The beard now feared! Visiting NBA superstar James Harden got a taste of Chinese speed with his jaw on the floor, as he sold out 10,000 bottles from his J-HARDEN brand wine within seconds during a live commerce on Tuesday night.

Harden showed up in the Chinese online celebrity CrazyXiaoyangge's livestreaming channel on Tuesday night with his personal brand J-Harden wine. Within seconds, Harden was told that 5,000 orders (436 yuan or $60 for two bottles) had been placed, meaning his 10,000 bottles were sold out at lightning speed. More than 15 million people watched the Harden live stream on Tuesday night.

Finding the China speed unbelievable, Harden shouted with excitement "no way!" Harden had to go to the computer to confirm the sales record.

Harden then added another 3,000 orders and again they were sold out within seconds. 

Feeling so pumped, the NBA super star even performed a side cartwheel.

Chinese basketball fans showed much support to Harden during the livestreaming, leaving "MVP" comments all over the live stream . 

Harden, in return, learned to say "woaini" - "I love you" in Chinese, to his fans during the livestreaming. And discussion on James Harden being amazed by China speed during the live commercial became  trending topic on China's twitter-like Sina Weibo on Wednesday morning. 

Diehard Harden fans even suggested that if the NBA star is not happy in the American basketball league, he is welcomed to joint Team China and become an influencer on the Chinese internet.

Harden, although completing a season that failed to meet expectations with Philadelphia 76ers, received broad support from Chinese fans during China summer tour, especially after he lashed out at the team's president Daryl Morey as "a liar" during a commercial event in Beijing on Monday.

"Daryl Morey is a liar and I will never be a part of an organization that he's a part of," "Let me say that again: Daryl Morey is a liar and I will never be a part of an organization that he's a part of," he said.

In October 2019, Morey then the GM for the Houston Rockets posted on Twitter a slogan used by Hong Kong rioters at the time. 

He quickly drew the ire of the Chinese people and the team's Chinese fans and also triggered a backlash from business partners, including a more-than-one-year long suspension of NBA games on China Central Television (CCTV).

Just how fantastical a planet can be and still support recognizable life isn’t just a question for science fiction. Astronomers are searching the stars for otherworldly inhabitants, and they need a road map. Which planets are most likely to harbor life? That’s where geoscientists’ imaginations come in. Applying their knowledge of how our world works and what allows life to flourish, they are envisioning what kind of other planetary configurations could sustain thriving biospheres.

You don’t necessarily need an Earth-like planet to support Earth-like life, new research suggests. For decades, thinking about the best way to search for extraterrestrials has centered on a “Goldilocks” zone where temperatures are “just right” for liquid water, a key ingredient for life, to wet the surface of an Earth doppelgänger. But now it’s time to think outside the Goldilocks zone, some scientists say. Unearthly mechanisms could keep greenhouse gas levels in check and warm planets in the coldest outer reaches of a solar system. Life itself could even play a starring role in a planet’s enduring habitability.
“It’s an exciting time,” says Harvard planetary scientist Robin Wordsworth. “There’s still a ton for us to learn about the way different planets behave. The Goldilocks zone is just a very rough guide, and we need to keep an open mind.”

Currency of life
When it comes to habitable planets, water continues to be the currency of life. Too close to a star and all the water on a planet evaporates; too far and the planet is an icy snowball. The Goldilocks zone marks the region between those two extremes, where water can stay liquid. Every known organism requires liquid water at some point during its life cycle. Extraterrestrial life could be completely unlike anything seen on Earth, of course, but “we’ve got to start looking somewhere,” says Colin Goldblatt, a planetary scientist at the University of Victoria in Canada. “At least we know what Earth life looks like.”
With the assumption that water is king, astronomers search for wet planets using powerful telescopes. The search is limited by what the telescopes can see in a planet’s atmosphere, however. Life-supporting liquid water could hide under the surface, for example, inside Jupiter’s icy moon Europa (SN: 10/4/14, p. 10). And any subterranean life, which typically wouldn’t alter the atmosphere, would probably be undetectable. Even with rovers roaming Mars, scientists can’t tell for certain whether Martian groundwater hosts life (SN: 12/26/15, p. 26). For alien life to be observable from afar, liquid water would have to be at the surface, not just concealed belowground.

