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Tires from China are being slapped with tariffs of up to 45.3%.

An association of European manufacturers prompted the tariffs.

The average import value of a Chinese tire was €30.30 in 2024.

The European Union first imposed sweeping tariffs on EVs from China to shield its local car industry. Soon, plug-in hybrids could be hit too . And it turns out Chinese automakers aren’t the only target, because tire companies are now facing steep duties of their own.

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Chinese tires have surged in popularity, much like their cars. Between 2021 and 2024, the European market share held by Chinese tires climbed from 18 percent to 28 percent, with roughly 93 million of them imported into the bloc in 2024. According to the European Commission, around 336 million passenger car and light commercial vehicle tires were used across the EU that year. Tariffs are Brussels’ answer as it moves to protect homegrown firms such as Michelin, Pirelli, and Continental.

Read: China’s Answer To Europe’s EV Tariffs Came With A Gas Tank

Under so-called anti-dumping duties, producers such as Shandong Yongsheng and other Chinese manufacturers that didn’t receive an individual rate will be subject to a 45.3 percent levy. As with the bloc’s levies on Chinese EVs, companies deemed to have cooperated with the EU investigation will be subject to a reduced 24.4 percent tariff.

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Geely

According to a report from Automobilwoche, the duties apply to the import value of each tire rather than its retail price. In 2024, the average import value of a Chinese tire was €30.30 ($34.60). A 45.3 percent tariff therefore adds about €13.70 ($15.60) to that figure, while the 24.4 percent rate tacks on roughly €7.40 ($8.40). With VAT (sales tax) included, the extra cost lands somewhere between €9 ($10) and €16 ($18) per tire before retailers apply their own margins, and the budget segment stands to feel it most.

How Did We Get Here?

Brussels opened its investigation into Chinese tire companies in May 2025 after a complaint from the Coalition Against Unfair Tyre Imports, an association of European manufacturers. The group alleged dumping margins of between 41 and 104 percent and said Chinese producers were undercutting prices by 30 to 65 percent.

Korean brand Hankook, which runs plants in China, drew a reduced rate of 4.3 percent. Investigators found that while its Chinese factories were dumping, the practice did little harm to European industry. The Commission also noted that Hankook’s tires generally sat in the upper-middle segment and sold at far higher average prices than those of most rival Chinese suppliers.

The report adds that China and European importers rejected the allegations, warning the duties could push prices up and trigger shortages in the lower-priced tire segment. The Commission dismissed those arguments, saying European manufacturers had lost production volume, sales, and market share despite a growing market.

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Denza

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A new upgrade to the International Space Station's (ISS) quantum laboratory is enabling NASA to probe the behavior of atoms further than ever before, the space agency has announced.

Combining the ISS's newly upgraded "Cold Atom Laboratory" with the near zero-gravity of low Earth orbit, scientists are attempting to understand the properties of so-called "ultracold" atoms in an environment impossible to replicate on Earth. The aim of the mission is to study how clouds of atoms behave at temperatures close to absolute zero (minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit or minus 273.15 degrees Celsius) — the coldest possible temperature in the universe, where atoms lose all their energy of motion.

"At the coldest temperatures, matter behaves drastically different from anything we have experienced," Jason Williams , project scientist for the Cold Atom Lab at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which built the facility, said in a statement . "The wavelike nature of matter dominates, and ultracold matter can behave in ways that are not only unexpected, but that also enable extremely precise measurements of time, gravity, and motion. The lab has lots of tools — especially with this latest upgrade — to let us probe the nature of the universe."

Rule-breaking particles

Atoms and their subatomic particles are quantum mechanical objects whose behavior is fundamentally different from that of the large-scale world. For example, the laws of quantum mechanics predict that particles can be in more than one place at the same time (quantum superposition); can be mysteriously linked with each other over great distances (quantum entanglement); and move through spacetime as waves as well as moving like fixed, solid objects.

But observing these behaviors is notoriously difficult. Firstly, atoms are so tiny that if an atom were the size of a golf ball, then a human teeing one off would stand roughly as tall as the distance from Earth to the moon. Secondly, it’s impossible to isolate measurements of these behaviors for atoms in "normal" environments (like on Earth), as the desired quantum behavior is disturbed by energy from heat and gravity.

To overcome these challenges, the ISS's Cold Atom Laboratory — which is the size of a mini-fridge — uses lasers to cool gases of rubidium and potassium to just above absolute zero. At these temperatures, atoms form a state of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate , in which many atoms behave like a single wave of quantum matter.

Not only does this setup allow scientists to observe quantum behaviors on a much larger scale than that of single atoms, but the reduced gravity enables the condensate matter waves to expand and evolve undisturbed for much longer periods than would be possible on Earth.

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This is the fourth major upgrade to NASA’s Cold Atom Laboratory since it arrived aboard the ISS in 2018. According to NASA, the significant improvements in this most recent upgrade include a redesigned magnetic trap to contain the cloud of atoms, improved atom sources, and better measurement capabilities.

Scientists launched these upgrades to the ISS in April 2026, and they have since been installed, switched on, and started making state-of-the-art measurements. As well as enabling novel tests of fundamental physics, measurements of these effects are critical in demonstrating future, space-based, highly precise quantum technologies related to positioning, navigation, timing, and gravity sensing. These technologies could one day enable astronauts to navigate on the moon without GPS and produce high-precision maps of Earth’s gravity.

"In the previous century, there was a quantum revolution that led to lasers, cellphones, and MRIs for medical imaging," Ethan Elliott , deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California said in the statement. "We’re performing Quantum 2.0 – direct manipulation of large quantum states – and we hope for similar gains in quantum technology by advancing this science in orbit."