Empire Watch

Cleaning Up China’s Dirty Streets
"The Chinese need to learn that public spaces aren’t garbage dumps", said Raymond Zhou. During a recent national holiday, visitors dropped a staggering 32 tons of litter in Tiananmen Square in just four days. Beijing’s army of street cleaners rushed ...

China’s Moon Missions
The stage has been set for a new space race between China and the US. China has sent a lunar lander to the dark side of the moon. Since communication is not feasible from the dark side the Chinese had ...

MCPH1 Human Brain Gene & Monkeys – China
Chinese scientists have been modifying certain brain genes to create a new kind of monkey. Chinese researchers have incorporated the MCPH1 human brain gene into monkey embryos, in an experiment with hopes of crossing the wires of human and animal ...

MAYAN STRUCTURES FOUND IN GUATEMALA
Researchers using a high-tech aerial mapping technique called LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) revealed contours hidden by dense foliage. They may have found tens of thousands of previously undetected Mayan houses, buildings, and pyramids in the dense jungle of Guatemala's ...

Prison Sentences – Loosening The Shackles
Prison Sentences - Loosening The Shackles U.S. Prison Population The U.S. prison population is the highest in the world. A quarter of the world's inmates reside in U.S. prisons, despite being only 5% of the world population. Since the 1980's ...

China’s Attitude of Hands-Off Costs Lives
“None of my business” is the motto of most Chinese and it is costing lives. A school bus full of South Korean children was traveling through a tunnel near Weihai, China when it caught on fire. No one stopped to ...

Millennial Views
The lower you go on the generational totem pole, the more ethnically diverse you get. Young adults between 18-24 (so-called Millennial) don't like racial labels because they don't recognize the dividing lines of the past—they are the vanguard of a ...

Mutant Butterflies In Fukushima
Researchers in Japan say they have found evidence that radiation from the March 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident has caused the mutation of dozens of butterflies. The mutant butterflies are assumed to be just one of many affected ...

Chinese waste-to-energy plant will be a mile in circumference
On the mountainous outskirts of Shenzhen, a fast-growing mega-city in China, the largest waste-to-energy plant in the world is on the horizon. You can bet that this disk-shaped trash-burning plant isn’t going to do any wonders for China’s notoriously bad air quality ...

Beijing, China – Social Credit System
By the year 2020 Beijing will be using a credit system to rate their 22 million residents by how they make purchases, their personal behaviors, if they have traffic violations, and how their financial history looks to rate their trustworthiness ...