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BEIJING (AP) — Moon rocks brought back to Earth by a Chinese robotic spacecraft last year have provided new insights into ancient lunar volcanic activity, a researcher said Tuesday.

Li Xianhua said an analysis of the samples revealed new information about the moon’s chemical composition and the way heat affected its development.

Li said the samples indicate volcanic activity was still occurring on the moon as recently as 2 billion years ago, compared to previous estimates that such activity halted between 2.8 billion and 3 billion years ago.

“Volcanic activities are a very important thing on the moon. They show the vitality inside the moon, and represent the recycling of energy and matter inside the moon,” Li told reporters.

China in December brought back the first rocks from the moon since missions by the U.S. and former Soviet Union in the 1970s.

On Saturday, China launched a new three-person crew to its space station, a new milestone in a space program that has advanced rapidly in recent years.

China became only the third country after the former Soviet Union and the United States to put a person in space on its own in 2003 and now ranks among the leading space powers.

Alongside its crewed program, it has expanded its work on robotic exploration, retrieving the lunar samples and landing a rover on the little-explored far side of the moon. It has also placed the Tianwen-1 space probe on Mars, whose accompanying Zhurong rover has been exploring for evidence of life on the red planet.

China also plans to collect soil from an asteroid and bring back additional lunar samples. The country also hopes to land people on the moon and possibly build a scientific base there. A highly secretive space plane is also reportedly under development.

The military-run Chinese space program has also drawn controversy. China’s Foreign Ministry on Monday brushed-off a report that China had tested a hypersonic missile two months ago. A ministry spokesperson said it had merely tested whether a new spacecraft could be reused.

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LONDON (AP) — Celebrities joined Prince William in London on Sunday for the inaugural awards ceremony of his Earthshot Prize, an ambitious environmental program that aims to find new ideas and technologies around the world to tackle climate change and Earth’s most pressing challenges.

The winners announced Sunday included the government of Costa Rica, which was honored for a project that pays local citizens to restore natural ecosystems, and the city of Milan, which was handed a prize for its Food Waste Hubs program, which recovers food from supermarkets and restaurants and distributes it to those in need.

Actors Emma Thompson, Emma Watson and David Oyelowo joined William and Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, in handing out the awards at Alexandra Palace in north London.

Guests were asked to “consider the environment when choosing their outfit,” and Watson arrived wearing a gown made from 10 wedding dresses from the charity Oxfam. Kate wore an Alexander McQueen dress made for her in 2011, while her husband wore a dark green velvet blazer and a polo neck.

William and his charity, The Royal Foundation, launched the Earthshot Prize last year, inspired by President John F. Kennedy’s 1962 “Moonshot” speech that challenged and inspired Americans to go to the moon.

The prize, to be awarded to five winners every year until 2030, is billed as the most prestigious of its kind. Each winner will receive a grant worth 1 million pounds ($1.4 million) to develop and scale up their ideas.

“There’s been lots of amazing ideas over the past decades but it’s the implementation that really counts, so that’s what this is all about. So it’s really a reason to be cheerful,” Thompson said.

The other winners were a land-based coral farm in the Bahamas to restore dying coral reefs; a green hydrogen technology developed to transform how homes and buildings are powered; and an India-based technology that creates fuel from agricultural waste in a bid to stop crop burning.

William has said he wanted the initiative to inject some optimism into the climate debate, and on Sunday he urged young people not to give up hope for the future.

“For too long, we haven’t done enough to protect the planet for your future. The Earthshot is for you,” he said. “In the next 10 years, we are going to act. We are going to find the solutions to repair our planet.”

The United States will host next year’s award ceremony, he added.

The ceremony came days ahead of the COP26 U.N. climate change summit in Glasgow, which begins Oct. 31. William, his father Prince Charles and Queen Elizabeth II are all expected to attend.

Earlier this week William criticized the space race and space tourism, saying in an interview that the world’s greatest minds should be focused on repairing Earth instead of “trying to find the next place to go and live.”

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Follow all AP stories on climate change issues at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-change.

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A college basketball player hatched the idea after seeing a discrimination case nearly implode his own team, then wondering why nobody had done anything about it sooner.

Ten years later, that player has developed the idea into a key tool for fixing a sports landscape teeming with cases of sexual abuse, along with examples of racism and sexism in the workplace, discrimination, harassment and doping cheats at virtually every level.

The player, David Chadwick, has transformed his idea into a company called RealResponse, which provides customers — mainly university athletic departments and other sports organizations — technology to give athletes and employees a chance to initiate real-time, anonymous complaints by sending a simple text.

On Monday, RealResponse announced a deal with the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, which will use the platform as one of its many resources for whistleblowers to report their concerns about possible doping cases.

In a sign of the company’s breadth, which also illustrates the wide range of possibilities and problems that abound through sports, RealResponse already has deals in place with USA Gymnastics, the NFL Players Association, the National Women’s Soccer League and more than 100 university sports programs. It is also looking to partner with some of thousands of youth and club-sports organizations around the United States.

