Science
China’s Clean Energy Push is Powering Flying Taxis, Food Delivery Drones and Bullet Trains
As an American reporter living in Beijing, I’ve watched both China and the rest of the world flirt with cutting-edge technologies involving robots, drones and self-driving vehicles.
But China has now raced far beyond the flirtation stage. It’s rolling out fleets of autonomous delivery trucks, experimenting with flying cars and installing parking lot robots that can swap out your E.V.’s dying battery in just minutes. There are drones that deliver lunch by lowering it from the sky on a cable.
If all that sounds futuristic and perhaps bizarre, it also shows China’s ambition to dominate clean energy technologies of all kinds, not just solar panels or battery-powered cars, then sell them to the rest of the world. China has incurred huge debts to put trillions of dollars into efforts like these, along with the full force of its state-planned economy.
These ideas, while ambitious, don’t always work smoothly, as I learned after taking a bullet train to Hefei, a city the size of Chicago, to see what it’s like to live in this vision of tomorrow. Hefei is one of many cities where technologies like these are getting prototyped in real time.
I checked them all out. The battery-swapping robots, the self-driving delivery trucks, the lunches from the sky. Starting with flying taxis, no pilot on board.
Battery-swapping robots for cars
Of course, far more people get around by car. And navigating Hefei’s city streets shows how China has radically transformed the driving experience.
Electric vehicles (including models with a tiny gasoline engine for extra range) have accounted for more than half of new-car sales in China every month since March. A subcompact can cost as little as $9,000.
They are quite advanced. New models can charge in as little as five minutes. China has installed 18.6 million public charging stations, making them abundant even in rural areas and all but eliminating the range anxiety holding back E.V. sales in the United States.
Essentially, China has turned cars into sophisticated rolling smartphones. Some have built-in karaoke apps so you can entertain yourself while your car does the driving.
You still need to charge, though.
Lunch from the sky
China’s goal with ideas like these is to power more of its economy on clean electricity, instead of costly imported fossil fuels. Beijing has spent vast sums of money, much of it borrowed, on efforts to combine its prowess in manufacturing, artificial intelligence and clean energy to develop entirely new products to sell to the rest of the world.
Drone delivery has a serious side. Hospitals in Hefei now use drones to move emergency supplies, including blood, swiftly around the city. Retailers have visions of fewer packages stuck in traffic.
But does the world need drone-delivered fast food? And how fast would it really be? As afternoon approached, we decided to put flying lunches to the test.
We decided to eat in a city park where a billboard advertised drone delivery of pork cutlets, duck wings and milk tea from local restaurants, or hamburgers from Burger King. Someone had scrawled in Chinese characters on the sign, “Don’t order, it won’t deliver.” A park worker offered us free advice: Get someone to deliver it on a scooter.
Undeterred, we used a drone-delivery app to order a fried pork cutlet and a small omelet on fried rice. Then, rather than wait in the park, we went to the restaurant to see how the system worked.
Very rapid transit
China’s bullet trains are famous for a reason. Many can go nearly 220 miles per hour — so fast that when you blast past a highway in one of these trains, cars look like they’re barely moving.
In less than two decades China has built a high-speed rail network some 30,000 miles long, two-thirds the length of the U.S. Interstate highway system. As many as 100 trains a day connect China’s biggest cities.
Building anything this enormous creates pollution in its initial construction, of course, using lots of concrete and steel. Construction was expensive and the system has racked up nearly $900 billion in debt, partly because it’s politically hard to raise ticket prices.
But the trains themselves are far less polluting than cars, trucks or planes. And they make day trips fast and easy. So we decided to hop over to Wuhan, more than 200 miles away.
Taxis that drive themselves
We rolled into Wuhan looking forward to catching a robot taxi. While a few U.S. cities have experimented with driverless cars, China leads in the number on the road and where they can operate.
Wuhan is one of a dozen or more Chinese cities with driverless taxis. Hundreds now roam most of the city, serving the airport and other major sites.
But train stations are a special problem. In big cities, some stations are so popular that the streets nearby are gridlocked for blocks in every direction.
That was the case in Wuhan. Autonomous cars have not been approved in the chronically gridlocked streets next to the train stations, which meant that, to meet our robot taxi at its pickup spot, we either needed to walk 20 minutes or hop on a subway. (We walked.)
Of course if you want your own personal self-driving car, dozens of automakers in China sell models with some autonomous features. However, you are required to keep your hands on the wheel and eyes on the road. Just this month, regulators told automakers to do more testing before offering hands-free driving on mass production cars.
We wanted the full robot chauffeur experience.
