Image: Kwong Yee Cheng

There’s the China Art Palace, the size of New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. Just down the river there’s the Power Station of Art that, according to NPR, resembles the Tate Modern. There’s the China Fire Museum, and the Shanghai Museum of Glass. Since 2008, the Chinese have allocated something like $800 million to building new museums, and for the past few years, the country has opened about 100 each year, NPR says. In 2011 alone, 400 were built. China now has over 3,000 museums.

But while China might be booming in museums, the museums are not necessarily booming in visitors. Over half of the museums in China are free to visit. The others are relatively inexpensive. But when a big Andy Warhol exhibit opened up at the Power Station of Art, just 6,000 people came. The city boasts 23 million residents.

NPR reports that this statistic has a few explanations. First, The Power Station isn’t in an obvious place, sitting in an abandoned part of the old Shanghai Expo. Second, most people in China don’t know who Andy Warhol is. “When it comes to contemporary art, [Li Xu, deputy director of planning at the museum] says, most Chinese don’t know where to begin because cultural education has lagged far behind China’s economic boom,” NPR writes. Xu says that “one-third to one-half of artworks are hard for average visitors to understand if they didn’t receive sufficient art education. Chinese graduate students’ understanding of art only reaches the level of middle school students in the U.S.”

While most museum-curious people in the United States might immediately recognize Andy Warhol or Van Gogh or Georgia O’Keefe, the average Chinese has never heard of them. (And, let’s be fair, do names like Liu Ye, Zhang Xiaogang, Yu Youhan, and Mao Xuhui—all artists China Daily calls “celebrated figures”—mean much to American audiences?)

The other problem with these booming museums is that they might not be sustainable. Even now, after just opening, many of the museums aren’t open regularly. “They might have a grand opening or a press conference with great photographs and government officials,” Jeffrey Johnson, an architect who studies Chinese urbanization told NPR, “but if you return to this museum, which officially has been open for three months, it … might be closed and locked.”

According to the China News Service, the government is ready to commit money and resources to keep these museums going: “In the next ten years, the cultural industries are expected to see a golden period of development in China, and more residents can expect museums near their homes,” the service reports. Other groups in China are trying to educate their residents about art, so they can recognize and appreciate exhibits better. But it has become clear that if you build them, people won’t necessarily come.

More from Smithsonian.com:

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There are still some pretty annoying things about being left-handed. But in America, at least, we’ve mostly stopped forcing lefties to learn to use their right hand. That’s not the case everywhere, though. China, for example, claims that less than one percent of students are left-handed. If that were true, it would be strange: the global average of lefties comes in at 10-12 percent. A study in the journal Endeavor recently took on this question: Why are there no left-handers in China? The researchers also looked at India and Islamic countries and discovered that nearly two-thirds of the world’s lefty population faces discrimination.

There’s nothing special about the genetics of people living in China that makes them less likely to be lefties. Chinese-Americans are just as likely to be left handed as any other Americans. The lefties in China are actually switching their dominant hands. Why? Because it’s simply more difficult for them to stick with their naturally dominate hand than for people in Europe of the United States. Many Chinese characters require a right hand, says Discovery News.

Elsewhere, stigma against lefties still exists. Discovery News reports:

 In many Muslim parts of the world, in parts of Africa as well as in India, the left hand is considered the dirty hand and it’s considered offensive to offer that hand to anyone, even to help. The discrimination against lefties goes back thousands of years in many cultures, including those of the West.

Even the word left comes from “lyft” which meant broken. The German words “linkisch” also means awkward. The Russian word “levja” is associated with being untrustworthy. Synonyms for left in Mandarin are things like weird, incorrect and wrong.

And for a long time there were all sorts of ways to “retrain” lefties. An article in The Lancet explains the “scientific” rationales used:

The methods used to obtain this result were often tortuous, including tying a resistant child’s left hand to immobilise it. Typical of the reasoning to justify such practices is a 1924 letter to the British Medical Journal endorsing “retraining” of left-handers to write with their right hands, because otherwise the left-handed child would risk “retardation in mental development; in some cases…actual feeble-mindedness”. As late as 1946 the former chief psychiatrist of the New York City Board of Education, Abram Blau, warned that, unless retrained, left-handed children risked severe developmental and learning disabilities and insisted that “children should be encouraged in their early years to adopt dextrality…in order to become better equipped to live in our right-sided world”.