“I wanted to come up with something that would solve a direct challenge — the lack of confidential, anonymous, real-time ways for athletes and others to share concerns and feedback with administration,” Chadwick said.

The technology is designed to be as simple as possible, specifically for a generation of athletes used to doing almost everything on their cell phones.

It allows athletes or employees to start a report about workplace discrimination, doping violations, sex abuse and other concerns with a simple text. It skips the intake forms and drop-down menus that populate many reporting apps, and has privacy features that allow administrators to gather more information from whistleblowers while allowing those people to maintain their anonymity.

The NFLPA initially bought the service to give players a chance to report inconsistencies in COVID-19 testing protocols. It has since expanded use of the service to, according to a news release, “anonymously and securely report any and all issues … for everything from training camp issues, drug policy infractions, social injustice concerns, medical issues, COVID-19 policy violations, misconduct, hazing, harassment, and more.”

The germ of the thought for Chadwick came when he played at Rice, where a pair of players left after accusing administrators of discrimination.

“I found myself in the crosshairs of not knowing what was going on, and wondering, if they were going on, why they weren’t uncovered and addressed sooner?” Chadwick said.

He transferred to Valparaiso, and started the research. He contacted more than 200 administrators in university athletic departments, asking them what systems they had in place to receive complaints or concerns from athletes.

“I heard a theme of lots of informal forms of contact, things like ‘I have an open-door policy,’ and ‘I get to know my kids,’” Chadwick said. “But there was no consistency. Some did it non-anonymously, some did it anonymously, some did it with pen and paper, some did it electronically. Overall, there was terrible participation.”

Chadwick’s first iteration of his system allowed athletic departments to conduct end-of-season surveys from players. The feedback the ADs received was jarring: Tales of NCAA violations, drug use, hazing, sexual assault.

“The players very much bought into this and were willing to put very confidential and serious things into the system” Chadwick said. “I thought, we can’t wait for end-of-year surveys to get some of this information.”

RealResponse expanded its technology to include ways for athletes to initiate contact through a simple text.

The company also offers a way for organizations to keep a record of how they respond to complaints. Some of the biggest scandals in the Olympic sex-abuse cases have involved trying to figure out what authorities did when they received information; these programs keep track.

USADA’s sign-on to the platform marks another milestone for the company. One long-running problem in the anti-doping world has been the ability to protect the whistleblowers after they share their information.

“The connection with RealResponse helps remove potential barriers for whistleblowers in communicating with our investigation team,” USADA CEO Travis Tygart said.

Chadwick said the ultimate goal is to make that easier in all aspects of sports. Another hurdle to clear is getting organizations to buy in to gathering and more efficiently using the information that, for decades, has often been mishandled or not handled at all.

“In years past, there’s been a reluctance to implement a system like ours because of the question ‘Do we want to know?’” Chadwick said. “And that’s a point of emphasis for us. If you want to know, you should put systems and people in place to not only uncover the issues but to address them.”

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More AP sports: https://apnews.com/hub/apf-sports and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports

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LONDON (AP) — Ford Motor Co. plans to spend up to 230 million pounds ($315 million) to turn a transmission factory in northwest England into a plant that will make electric power units for cars and trucks sold throughout Europe.

The carmaker said Monday that the Halewood plant would begin producing the power units, which replace the engine and transmission used in internal combustion engines, by mid-2024. Capacity is planned to be around 250,000 units a year.

Ford said the investment includes support from the British government, though it did not specify the amount. Ford is one of the U.K.’s largest exporters, shipping engines and transmissions from its plants to more than 15 countries on six continents.

“This is an important step, marking Ford’s first in-house investment in all-electric vehicle component manufacturing in Europe,’’ said Stuart Rowley, president of Ford of Europe.

Ford plans to sell nothing but all-electric passenger vehicles in Europe by 2030, with two-thirds of commercial vehicle sales expected to be all-electric or plug-in hybrid by that date.

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TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — The Taiwanese company that manufactures smartphones for Apple Inc. and other global brands announced plans Monday to produce electric cars for auto brands under a similar contract model.

Foxconn Technology Group will produce cars and buses for brands in China, North America, Europe and other markets, said its chairman, Young Liu. He said the clients can modify their appearance and features for their markets.

Foxconn, also known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., enters a crowded global market with electrics being offered by almost every established automaker and dozens of ambitious startups.

The flagship Model E sedan, developed with Italian design house Pininfarina, is due to be launched in 2023, the company said. It said the Model E will seat five and have a range of 750 kilometers (470 miles) on one charge.

Liu mentioned automakers Fisker Inc. and Taiwan’s Yulong Group as clients.

The newspaper Taiwan News said last week other potential customers include Stellantis, the automaker formed by the merger of FIAT Chrysler and Peugeot, but Liu did not confirm that.

Foxconn said its first electric bus, the Model T, will have a range of less than 400 kilometers (250 miles) on one charge.

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