From the editor | February 09

OZY's Around The World email takes you where no one else is going, and I don't only mean geographically. Today, we uncover how the coronavirus is torpedoing China's Olympic dreams, meet the Germany-based scientist leading efforts to build a moon village, discover why rice could help Nigeria quit oil (pictured), visit the final few fighters of a dying martial art in Myanmar and much more. Enjoy.

Charu Kasturi, Senior Editor

Around the World

The Coronavirus’ Next Victim: China’s Olympic Dreams

Since 2016, China has plotted to overcome its poor performance at the Rio Olympics. With months to go before Tokyo, the coronavirus is threatening those dreams.

The Chinese women’s soccer team for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games stretched on their yoga mats along a Brisbane hotel corridor. They had arrived in Australia from Wuhan — ground zero of the coronavirus outbreak — and were under intense scrutiny. Barred from using the hotel gym and effectively quarantined on their floor, the team had to settle for whatever little training they could manage between elevator entrances and empty industrial laundry trolleys. Four of their teammates remain stuck in Wuhan under a government-enforced travel ban.

Less than six months out from the world’s most awaited sporting event, premier athletes are typically fine-tuning their training routines. But many of China’s Olympic teams are instead grappling with the impact of the coronavirus that has already killed more than 600 people and brought disruption and uncertainty to a sporting machine renowned for its efficiency and ruthlessness. The virus, which has already hit China’s economy and crippled public life, now threatens to torpedo its dreams of reversing in Tokyo the ignominy of the 2016 Rio Games, where the second-most successful Olympic nation this millennium fell third in the medals tally behind the much smaller Great Britain.

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Around the World

The Village on the Moon Starts Here

Aidan Cowley's team in Germany is figuring out how we stay on the moon long-term.

It’s like the surface of our moon is covered in talcum powder. Everywhere you go, there’s regolith, a fine, powdery substance weathered by billions of years of exposure to everything from solar winds to micro-meteorites. Yet that powder didn’t see Aidan Cowley’s microwave oven coming. “And out come nuggets of melted regolith,” says Cowley, “which we might use to build roads, landing pads or even bricks for habitats on the moon.”

The 37-year-old Irishman is a science adviser at the European Space Agency (ESA), leading a peculiar unit called Spaceship EAC, dedicated to experiments like microwaving lunar dust. Around 15 early-career researchers and students work on speculative technologies that can help humans live on the moon — in essence, building their own moon base. What makes them different is a focus on new, crazy ideas rather than short-term projects. “We’re a brainstorming group, slash think tank, slash skunk works,” says Cowley.

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