With liquid surface water as a must-have for hunting extraterrestrials, astronomers estimated the extent of the habitable region more than 50 years ago. Early research confined the Goldilocks zone for our own solar system to a narrow band — one estimate placed it from 0.95 times to 1.01 times Earth’s average distance from the sun. But then scientists realized the surprising influence of Earth’s built-in temperature control system: the carbon cycle, the process by which carbon travels from the atmosphere into the Earth and back out to the atmosphere.

The carbon cycle controls how much heat-trapping carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere. Rainfall weathers exposed rocks, causing a chemical reaction that pulls CO2 from the air and into the oceans and eventually underground via plate tectonics. Volcanoes, meanwhile, spew CO2 into the atmosphere. This cycle keeps the planet’s temperatures from getting too extreme.

If the climate ever gets too cold, the carbon cycle could boost CO2 to compensate. For instance, if temperatures drop and rainfall slows, the lack of weathering will allow CO2 to build up in the atmosphere. And as volcanoes continue belching up additional CO2, temperatures will rise and rainfall will rise. And if things get so hot that glaciers melt and rainfall increases, the planet will cool as weathering accelerates and draws down more CO2 from the atmosphere. Plants and other organisms also play roles in drawing in CO2 or releasing it into the air.

This balancing act could help keep planets within a comfortable range for life, expanding the habitable zone to as wide as 0.5 to 2.0 times Earth’s distance from the sun, though these numbers are hotly contested. Thanks to the carbon cycle, Earth might still be habitable even if pushed out to Mars’ orbit, says Penn State geoscientist James Kasting.

Rocky recycling
Not every planet tucked safely inside the habitable zone is necessarily life-friendly. Venus and Mars are within the habitable zone by some definitions, but neither boasts a livable surface climate. More than location is at play. Other factors such as plate tectonics may make a planet right or wrong for life. Plate tectonics is an important piece in the temperature-controlling carbon cycle, as the shifting and sinking plates that cover Earth’s surface carry carbon into Earth’s interior that later erupts from volcanoes. Some scientists propose that planets akin to Venus and Mars that lack the conditions for plate tectonics should be crossed off the “explore list” (SN: 1/23/16, p. 8).
Lindy Elkins-Tanton, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University in Tempe, disagrees. On exoplanets, other processes could do the job of plate tectonics, she said last December at an American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. “We’re too Earth-centric in our notion of how you can create a planetary carbon cycle,” she says. “What else can we consider?”

One alternative could be the churning of a planet’s outer layers in a way that doesn’t require giant shifting slabs. The deepest part of a terrestrial planet’s outermost shell becomes denser as pressures increase with depth. Rising molten rock from the planet’s hot interior can also add density and heat to the bottom of the shell, making the rock runnier and denser. Even just a 1 percent density change could produce globs of material dense enough to sink deeper into the planet, carrying carbon along for the ride, Elkins-Tanton proposes.

As the material sinks, it releases some water like a squeezed sponge. This carbon-containing water then seeps back toward the surface. Water loosens the bonds that hold rocks together, which lowers a rock’s melting point. If enough water accumulates, molten magma pools form and fuel volcanic eruptions. Together, these mechanisms could substitute for plate tectonics in the carbon cycle, Elkins-Tanton says. True, the process would be much slower than plate tectonics, but it could keep some planets’ climates livable, her simulations show.

Hot air
Of course, the carbon cycle matters only if CO2 is the main driver of the atmospheric blanket that keeps a planet cozy enough for life-sustaining liquid water. Plenty of other greenhouse gases, such as ozone or nitrous oxide, could keep exoplanets temperate. One, however, would be particularly potent: hydrogen.

Earth used to have a lot more hydrogen in its atmosphere. In 2013, Wordsworth and planetary scientist Raymond Pierrehumbert, now at the University of Oxford, proposed that hydrogen could have kept Earth warm back when the sun was cool. They were attempting to resolve the faint young sun paradox (SN: 5/4/13, p. 30).