While today in the United States and Europe, left handed kids aren’t punished and retrained, these same sorts of biases still exist in large parts of the world, proving that righties are just as capable as being sinister as lefties.

More from Smithsonian.com:

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Photo: jnissa

In Mozambique, it seems to be game over for rhinos. A wildlife warden in the Great Limpopo Transfrontier park—the only place where rhinos were still surviving in the southern African country—told AP that the last of the animals have been killed by poachers.

Elephants also could become extinct in Mozambique soon, the warden, Antonio Abacar, warns. He says game rangers have been aiding poachers, and 30 of the park’s 100 rangers will appear in court soon. “We caught some of them red-handed while directing poachers to a rhino area,” Abacar says.

In Asia, the hacked-off horns can fetch a price equivalent to more than their weight in gold. Traditional Chinese medicine holds that the ground horns have curative properties. (Science holds that they do not.) In China and Vietnam, the horns are also used as decorations or as aphrodisiacs.

Mozambique’s rhinos have been living on the edge of extinction for more than a century, when big game hunters first arrived and decimated populations. Conservationists there have painstakingly built the population up over the last few years, but poachers—who often have significantly more funding, manpower and resources than wildlife wardens—seem to have finally stamped out the country’s rhinos for good. Mozambique’s conservation director remains hopeful that a few stray rhinos may still exist, however.

For many wildlife wardens, the lure of money and the lack of legal deterrents, often proves too much to resist. AP describes the typical case:

A game ranger arrested for helping poachers in Mozambique’s northern Niassa Game Reserve said on Mozambican Television TVM last week that he was paid about $80 to direct poachers to areas with elephants and rhinos. Game rangers are paid between $64 and $96 a month, and though the guilty ones will lose their jobs, the courts serve as little deterrent to the poachers: Killing wildlife and trading in illegal rhino horn and elephant tusks are only misdemeanors in Mozambique.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Mozambique’s government is still working on legislation first drafted in 2009  which would impose mandatory prison sentences for people caught shooting wildlife.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Wildlife Managers Are Poisoning Rhino Horns to Stop People From Eating Them 
In Vietnam, Rhino Horn Is the Drug of Choice at Both Parties and Hospitals 

A species of still-surviving clouded leopard closely related to the now-extinct Formosan clouded leopard. Photo: Tambako the Jaguar

Scientists in Taiwan threw in the towel this week on the Formosan clouded leopard (Neofelis nebulosa brachyura), a subspecies of big cat native to the island. For more than a decade, zoologists from Taiwan and the U.S. have been trying in vain to locate any evidence of the leopard’s presence in Taiwan, and they say there is little chance that Formosan clouded leopards still survive there. Focus Taiwan reports: 

In the search for the leopard that typically weighs 10-20 kilograms, the researchers set up some 1,500 infrared cameras and scent traps in the mountains but no evidence was found to suggest that the endemic clouded leopard still exists, according to Chiang.

English naturalist Robert Swinhoe first described the Formosan clouded leopard in 1862. In just over one hundred years, however, the species had all but disappeared. Hunters reported the last confirmed sighting of the animal in the Taiwan’s mountainous region in 1983. In the 1990s, researchers got their hopes up when they saw territorial markings near a national park that could have been made by a clouded leopard, but the animal itself remained elusive. Illegal hunting and development on the island most likely led to the big cat’s demise, they concluded.

