcast by state television channel CCTV, the pinkish, hairless cub emerged, and its mother was shown licking the tiny wiggling creature to clean it.
Panda researchers said on Friday that it was the first successful live birth worldwide using frozen panda sperm.
“We did try before but it failed,” said Huang Yan, a deputy research technician with the China Panda Preservation Research Center.
He declined to elaborate but said the Wolong team had improved its thawing techniques, making frozen sperm more viable.
Sperm samples are deep-frozen using liquid nitrogen, and in the past, only 20 percent to 30 percent of the sperm survived. But this time the center managed to raise viability to about 80 percent, he said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing
RSS