Early in Earth’s history, about 3.8 billion years ago, the sun shined 20 to 30 percent less brightly than it does now. Keeping the young planet warm posed a problem. Wordsworth and Pierrehumbert proposed that hydrogen, when combined with abundant nitrogen in the atmosphere, could serve as a paradox-resolving greenhouse gas. When hydrogen and nitrogen molecules collide in the air, the hydrogen molecules start wobbling differently. This wobbling increases the range of light wavelengths that hydrogen molecules absorb, amplifying the greenhouse effect. Hydrogen escaped from Earth’s atmosphere over time. But on larger rocky planets with stronger gravitational pulls, that hydrogen would stick around, Wordsworth says.
With enough hydrogen and nitrogen, a planet can keep warm far outside of the CO2-based Goldilocks zone, Wordsworth says. Planets as far away from their sun as Pluto is to ours could stay above freezing. Even rogue planets alone in the cosmos with no parent star might keep warm enough to support life (SN: 4/4/15, p. 22).

The problem, however, is that these planets would need something akin to a carbon cycle to fine-tune hydrogen concentrations and prevent temperatures from getting too hot or too cold. Worse yet, at least on Earth, enterprising microbes feast on any available hydrogen for energy. Emerging life-forms could gorge on an exoplanet’s hydrogen, essentially eating the very thing keeping the planet warm enough for life. Those planets therefore might not stay habitable long enough for advanced life to evolve, Wordsworth says.
The inhabitance paradox
The hungry microbes might actually be good for hydrogen-wrapped planets, planetary scientist Dorian Abbot of the University of Chicago proposed at the AGU meeting in December. Higher temperatures make enzymes work faster and microbes more active. If temperatures rose, the hydrogen-chomping microbes would draw more hydrogen from the atmosphere and cool the planet. And if temperatures fell too far, microbe activity would fall and hydrogen levels would stabilize.

The ability of life, like those microbes, to fundamentally alter the climate and chemistry of its home planet poses a new paradox, Goldblatt said at the same meeting. Whether or not a planet is habitable could sometimes depend on whether life has already made itself at home there. He calls it the inhabitance paradox; the idea is an extension of the Gaia hypothesis, the proposal that organisms alter their surroundings to maintain a habitable environment. In other words, life could be a requirement for life.

The paradox showcases just how complex the hunt for habitable planets has become, Goldblatt says. “There are many other ways to support life — we just don’t know what they are yet,” he says. “Our imagination is limited to our experience. We’re going to observe other planets and see things we never have imagined.”

Most people think that autism is a disorder of the brain. But the skin may play a role, too, a new study suggests.

Nerve cells in the skin are abnormal in mice with mutations in autism-related genes, leading to poor touch perception, scientists report June 9 in Cell. This trouble sensing touch may influence the developing brain in a way that leads to social deficits and anxiety later in life.

The results raise the provocative idea that fixing abnormal senses may alleviate some of the behavioral symptoms of autism, says study coauthor David Ginty, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School.
To explore the role of touch, Ginty and colleagues used mice that carried mutations in genes linked to autism. The genes are active in many places, including the brain. But the researchers used genetic tricks to place the mutated genes only in the peripheral nervous system — the collections of nerves outside the brain and spinal cord.

Adding mutations in a handful of autism-related genes only in peripheral nerves interfered with the mice’s sense of touch. These mice had trouble telling a smooth object from a rough one, and they had outsized reactions to harmless puffs of air. “They’re really touchy when you pick them up,” Ginty says. The sensory breakdown was caused by touch-sensing nerve cells that seemed to have trouble sending messages to the spinal cord, the researchers found.

Some mice also had behavioral deficits. Those with mutations in one of two genes — Mecp2 or Gabrb3 — in the peripheral nervous system, but not the brain, showed more signs of anxiety and interacted with other mice less than mice that didn’t have those mutations. Discovering that changes in the touch-sensing nerve cells could affect behavior was unexpected, Ginty says.