Robot trucks don’t need windows
After a meal at one of Wuhan’s famous crawfish restaurants, we headed back to Hefei.
We had enjoyed Hefei’s airborne lunches, but there’s a lot more autonomous delivery in that city than just food. China still has many intercity truck drivers, but is starting to replace them with robot trucks for the last mile to stores and homes.
The trucks look strangely faceless. With no driver compartment in front, they resemble steel boxes on wheels.
The smaller ones in Hefei carry 300 to 500 packages. The trucks go to neighborhood street corners where packages are distributed to apartments by delivery people on electric scooters or a committee of local residents. Larger trucks serve stores.
Robot delivery trucks now operate even in rural areas. I recently spotted one deep in the countryside as it waited for 13 water buffalo to cross a road.
Subways get a makeover
Cities across the country are rapidly building subways. So many, in fact, that China has become the world’s main manufacturer of automated tunnel-boring machines.
It has also pioneered the manufacture of prefab subway stations. They’re lowered in sections into holes in the ground. Building a new station can take as little as two months.
Nearly 50 cities in China have subway networks, compared with about a dozen in the U.S., and they tend to be popular and heavily used.
As in many Chinese cities, people in Hefei live in clusters of high-rises, and many live or work close to stations. The trains cut down on traffic jams and air pollution.
And like so many things, new ones are usually driverless.
The changes are spreading across the country.
Many Chinese cities have not only replaced diesel buses with electric ones but are also experimenting with hydrogen-powered buses. And driverless buses. And driverless garbage trucks. And driverless vending machines.
One such vending machine was operating in the Hefei park where we ordered our drone lunches. According to a nearby hot dog vendor, the brightly lit four-wheeler drove into the park every morning, though always accompanied by a person on a bike who made sure nothing went wrong.
A robotic snack machine that needs a chaperone — how practical is that? But the fact that they are rolling around the streets of Hefei at all says something about China’s willingness to test the boundaries of transportation technologies.
Some ideas may not work out, and others might suit China but not travel well. For example, Beijing can essentially order arrow-straight rail lines to be built almost to the heart of urban areas with little concern for what’s in the way. Other countries can’t replicate that. Chinese-built bullet trains in Nigeria and Indonesia, which travel from one city’s suburbs to the next, haven’t proven nearly as popular.
Still, China shows a willingness to take risks that other countries may not. In San Francisco the death of a bodega cat, killed by a self-driving taxi, has hurt the industry’s image. But in China, fleets of similar cars are operating widely and censors delete reports of accidents. The cars are improving their software and gaining experience.
As for me, after several days putting Hefei’s idea of the future to the test, it was time to head for my next reporting assignment, in Nanjing. By bullet train, of course.
new video loaded: Pentagon Releases U.F.O. Files
By Jorge Mitssunaga
May 8, 2026
President Trump has signed off on a plan to fire Dr. Marty Makary, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, after a series of clashes over vaping, oversight of the abortion pill and a series of new drug application denials that rattled biotech companies, according to a person briefed on the matter, who was not authorized to discuss it publicly.
Dr. Makary had a high profile for an F.D.A. commissioner, appearing frequently on television and podcasts to sell the work he was doing at the agency on improving the food supply, speeding up some drug approvals and trying to restore agency morale after thousands of staff members left.
He tried to walk the tightrope between the business-friendly Make America Great Again movement, pledging to get rid of regulations that slow down innovation and to attract more drug trials to the United States. He was an ally of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make American Healthy Again supporters, voicing the skepticism of the pharmaceutical industry and authorizing natural food dyes.
Ultimately, Dr. Makary’s efforts were not enough to overcome the grievances of a growing band of enemies focused on selling tobacco, opposing abortion and seeing biotech therapies authorized.
Mr. Trump’s decision to dismiss him was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
The decision could still change, given Mr. Trump’s propensity to change his mind Dr. Makary has also proven persuasive with Mr. Trump in beating back previous efforts to oust him.
Leaving the White House Friday evening, Mr. Trump dismissed the idea that Dr. Makary would be fired.
“I’ve been reading about it, but I know nothing about it,” he said.
The White House has pressured Dr. Makary for months to authorize flavored e-cigarettes, according to a person close to the conversations. The approvals were a top wish of major tobacco companies that have been top donors to Mr. Trump. In March, the F.D.A. issued a memo saying that it would only authorize e-cigarettes in flavors such as mint, tea and spices. The memo said the fruit and candy flavors would be unlikely to pass muster, given their appeal to young people.
Pressure continued, though, and on Tuesday the F.D.A. authorized blueberry and mango flavored e-cigarettes by Glas, a small company based in Los Angeles.