Today, two clouded leopards do live in the Taipei zoo, but they are both straight-up Neofelis nebulosa, a species that hails from the Himalayas. The only know specimen of Formosan clouded leopard, which has a tail about half the length of its mainland relatives, sits on a shelf at the National Taiwan Museum.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Three Decades After Last Sighting, Japanese River Otter Declared Extinct 
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In places where malaria thrives, mosquito nets are used to keep the bugs away from people as they sleep. Photo: Matt Handy

In 2010 alone, malaria infected 219 million people, largely in tropical regions in Africa, South and Central America, Asia and the Philippines. That year, the disease, caused by a parasite carried by mosquitos, killed 660,000 people. Objectively, that’s a high number of deaths, but compared to the number of infections, it’s relatively low. Right now, powerful anti-malarial medication protects those millions of infected people. But, says the BBC, a new strain of the parasite has been found in Cambodia that resists the leading class of anti-malarial drugs.

The new strain, first identified in 2008, is resistant to artemisinin, a “frontline drug in the fight against malaria,” the BBC writes. Since it was first discovered, the resistant version of malaria has spread around Southeast Asia. Health organizations are working hard to contain the spread of the drug-resistant variety: if the drugs are rendered ineffective, the consequences could be dire for millions of people.

This isn’t the first anti-malarial to be rendered useless, either. “The history of antimalarial medicine,” says the Mayo Clinic, “has been marked by a constant struggle between evolving drug-resistant parasites and the search for new drug formulations.”

Modern political history is already intertwined with the history of anti-malarial medications, and if drug-resistant strains of malaria continue to spread, they could prompt far-reaching changes. The advent of the first anti-malarial, says Glencoe World History, enabled European imperialism into tropical regions worldwide.

“Before 1850, the fear of disease was a major factor in keeping Europeans from moving into Africa. Especially frightening was malaria, an often fatal disease spread by parasites. …By 1850, European doctors had learned how to treat malaria with quinine, a drug that greatly reduced the death rate from the disease. Quinine is a bitter drug obtained from the bark of the cinchona tree, which is native to the slopes of the Andes in South America.”

Malaria is most common in tropical and sub-tropical regions where the mosquitos that carry the parasite live. Photo: CDC

Cinchona trees were transplanted from South America to India, and a steady supply of the drug enabled Europeans to move across Africa.

“By the beginning of the twentieth century, more than 90 percent of African lands were under the control of the European powers. A drug found in the bark of Latin American trees, which were then grown in Asia, had been used by Europeans to make possible their conquest of Africa.”

Since then, multiple generations of anti-malarial medication have come and gone (and researchers are still announcing promising new leads). But any time a drug-resistant strain like the one in Cambodia develops, it’s worth keeping an eye on.

More from Smithsonian.com:

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Photo: Kevin H.

In South Africa, lion bones are selling for around $165 per kilo (2.2 pounds). That’s about $5,000 for a full skeleton. The skull is worth another $1,100, according to the Guardian.

Over the past several months, officials in South Africa have noticed a steady increase in the number of permits they’re issuing for export of lion bones from certified trophy dealers. Such establishments breed lions for the express purpose of allowing wealthy tourists to engage in a controlled lion hunt. After killing the animal, if the patron does not want its body or bones, the breeders can then turn a large profit by stripping the lion down and selling its parts to Chinese and Southeast Asian dealers. The Guardian explains:

In 2012 more than 600 lions were killed by trophy hunters. The most recent official figures date from 2009, certifying export of 92 carcasses to Laos and Vietnam. At about that time breeders started digging up the lion bones they had buried here and there, for lack of an outlet.

In China, Vietnam and some other Southeast Asian nations, lion bones serve as a stand-in for tiger bones. Practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine believe the bones help with allergies, cramps, ulcers, stomach aches, malaria and a host of other ailments. As with many other purported traditional Chinese medicine “cures,” tiger bones ground into a powder and mixed with wind is also said to boost a man’s sexual prowess.

Despite the lack of scientific proof this potion is very popular, so with tiger bones increasingly scarce, vendors are replacing them with the remains of lions. Traders soon realised that South Africa could be a promising source. It is home to 4,000 to 5,000 captive lions, with a further 2,000 roaming freely in protected reserves such as the Kruger national park. Furthermore such trade is perfectly legal.

