Video of the Day: Yao Ming PSA about shark fin soup

by Mike Barish on

We recently covered the controversy over shark fin soup, so no need to rehash that. However, we were interested in this video staring Yao Ming, arguably the most famous – and popular – Chinese national in the world. In the ad, diners decline to eat shark fin soup after witnessing just how inhumane it is.

Yao, of course, is the dominant center on the NBA’s Houston Rockets. That’s when he’s not nursing the injuries that caused him to miss 77 of 82 games last season. In fact, he’s missed 168 games over the last five seasons. Perhaps he could have used some of the shark fin’s alleged medicinal and virility-enhancing properties. What? Too soon?

Video of super DIY Chinese street-sweeper

by Justin Delaney on

One of the coolest things about China is this street sweeper. Fashioned from dried plants or perhaps straw of some kind, it is the sort of thing that is conceived in the pockets of China where rural life and modernity intermingle to create interesting contraptions with a foot in each century. With the functionality of its modern counterparts and the charm of peasant ingenuity, the device appears to be plucked from Mao’s cultural revolution but remixed considerably to serve its purpose in the 21st century.

Lost kingdom found in China

by Sean McLachlan on


Archaeologists in China have discovered a forgotten ancient kingdom.

Working in Linfen city in the northern Shanxi province, the team of scientists found tombs with bronze artifacts bearing the name of the local ruler–Count of the Ba Kingdom. There was no previous record of this kingdom, although considering China’s vast history such surprises shouldn’t be, well, surprising.

The tombs date back to the Xizhou dynasty (1046 to 771 B.C.), also known as the Zhou dynasty. This was the longest-running dynasty in Chinese history and while the feudal rulers were powerful, there were many smaller kingdoms that came and went with the fortunes of politics and war. Apparently the Zhou chroniclers didn’t feel the need to record the Ba Kingdom, or maybe all the records got lost in the past 3,000 years.

Despite a bit of political chaos, the Zhou dynasty saw high achievements in art, like the bronze vessel above, the development of iron technology, and advances in writing.

Chinese archaeology is enjoying something of a renaissance thanks to greater funding and increased legal protection for ancient sites. It’s also facing some serious challenges as growing cities and rapid construction threaten ancient sites.

[Photo courtesy PericlesofAthens via Wikimedia Commons. This vessel is not one of the ones found in the Ba Kingdom tombs]

China bans time travel, America still working on it

by Chris Owen on

In their latest effort to uphold the country’s values and not dare promote anything that would re-write history, Chinese censors told the film and television industry no more fictional time travel in the media. They should have waited a little while. Over here in America, physicists believe they have proved time travel is not even possible.

The Chinese government imposed a ban on all films centered on time travel, expressing that such films “Casually make up myths, have monstrous and weird plots, use absurd tactics, and even promote feudalism, superstition, fatalism and reincarnation” reports the National Post.

Meanwhile, physicists from the University of Maryland have created a specialized kind of material, called a ‘metamaterial,’ that mimics the mathematics of the Big Bang (theory, not television program) when light is beamed through it, reports wired. In a simulated Big Bang experiment they found that circular orbits of light, needed for time travel as we believed it to be, were not possible. That pretty much rendered time travel impossible too.

Actually, science fiction fans who live in China will probably be OK with all this. They can’t see time travel in films or television anymore but it really never existed before anyway and now we know it. Or so we think.

Don’t tell the physicists at Vanderbilt University time travel does not exist. Last month Gadling reported that Vanderbilt physicists set to prove time travel did exist using a different approach. Using world’s largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, they plan to cause matter to travel backwards in time.

“One of the major goals of the collider is to find the elusive Higgs boson: the particle that physicists invoke to explain why particles like protons, neutrons and electrons have mass. If the collider succeeds in producing the Higgs boson, some scientists predict that it will create a second particle, called the Higgs singlet, at the same time.” reported Vanderbilt’s research news.

Professor Tom Weiler and graduate fellow Chui Man Ho think these singlets should have the ability to jump into an extra, fifth dimension where they can move either forward or backward in time and reappear in the future or past.

While they doubt a person could travel through time, they thought messages might be sent successfully.

“Because time travel is limited to these special particles, it is not possible for a man to travel back in time and murder one of his parents before he himself is born, for example. However, if scientists could control the production of Higgs singlets, they might be able to send messages to the past or future.”

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Proposed China hotel shaped like ping pong paddle

by Melanie Nayer on

File this under: Weird ideas that surprisingly make sense.

Only in China would a hotel designed in the shape of a ping pong paddle be been proposed as part of a sports complex. The new China hotel, located in the eastern city of Huainan, would cost approximately $46 million, the China Daily reports.

Located in $276 million sports complex, the hotel will feature three main sections:

The “handle” will be an observation deck and viewing platform. The “paddle” will include the guestrooms The “base” will include conference facilities.

The main sports complex will also include other sports-shaped buildings. An open-air stadium will be in the form of a football (no team affiliation denoted) and three other facilities inside the complex will represent soccer, basketball and volleyball. The newspaper says the timeline for completion of the sports complex is still five years away.

No word on whether or not restaurants and bars will be included in the hotel design, but we predict a great game of beer pong when the doors open.