Abortion foes including Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America have continued to turn up the heat on Dr. Makary, reiterating their call for his firing on Thursday. The group’s leaders and others view Dr. Makary as dragging his feet on a safety review of the abortion pill mifepristone, which they viewed as a way to highlight what they believe are dangers of the drug. Former Vice President Mike Pence, who also opposes abortion rights, amplified criticism of Dr. Makary on social media as well.
The administration has been under pressure from conservatives to tighten regulations on the prescribing and dispensing of mifepristone. The Supreme Court is reviewing a federal appeals court ruling that temporarily blocked abortion providers from prescribing the drug through telemedicine and sending it to patients by mail.
Biotech companies and their investors have also raised alarms with the White House about agency decisions to reject a series of treatments for rare diseases. The F.D.A. typically turns down about 20 percent of the applications it receives for drug approvals from companies.
Dr. Makary has been aggressive in defending the decisions, which he said came from career scientists who found the medications ineffective.
Dr. Makary also had to contend with a health secretary who seemed to view the F.D.A. as an avenue for getting his favored products authorized, exemplified by Mr. Kennedy’s social media post saying that the agency would end its “war on” stem cell treatments, peptides and raw milk. Mr. Kennedy pushed the F.D.A. to reverse a 2023 ban and allow the use of a number of peptides, unproven compounds purported to offer anti-aging or muscle-recovery benefits.
Before leading the F.D.A., Dr. Makary was a cancer surgeon and health policy researcher at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He was also the author of several books about the health care system.
Some of Dr. Makary’s more popular moves included encouraging broader use of hormone replacement products for women and lifting the F.D.A.’s warnings on them. He helped speed some promising drugs to market, including a pancreatic cancer therapy and the pill form of the popular GLP-1 weight loss drugs.
Some California residents were among the 147 passengers and staff aboard a luxury cruise ship stricken by a suspected outbreak of hantavirus that has left three people dead and several others severely ill, officials confirmed Thursday.
California public health officials say they are monitoring the situation after being notified by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that some state residents were passengers on the MV Hondius. The precise status of those individuals, however, remains murky.
Hantavirus is a rare but deadly disease that attacks the lungs and is typically contracted by humans through inhalation of particles contaminated with the urine, feces or saliva of a wild rodent.
However, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, confirmed Thursday that the Andes virus — a form of hantavirus that can spread from person to person — was involved in the outbreak.
Here’s what we know:
The MV Hondius cruise ship anchored at a port in Praia, Cape Verde, on Wednesday.
(Misper Apawu / Associated Press)
As its name suggests, the Andes virus is typically found in South America. The Dutch-flagged MV Hondius was on a 46-day journey that traveled from Antarctica with stops in Argentina.
In the case of human-to-human transmission, a person would first be infected by a wild rodent’s contaminated particles and then pass the infection to someone else, said Dr. Gaby Frank, director of the Johns Hopkins Special Pathogens Center.
“In previous outbreaks of Andes virus, transmission between people has been associated with close and prolonged contact, particularly among household members, intimate partners and people providing medical care,” Ghebreyesus said. “That appears to be the case in the current situation.”
None of the remaining passengers or crew members on the ship are symptomatic, he said.
The ship was not permitted to allow passengers to disembark at its original destination, Cape Verde, and is sailing for Spain’s Canary Islands.
“I want to be unequivocal here: This is not SARS-CoV-2. This is not the start of a COVID pandemic. This is an outbreak that we see on a ship. There’s a confined area,” Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, who leads the WHO’s epidemic and pandemic management, said at a briefing. “This is not the same situation we were in six years ago. It doesn’t spread the same way like coronaviruses do.”
California passengers on the cruise
On April 1, 114 guests boarded the cruise ship in Ushuaia, Argentina. Twenty-three days later, 30 passengers — including six people from the United States — disembarked on a stop in St. Helena, a remote island about 1,100 miles off the coast of Africa, according to the cruise operator Oceanwide Expeditions.
Public health agencies in California, Georgia and Arizona were notified by the CDC that some of their residents were among the passengers on the cruise. It’s unclear whether these individuals disembarked on April 24, however.
The CDC is assisting local health authorities with monitoring California residents who were aboard the cruise, according to a statement by the California Department of Public Health on Friday.
As of Friday, one passenger has returned to their California residence and is in contact with local public health officials, and at least one other remains aboard the ship, according to the state agency.
“We understand that news of an unusual outbreak can be concerning,” said Dr. Erica Pan, director of the California Department of Public Health. “Unlike influenza and COVID-19, years of experience in South America have shown that this Andes hantavirus rarely spreads between people.”
