u/violentviolinz

>In a Taiwan conflict, China ‌could launch a “large ⁠attack wave” of strike aircraft, missiles flying on different trajectories, and fast and slow drones, said Peter Layton, a visiting fellow at Griffith University in Australia and a retired Australian air force group captain who has worked at the Pentagon. “There would be a lot of diverse things all coming at the same time,” he said. “It would be an air defense nightmare.”

>These drones don’t rank among China’s most threatening, advanced UAVs, but they would be costly to combat. The small, high-speed interceptor drones that Ukraine has been fielding in its war with Russia would be ineffective in shooting them down, said Layton. “Those J-6s would need a proper expensive missile.”

>The twin-engined J-6 was derived from the 1950s-era Soviet Mig-19 ​fighter. This jet and other Soviet-derived aircraft formed the core of China's fighter fleet until the mid-1990s, according to the U.S. Air Force's Air University, opens new tab.

>Dahm estimated more than 500 ​of these aircraft have been converted ⁠to drones. The drone version of the J-6 is designated the J-6W.

>Goblet-shaped sea jelly relatives with miniature “arms.” A plump, legless creature resembling a sausage. Long, wormlike animals tipped with flat “holdfast” discs for anchoring to the seafloor.

>Newfound fossils from a site in southwestern China, preserved in exquisite detail, offer a peek at a time in Earth’s distant past called the Ediacaran (635 million to 542 million years ago). The discovery suggests that complex animals — perhaps even ancestors of all vertebrates — were around millions of years earlier than once thought.

>A few types of creatures were previously known from the Ediacaran, but the evolution of complex animal life has long been associated with the Cambrian, a later period from 542 million to 488 million years ago when fauna diversity and complexity were booming.

>However, the fossils from China tell a different story. These boneless organisms fossilized as biofilm — they were rapidly buried and compressed between layers of rock, leaving behind two-dimensional impressions of their organic tissues. Animals’ entire bodies were preserved. Feeding structures, delicate limbs and even traces of internal organs, which are typically lost during fossilization, are still visible.

>Researchers found the fossils at the Jiangchuan Biota fossil site in what’s now China’s Yunnan province. The site measures just 518 square feet (50 square meters), covering roughly the same area as a dozen king-size mattresses. Scientists from China and then the UK excavated approximately 700 fossils during multiple visits between 2022 and 2025. About 200 of these specimens represented animals, many measuring less than an inch (2.5 centimeters) long.

>As the war in Iran erupted five weeks ago, social media sleuths across Western and Chinese platforms flagged a wave of viral posts detailing equipment at U.S. bases, the movements of American carrier groups and granular breakdowns of how military aircraft were assembling for strikes on Tehran.

>The intelligence came from a fast growing new market: Chinese firms — some with links to the People’s Liberation Army — marrying artificial intelligence with open-source data to market information they claim can “expose” the movements of U.S. forces.

>“The proliferation of more and more capable private sector geospatial analysis companies in China will augment China’s defense capabilities and ability to contest U.S. forces in a crisis,” said Ryan Fedasiuk, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute think tank.

>MizarVision, a Hangzhou-based firm founded in 2021, is one of the companies that uses a mix of Western and Chinese data filtered through AI to catalogue activity at U.S. bases in the Middle East, track naval movements and identify the position and number of specific aircraft and missile defense systems.

>Images sourced to the firm — which is not part of China’s military but holds a National Military Standard certification required for firms supplying services to the People’s Liberation Army — and posted on Chinese and Western social media, for example, detailed the buildup of U.S. forces in the Middle East on the eve of the launch of Operation Epic Fury, including the passage of the USS Gerald R. Ford and USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike groups. It also shared detailed breakdowns of the number and types of aircraft massing at Israel’s Ovda Air Base, Saudi Arabia’s Prince Sultan Air Base and Qatar’s al-Udeid Air Base.

>“In the lead-up to the escalation of tensions in Iran in 2026, we quickly identified the locations of weapons and equipment deployed in the Middle East,” and “exposed” the refueling patterns of U.S. carrier groups, MizarVizion’s website claims.

>Elsewhere on the site, it claims to have tracked U.S. military escalation ahead of the operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro “months in advance” and says it can “track the entire transport process” of U.S. medium-range missiles in the Asia Pacific “in real time.”

>“My understanding is that they are buying a lot of imagery from actual collectors like the Jilin satellite constellation that China operates,” said Fedasiuk, who has tracked the rise of Chinese firms positioning themselves as experts in monitoring U.S. military movements.

>Jing’an Technology, another Hangzhou-based firm tracking U.S. military movements in the Middle East, released what it claimed was a recording two U.S. B-2A stealth bombers communicating with each other during the opening salvos of Operation Epic Fury.

>“In the eyes of AI, there is no absolute ‘stealth,’” it said in a post on Chinese social media site describing its analysis in early March. The firm later deleted the recording. In earlier posts, it claims to have tracked similar interactions between U.S. B-52 strategic bombers flying patrols near Venezuela in October.

>“While ordinary people were still debating over social media tweets, [Jing’an] frantically cross-validated massive amounts of ship and flight data in just a few days from the end of January to the beginning of February, locking onto more than 100 U.S. warships, dozens of U.S. military aircraft, and recorded more than 100,000 [military-related] movements,” the firm said in a Chinese social media post.