But just because trade in legally-sourced lion bones is given the green light from the South African government does not mean illicit activities are not underway. One investigator told the Guardian that he estimates that the legal market only contributes half of the lion bones currently leaving the country. That means poaching is responsible for the rest.

More from Smithsonian.com:

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China Covertly Condones Trade in Tiger Skins and Bones 

If all goes to plan, a new deal inked by two of the world’s biggest companies could give rise to a sustainability advocate’s paradise: a resort near the South China Sea that gets all of its power from the heat of the water nearby through a new type of renewable energy.

The deal, says a news release issued by Lockheed Martin, will see the defense giant partner with the Reignwood Group—a massive company that does everything from selling Red Bull in China to operate hotels and golf courses, managing properties and operating a private aircraft service—to develop the first commercial plant for a new type of renewable energy generation system known as ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC).

Ocean thermal energy conversion draws on the natural temperature gradient that forms in tropical oceans worldwide. The surface of the ocean, heated by the Sun, is much warmer than the water deeper down. OTEC plants use the warm surface water to boil a liquid with a really low boiling point in a low-pressure container to form steam. This steam then drives a turbine, generating electricity. Colder water from deeper down is pulled up in a pipe, and by having this cold water pass by the pipe containing the steam, the steam is condensed back into a liquid. The liquid flows around, is heated by the warm surface water, and turns into steam once more—on and on, generating electricity from the temperature gradient in the ocean.

The idea for ocean thermal energy conversaion has been around for a really, really long time. “The concept of deriving energy from ocean thermal gradients was a French idea, suggested in 1881 by Jacques d’Arsonval, and French engineers have been active in developing the requisite technology,” says Marine Energy Times.

According to energy reporter Tyler Hamilton, famed engineer Nikola Tesla even tried his hands at making it work.

While Lockheed has been working on this for four decades, one of the first in-depth discussions of the concept came from Nikola Tesla, who at the age of 75 outlined how such a plant might be built in the December 1931 issue of Everyday Science and Mechanics journal. Tesla spent considerable time devising a way to improve the efficiencies of such a power plant, but he determined that it was too great an engineering challenge at the time. “I have studied this plan of power production from all angles and have devised apparatus for bringing down all losses to what I might call the irreducible minimum and still I find the performance too small to enable successful competition with the present methods,” he wrote, though still expressing hope that new methods would eventually make it possible to economically tap the thermal energy in oceans.

So the idea is old, but recent technological developments have driven ocean thermal energy conversion into the realm of possibility. Interestingly, some of the most troubling issues facing OTEC were solved by the oil industry, says the Marine Energy Times:

Ocean thermal is the only remaining vast, untapped source of renewable energy, and is now ripe for commercialization.  The near market-readiness of this technology is largely attributable to the remarkable ocean-engineering innovations and successful experience of the offshore oil industry during the past thirty years in developing, investing in, and  introducing mammoth floating platforms.  That achievement has inadvertently satisfied ocean thermal’s key operational requirement, for a large, stable, reliable ocean platform capable of operating in storms, hurricanes and typhoons.

Consequently, adaptations of those offshore-ocean-platform designs can be spun-off  to supply the proven ocean-engineering framework on which to mount the specialized ocean thermal plant and plantship heat exchangers, turbomachinery, cold water pipe (CWP) system, and other components and subsystems.Those offshore engineering achievements have greatly reduced the real and perceived risks of investing in ocean thermal plants.

Lockheed Martin has been working on the technology behind OTEC, too, and the deal with the Reignwood Group will see them build a test plant. If they manage to pull it off, the work could open the door to increased investment in this new form of renewable energy.

According to Green Tech Media, there are some potential environmental issues to look out for: if the cold water brought up from depth is pumped out into the surface waters, you could trigger a huge algae bloom that is really bad for the local ecosystem. But, if you release the cold water further down, around 70 meters depth, you should be able to avoid this dilemma. Having a small-scale test plant will give researchers a way to learn about any other unforeseen issues before moves are made to implement this new type of renewable energy on a larger scale.