The skin’s influence seems to be important early in life. Social behaviors and anxiety didn’t suffer when the genes were first mutated in touch-sensing nerve cells during adulthood. The effect on behavior showed up only when the genes were abnormal during development, the team found.

That finding is “the most impressive part of the work,” says neuroscientist Kevin Pelphrey of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The results emphasize how autism is an inherently developmental disorder, he says.
Pelphrey and colleagues previously found that the brains of children with autism react differently to light touch, which fits with the idea that problems of touch may be involved in the disorder.

Next, Ginty and colleagues plan to figure out exactly when these genes do their important work in the peripheral nervous system. “We are now really interested in the window of time,” he says. “Presumably that window closes at some point, and we’re trying to figure out when that is.” The researchers will also explore ways to restore normal touch sensation, including drugs or genetic manipulations, that would work before the window closes.

It’s possible that other nerve cells outside the brain are affected in autism, too, says neuroscientist Aaron McGee of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. “If you have these problems with peripheral nerves that have roles in active sensation, do you also have problems with the nerves that innervate the gut?” If so, that could help explain why people with autism often experience gut trouble.

McGee cautions that it’s difficult to compare behaviors of mice with symptoms of autism in people. But he says that the genetic experiments described in the paper are “awesome, thorough and significant.”

Pig fat has made the leap from kitchen staple to laboratory marvel for its ability to grow bone. Stem cells from the fat tissue of Yucatán minipigs grew into pieces of bone that were then successfully implanted into the pigs’ jaws, researchers report June 15 in Science Translational Medicine.

The team of bioengineers used cow bone scaffolds infused with stem cells from a minipig’s fat tissue to grow bone grafts in a special chamber in the lab. The new bones, which were personally fitted to each minipig’s jaw, fared better after six months than standard bone grafts not seeded with fat cells.

The new research brings scientists a step closer to one day using fat stem cells to repair humans’ broken or worn-out body parts.

Busy nerve cells in the brain are hungry and beckon oxygen-rich blood to replenish themselves. But active nerve cells in newborn mouse brains can’t yet make this request, and their silence leaves them hungry, scientists report June 22 in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Instead of being a dismal starvation diet, this lean time may actually spur the brain to develop properly. The new results, though, muddy the interpretation of the brain imaging technique called functional MRI when it is used on infants.
Most people assume that all busy nerve cells, or neurons, signal nearby blood vessels to replenish themselves. But there were hints from fMRI studies of young children that their brains don’t always follow this rule. “The newborn brain is doing something weird,” says study coauthor Elizabeth Hillman of Columbia University.

That weirdness, she suspected, might be explained by an immature communication system in young brains. To find out, she and her colleagues looked for neuron-blood connections in mice as they grew. “What we’re trying to do is create a road map for what we think you actually should see,” Hillman says.

When 7-day-old mice were touched on their hind paws, a small group of neurons in the brain responded instantly, firing off messages in a flurry of activity. Despite this action, no fresh blood arrived, the team found. By 13 days, the nerve cell reaction got bigger, spreading across a wider stretch of the brain. Still the blood didn’t come. But by the time the mice reached adulthood, neural activity prompted an influx of blood. The results show that young mouse brains lack the ability to send blood to busy neurons, a skill that influences how the brain operates (SN: 11/14/15, p. 22).

That finding was enabled by technology that allowed the researchers to see neural activity and blood flow at the exact same time. It’s “a powerful application of cutting-edge imaging techniques,” says neuroscientist Alan Jasanoff of MIT.

Showing that oxygen demands are unheeded during early development is interesting, says neuroscientist Matthew Colonnese of George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences in Washington, D.C. More studies are needed to say whether human infant brains behave similarly and, if so, how this process might sculpt the brain.

The results don’t mean that fMRI data from young children aren’t valuable, Hillman says. “What we are begging people to do is to make room for this hypothesis, and actually treat it as an opportunity.” Blood flow data might not be a good proxy for neural activity in newborns, but “it may well be measuring a change that is very important to normal brain development,” she says.