The death toll from recent heavy rains and flooding in Yemen climbed to 61 on Sunday, according to a statement by the Executive Unit for the Management of Displaced Persons Camps in Yemen.
Severe flooding in the country in the south of the Arabian Peninsula has caused widespread devastation. According to a report released on Sunday by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Yemen, torrential rains have affected 34,260 families, with displaced persons bearing the brunt of the impact.
As the floods receded in Al-Suwaidiyah village in Zabid District, located in western Yemen, the village remained in ruin. According to local authorities, the flood caused a total of three deaths in the village and destroyed more than 40 houses completely or partially.
"It suddenly began raining heavily in the evening of that day (Aug 6). Our house was damaged. Furniture and cattle were also washed away. We only rescued some cattle. Everything else was gone," said disaster victim Mohammed Nasser.
The rainy season in western Yemen usually arrives in early July and lasts for nearly two months. However, due to climate change, this year's rainy season only arrived at the end of July, and the amount of precipitation per day has been much higher this year than in previous years.
As the situation worsens, Yemen's National Center of Meteorology has issued warnings to citizens throughout the country, urging them to avoid watercourses and exercise caution. The center forecasts continued heavy rainfall, floods, and strong winds, particularly in the highlands and western and southern regions of the country.
Last Thursday, the Yemeni government called for international support to help address the damage caused by recent heavy rains and floods.
Death toll from Yemen flooding rises to 61
Death toll from Yemen flooding rises to 61
Death toll from Yemen flooding rises to 61
Shanghai, a leading force for Chinese modernization, is accelerating the pace of building itself into a science and technology innovation center with global influence.
The tech-savvy metropolis is now speeding up the transition from structure building to function strengthening. Taking strengthening the capability of fostering original sci-tech innovations as the main task, it is pursuing both sci-tech innovation and institutional innovation to significantly improve its comprehensive strength in science and technology as well as the overall effects of innovations.
Over the past 10 years since Shanghai began building itself into an international science and technology innovation center, it has reaped fruitful results in sci-tech innovation, which has pushed the metropolis' GDP across the 4-trillion-yuan (about 570 billion U.S. dollars) mark.
In 2023, Shanghai's total research and development expenditure accounted for 4.4 percent of its GDP, and the city's fiscal expenditure on science and technology rose by 36.7 percent to 52.8 billion yuan (about 7.47 billion U.S. dollars).
Driven by science and technology advances, Shanghai's industrial transformation has sped up. The combined scale of the three leading industries of artificial intelligence, integrated circuits, and biomedicine in the city has reached 1.6 trillion yuan (about 226 billion U.S. dollars).
At the National Local Joint Humanoid Robot Innovation Center in Shanghai's Zhangjiang Science City, Qinglong, an open-source general-purpose humanoid robot with a height of 182 centimeters and up to 43 active degrees of freedom, is being trained to pick up oranges.
"After some training, the robot will be able to complete this move by itself when it encounters a similar scenario in the future," said Shi Zhihua, trainer of robot Qinglong.
Thanks to an advanced control software, Qinglong can skillfully perform fast walking, avoid obstacles, go uphill and downhill, and resist impact.
"We plan to build a venue that can simultaneously train 1,000 robots by 2027," Shi said.
The Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility (SSRF), a third-generation medium-energy synchrotron light source facility with 46 laboratories, has been operating around the clock to serve researchers from around the country, whose experiments cover a wide range of fields such as life sciences, materials science and chemical catalysis.
"We are using the SSRF's light to observe the phase change process of this material when it's heated to 1,100 degrees Celsius," said Song Shuang, a PhD candidate of Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
"Our team is developing materials for the energy sector," said Miao Zhikai, a researcher of Tianjin University.
"We are developing cathode materials for sodium-ion batteries," said Li Guodong, a researcher of Fudan University.
Though the laboratories at the SSRF have been running at full capacity, researchers still have to apply for them months in advance, reflecting the vibrancy of innovation in Shanghai.
Shanghai blazes sci-tech frontiers to boost innovation-driven modernization