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Some of the fossilized baby dinosaur bones and where they could have fit in the ancient dinosaur Massospondylus. They think that the new find actually represents a different-but-similar dinosaur, Lufengosaurus. Photo: Reisz et al.

A paleontological treasure trove unearthed in southern China has yielded a dazzling find: a field of fossilized eggs and embryonic dinosaurs of what is thought to be Lufengosaurus, a long-lost sauropod-style dinosaur. This “bone bed,” say the scientists in a recently published study, is tied with another field from South Africa for the distinction of being the world’s oldest collection of fossilized dinosaur eggs. What’s more, says Nature, research on the eggs and embryos turned up something spectacular:

[I]t is not just the age of the fossils that is notable, the researchers say. Spectroscopic analysis of bone-tissue samples from the Chinese nesting site revealed the oldest organic material ever seen in a terrestrial vertebrate.

The team found more than two hundred bones. They also found collagen—“a common protein found in connective tissues such as bones and tendons”—trapped within many of those bones, says the CBC.

“If this is collagen, then the potential for extracting collagen and comparing to those of living animals really opens a new area of research,” Reisz said.

In the Chinese baby bone bed, the researchers found that the fossilized baby dinosaur bones were scattered about, rather than preserved whole with the baby dinosaurs still encased in their eggs. The bones represented dinosaurs at different stages of development, which gives the researchers clues about how, exactly, the baby dinos grew.

The scientists are sure that these baby dinosaurs were still embryos developing in eggs (and not just little hatchlings), because these embryos were not as far along as fossilized baby dinosaurs found still trapped within their eggs at other research sites. Other signs made it obvious that the babies were still growing, too: they had teeth that that didn’t yet protrude from the bone, and their bones were not yet fully developed.

The Atlantic Wire reminds us that this discovery does absolutely nothing to make a Jurassic Park-style resurrection possible.

More from Smithsonian.com:

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Photo: entendered

Thieves are plundering Europe’s museums of their rhino horns and elephant tusks. First it was Haslemere Educational Museum and Norwich Castle Museum in England, then the Florence Museum of Natural History. Overall, the Guardian reports, more than twenty museums and auction houses in Britain, Germany, Sweden, Italy and Belgium have lost tusks and horns to poachers looking to turn a quick profit. Last weekend, Paris’ Museum of Natural History came close to becoming the latest member to join this growing list. The Guardian reports: 

Police were called to the museum in the early hours of Saturday morning where they found a chainsaw still whirring after a man in his 20s escaped over a wall with a tusk over his shoulder.

The thief, startled by the museum’s alarm system, tried to make a quick break for it but wound up fracturing his ankle.

The elephant in question once belonged to King Louis XIV. The animal was a gift from the Portuguese king in 1668 and was much beloved by Louis XIV and his visitors.

It lived for 13 years in the royal menagerie in the grounds of the opulent palace of Versailles where it became the star attraction. When it died, its skeleton was transferred to the natural history collection in Paris, one of the biggest in the world alongside London’s Natural History Museum.

The tusks, in fact, were added to the skeleton in the 19th century. The wildlife black market isn’t paying for historical value, though; buyers are purportedly interested in the value of animal parts in traditional Chinese medicinal. Elephant tusks currently fetch hundreds of dollars per pound while rhino horns go for much higher prices.

The Parisien museum curators say they’ll restore the sawed off horn to its rightful place. Curators at other institutions, such as London’s Natural History Museum, are not taking any chances, however. They replaced their horns two years ago with fakes.

More from Smithsonian.com:

State Department Takes on Illegal Wildlife Trade 
China Covertly Condones Trade in Tiger Bones and Skins 

Image: Steve Rhodes

This week, the Supreme Court of the United States has been hearing arguments for and against the legalization of gay marriage, and the hearings have rekindled the debate among American people, outside the courthouse, in the news, on Facebook. But the U.S. isn’t the only nation struggling with the gay marriage issue. Here are where the debate stands in other countries around the world:

There are a few places where gay marriage is legal. Denmark began allowing couples to marry last year. Argentina did three years ago. It’s also legal in Belgium, Canada, Iceland, Norway, Portugal, South Africa, Sweden and the Netherlands.