Officials said the current public health protocol is to do daily symptom monitoring and reporting.
“As there are no known cases of Andes hantavirus infection from people without symptoms, and any spread has usually been limited to people with prolonged close contact with an ill person with this virus, the risk to the general public in California is extremely low,” the agency said in a statement.
In a statement earlier this week, the CDC also said that the risk to the American public “is extremely low” at this time.
“We urge all Americans aboard the ship to follow the guidance of health officials as we work to bring you home safely,” the agency said.
The others who exited the ship on April 24 were individuals from Canada, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Switzerland, Sweden, Singapore, St. Kitts and Nevis, Turkey and the United Kingdom.
Of the remaining passengers still aboard the ship headed for Spain’s Canary Islands, California Department of Public Health said none were ill as of Friday.
How many people have been infected?
The number of lab-confirmed hantavirus cases has risen to five, according to the WHO. There are three additional suspected cases.
A timeline of reported cases of hantavirus aboard the cruise ship can be found here.
The WHO is monitoring reports of other people with symptoms “who may have had contact with one of the passengers. In each case, we are in close contact with the relevant authorities,” Tedros said.
The first passenger to have been infected, a Dutchman, became sick aboard the cruise ship on April 6 and died on April 11.
No samples were taken, because his symptoms were similar to other respiratory diseases. His widow left the ship with his body on April 24 during the scheduled stop at St. Helena.
“She deteriorated during a flight to Johannesburg on the 25th of April and died the next day,” Tedros said.
Before boarding the cruise ship, the Dutch couple had traveled through Argentina, Chile and Uruguay on a bird-watching trip, “which included visits to sites where the species of rat that is known to carry Andes virus was present,” Tedros said.
After leaving the ship, the woman was briefly aboard a KLM aircraft in Johannesburg bound for Amsterdam but was barred from the flight due to her medical condition, the airline said in a statement.
Dutch news outlets reported that a flight attendant on a KLM airplane — who briefly had contact with the widow — started feeling sick and had mild symptoms and was in isolation at a hospital in Amsterdam.
The flight attendant has since tested negative for the Andes virus, Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency medicine physician, wrote on his Substack blog, Inside Medicine, citing a text message sent to him by Tedros.
“It is still possible that the flight attendant contracted the Andes virus. However, given our understanding of the virus, this information means that the flight attendant’s symptoms are not caused by the Andes hantavirus, but by some other medical illness,” Faust wrote.
More cases may be reported, because the incubation period — the time it takes between exposure to the virus and the onset of illness — for the Andes strain of the hantavirus is up to six weeks.
What we know about hantavirus
There are roughly 50 identified species of hantavirus. The virus that’s found in the Americas tends to cause a cardiopulmonary syndrome, a condition that affects the heart and the lungs, according to Frank.
There have been 890 laboratory-confirmed cases of hantavirus disease reported in the U.S. since surveillance began in 1993, according to the most recent data from the CDC.
From 1980 to 2025, 99 California residents have been diagnosed with a hantavirus infection, according to the California Department of Public Health.
CDC officials said 38% of people who develop respiratory symptoms may die from the disease.
Still, the data suggest that contracting hantavirus is rare, said Dr. Afif El-Hasan, member of the American Lung Assn.’s national board of directors.
There is no vaccine or specific antiviral medicine for hantavirius.
Intensive-care treatment may include intubation and oxygen therapy, fluid replacement and use of medications to lower blood pressure, according to the American Lung Assn.
The signs of hantavirus
Early symptoms of hantavirus are similar to the flu and include fatigue, fever and muscle aches, according to the CDC. Symptoms start to develop within one to eight weeks after contact with an infected rodent.
Half of those who contract the virus also experience headaches, dizziness, chills, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and abdominal pain.
Four to 10 days after the initial phase of the illness, another round of symptoms can develop, which include coughing, shortness of breath and possible tightness in the chest as the lungs fill with fluid.
Even though contracting hantavirus in the U.S. continues to be a rare event, El-Hasan said, people should take these initial symptoms seriously and promptly seek medical care.
How to protect yourself
Hantavirus cases can occur year-round, but the peak seasons in the United States are the spring and summer, which coincide with the reproductive seasons for deer mice.
To lessen your risk of infection, keep wild rodents out of your home and other enclosed spaces by sealing any holes and placing snap traps.
If you find evidence of mice, wear personal protective equipment and disinfect the area. When you’re done, put everything, including cleaning materials, in a bag and toss it in your trash bin.
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