Weekly News Bites: Speaking plant, sinking cities, and sensitive systems

Asia Research News monitors the latest research news in Asia. Some highlights that caught our attention this week are an AI model trained on ‘plant-speak’, how greedy groundwater use is making cities sink, and a lidar system that could find a needle in a very large haystack.

Do you speak plant? Well a new AI model developed by an international team, including Northeast Normal University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, can! The model deciphers the "genetic language" of plants, trained on RNA data from over 1,000 species. This technology can be used to understand plants better and boost efforts to innovate using different species.

Researchers from the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, Chulalongkorn University, and the Russian Academy of Sciences discovered five new Darwin wasp species in India and Thailand. Named after conservationists, the fact that we are still discovering new species highlights Asia's rich biodiversity and the need for taxonomic research.

In what researchers describe as a “crisis in slow motion”, ground in cities like Metro Manila and Cebu is sinking due to overuse of groundwater and rapid urbanization. A study by the University of the Philippines listed the urbanized centres where this is a serious problem. The researchers urge better groundwater monitoring to combat the effects.

Scientists at Xiamen University have created a radar system that can "see" up to 1,000 meters underwater using advanced laser technology (called lidar). The paper won the award for Best Paper in the journal Applied Optics. The lidar system is so sensitive that it could fish for “a needle in the sea”.