Spain legalized gay marriage eight years ago and ever since has been hearing counterarguments in court. It wasn’t until November of last year that the highest court in Spain rejected an appeal presented by conservatives, perhaps closing the case for good.

Other places are debating the issue much like we are. France in many ways seems like a mirror to the United States. The senate there will make a final vote on a bill that would legalize marriage and adoption for gay couples in April. Riot police were called to an anti-gay marriage protest on Sunday, where most estimate there were about 300,000 protestors (although conservatives who organized it claim there were 1.4 million). France’s president, much like our own, supports the bill.

Colombia is debating the issue now, and Uruguay will vote in April. Taiwan started hearing arguments on gay marriage this year, and if they legalize it they’d become the first nation in Asia to do so. India decriminalized homosexuality in 2009 but has yet to broach the marriage subject.

In China, the gay marriage question is a little different. The Los Angeles Times explains:

Women who unwittingly married gay men, dubbed “gay wives,” have pleaded to be able to annull their unions and then be labeled as “single” rather than “divorced,” the official Xinhua News Agency reported in January. Gay rights advocates countered the real solution was to allow same-sex marriage.

Sixty percent of U.N. countries have abolished laws that ban same-sex couples, but two-thirds of African countries still have laws banning homosexuality. Five countries still punish homosexuality with death: Sudan, Mauritiania, Nigeria, Somaliland and Afghanistan. In Russia, a huge proportion of the citizens are opposed to gay marriage—85 percent according to one poll. Five percent of the people polled said that gays should be “eradicated.”

The tides are turning elsewhere. In Uganda, an anti-homosexuality bill has been in the works since 2009, but protests against it have kept it from becoming law. Malawi no longer enforces its anti-gay laws. And even in Russia, things might be changing. The country’s first lesbian-only magazine was just published earlier this month.

So the U.S. isn’t alone in tackling the gay marriage question, and they’re certainly not the only citizenry up in arms on either side.

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Image: Jack Zalium

Earlier this month, locals spotted what would prove to be the first of a plague of dead pigs floating down the Huangpu River in Shanghai, which supplies drinking water to the metropolis. The pig death toll has steadily risin since then—16,000 confirmed at last counting.

But just as officials said they were finishing up with recovering the last of the carcasses, dead ducks joined the swine in polluting China’s rivers. Locals in Sichuan Province spotted around 1,000 of the birds floating down the Nanhe River, the BBC reports.

As for the dead pigs, officials still have not produced an explanation for the animals’ presence. The Huffington Post writes:

Hog farmers have told state media that the dumping of swine carcasses is rising because police have started cracking down on the illicit sale of pork products made from dead, diseased pigs.

Local officials also told Southern Weekly that the city lacks enough facilities to properly dispose of dead pigs.

Though many hog farms are situated upstream of Shanghai, the authorities still haven’t nailed down any culprits. The New York Times explains that authorities do have their eye on the upstream farmers, though: 

Those suspicions seemed to be confirmed when Shanghai officials said that more than a dozen of the pigs carried ear tags indicating that they were from Jiaxing. The authorities then announced that they had detained a farmer who confessed to throwing his animals into the river.

But in Jiaxing, farmers denied dumping pigs into the river, calling it preposterous and saying that the animals could not possibly have floated all the way to Shanghai.

It’s also possible, the Times writes, that the animals died on their way to Shanghai and that truck drivers decided to dump the bodies in the river. The paper argues, though, that this may actually be a bit of positive environmental news from China:

In May, for example, the police in this hog-producing city arrested four people who had sold dead pigs to slaughterhouses. And in December, a Zhejiang Province court sentenced 17 people to prison sentences, one for life, for processing and selling meat from pigs that had died of various diseases. In less than two years, the group had collected about 77,000 animals.

So, as the authorities have cracked down on people selling diseased or dead pigs, agriculture experts say, it is possible that someone may have decided it was better to dump dead pigs into the river.

Officials insist to locals that the water is still safe to drink and that the city’s pork is fine to eat.

More from Smithsonian.com:

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The ancient Chinese coin uncovered in Kenya. Photo: John Weinstein/The Field Museum

The 600-year-old coin is made of copper and silver and has a hole in the center. It’s called a Yongle Tongbao and was issued by Emperor Yongle, who reigned during the Ming Dynasty between the years 1403 to 1425 AD. It was found on Manda, an island in Kenya, announced researchers from The Field Museum and the University of Illinois, and it’s a tangible piece of evidence of Chinese exploration and trade in Africa, years before European explorers reached this part of the world.

It’s easy to date the coin: it features the emperor’s name. Yongle was perhaps best know for starting the initial construction of Beijing’s Forbidden City, but he also sent huge fleets of ships, under the command of admiral Zheng He, out across the ocean to faraway lands.

UCLA‘s International Institute explains:

Upon the orders of the emperor Yongle and his successor, Xuande, Zheng He commanded seven expeditions, the first in the year 1405 and the last in 1430, which sailed from China to the west, reaching as far as the Cape of Good Hope. The object of the voyages was to display the glory and might of the Chinese Ming dynasty and to collect tribute from the “barbarians from beyond the seas.” Merchants also accompanied Zheng’s voyages, Wu explained, bringing with them silks and porcelain to trade for foreign luxuries such as spices and jewels and tropical woods.

The researchers who found the coin describe Zheng He as “the Christopher Columbus of China.” But this admiral’s fleet was much larger than Columbus’. Zheng He commanded as many as 317 ships with 28,000 crew members; Columbus had just three ships and fewer than 100 crew to command.

The Chinese expeditions started out closer to home, but a voyage that began in 1417 made it to Africa. The fleet’s treasure ships brought back strange animals—giraffes, zebras, and ostriches—to the court at home.

After Yongle’s death, though, successors soon banned foreign expeditions and destroyed much of the documentation of the Zheng He’s voyages. The coin provides one of the few tangible links between Africa and China at that time. As for Manda, where the coin was discovered, that island was home to an advanced civilization for around 1,200 years, but it was abandoned in 1430 AD, never to be inhabited again.

More from Smithsonian.com:

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Tigers at a captive breeding facility in Harbin, China. Photo: Rachel Nuwer

Trade in big cats like tigers may be illegal around the world, but that doesn’t stop the animals and their parts from winding up on the wildlife black market. Just 3,500 or so wild tigers live today, but since 2000 the carcasses and skins of more than 5,400 Asian big cats—including tigers—have turned up at airports, restaurants or dealers’ shops. And those are just the remains that have been found and recovered by authorities.

More than 90 percent of these tiger parts are destined for China. That country values them for use in traditional Chinese medicine and as trophies and charms. In 1993, China banned the use of tiger bone in any product, but the government encourages breeding of tigers on animal farms. Around 5,000 to 6,000 tigers live behind bars in around two hundred zoos and farms in China today.

While China insists that these tigers are bred for conservation purposes, the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), a conservation organization, says that China is breeding tigers for other purposes. One document the organization uncovered reveals that the government has legalized domestic trade in the skins of captive-bred tigers. Rather than quelling demand for wild skins, the conservation agency argues, this legal trade only perpetuates demand for cheaper skins from wild tigers, which fetch a prices about three times lower than skins from animals raised in captivity.

A growing number of companies have permission from the government to deal in captive-bred tiger skins, EIA reports, and each skin is issued with a certificate of authenticity from the government. But when EIA representatives asked one trader in China where the skins actually come from, the seller responded, “You don’t need to care, so long as it comes with a permit. It’s as if you were asking a child trafficker, ‘Who does the child belong to?’”

As for tiger bones, which are highly valued in traditional Chinese medicine and for making bone wine, their trade is banned but still occurs clandestinely, according to skin sellers that EIA spoke with. Tiger bone wine sells for hundreds of dollars per bottle and was found on sale at the same facilities offering captive-bred tiger skins. One trader told EIA that in 2005 the government issued a “secret” internal notification that authorized limited use of captive-bred tiger bones for wine and medicine. One company plans to turn out 800 tons of tiger bone wine per year based upon this loophole.

While China publicly calls for protection of its wild tigers, EIA points out that the government sends a conflicting message by allowing captive-bred tiger skins and bones to flood the market. This only stimulates demand for tigers and perpetuates illegal poaching of the animals from the wild, they say.

Watch the full investigation video here:

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A man sorts through rubbish in Guiyu, the world’s largest center for electronic waste. Photo: Bert van Dijk

After several years of speculation, China’s environment ministry just acknowledged the existence of so-called “cancer villages,” France24 reports. Rumors of these cancer hot spots first began in 2009 after a Chinese journalist posted a map pinpointing areas that seemed to suffer from higher incidences of disease. But this is most likely the first that authorities dubbed the pollution-laden problem locations “cancer villages” in an official report.

Across China, there is growing discontent over the levels of industrial waste, smog and other environmental problems that have resulted from rapid, sometimes unregulated development. The new five-year plan points out: ”Poisonous and harmful chemical materials have brought about many water and atmosphere emergencies… certain places are even seeing ‘cancer villages.’”

The report doesn’t get into too many specifics or potential solutions, but it does acknowledge that China uses “poisonous and harmful chemical products,” many of which are banned in developed countries around the world. These chemicals, they write, “post long-term or potential harm to human health and the ecology.”

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In China, most electricity comes from coal power plants. A turn to natural gas could help limit carbon dioxide emissions. Photo: Puuikibeach

In China, everything is booming. Last year, the country’s worst-performing year in more than a decade, the economy grew by a more-than-respectable 7.8 percent. China is now the number two economy in the world, and this rampant growth has brought a surge in pretty much everything you can think of. The soaring need for materials and energy has sent the country racing to build natural resource, energy infrastructure and housing on a massive scale.

Early last year, says The Week, the Ark Hotel, a 30-story building, went up in just over two weeks. In the housing industry, says the Daily Mail, there are plans to build “20 cities a year for the next 20 years.”

China is the world’s largest producer of wind power. And, already the second-largest solar energy provider, China is looking to “double its installed capacity for solar electricity” by the end of the year. Even after a recent turn away from coal power, the country is still planning hundreds of new plants.

Against this backdrop, the Guardian reports that China could become one of the world’s largest players in the fracking industry: there are massive stores of natural gas in shale rock formations across the country.

[A]n 24 October white paper on energy development released by China’s top cabinet… “calls for ramping up the industry and pumping 6.5 billion cubic meters of natural gas from underground shale formations by 2015.”

“The model for China’s anticipated success is the US shale gas sector,” the article states. “Geologists estimate the nation’s recoverable reserves at about 25 trillion cubic meters, on par with the United States.”

…In order to reach the government’s annual shale gas production goal of 6.5 billion cubic meters by 2015, as many as 1,380 wells will need to be drilled across the country, requiring up to 13.8 million cubic meters of water, an industry source told Caixin.

But though the potential is there, says Nature, the government seems to be taking its time on the push to frack. China hasn’t had that much that experience with the technique of hydraulic fracturing—of pumping a high pressure sand solution into the ground to crack open difficult to reach methane wells:

“In the United States, it took 60 years and 200,000 wells” to lay the groundwork for the shale-gas revolution. China has drilled fewer than 100 wells, and its geology is different. Many of the Chinese shale formations have a high clay content, for instance, which makes them more pliable and less apt to fracture. Many are also deeper. “We simply have no idea about whether or not the geology is going to produce,” Friedmann says.

Natural gas, burning cleaner than coal, could have strong benefits in terms of mitigating climate change if China put its full force behind it. But fracking has been associated with environmental issues, too. The goal, if and when the country does decide to drill, is for China’s fracking industry to evolve a little more deliberately than the one in the U.S.

China is going to be able to leapfrog over some of the stages that the United States went through,” Banks says. “We are pushing to make sure that it is leapfrogging the environmental impacts as well.

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