China's eight-day Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day holidays wrapped up on Friday, with the number of domestic trips and tourism revenue seeing robust growth and exceeding that of 2019, underscoring the robust recovery of the world's second-largest economy.

The bustling scenes seen across the country during the Golden Week holidays offered the latest sign of strong vitality in China's consumption, a major economic growth driver, and the vast potential of China's steady economic recovery, in stark contrast to the dire predictions made by Western media and politicians, analysts said.

While downward pressure remains, China's economy will continue to rebound in the rest of the year and could make a full recovery at the end of 2023, thanks to robust recovery in consumption and other areas and a range of policy measures taken to boost growth, analysts noted.

Bustling tourism

A total of 826 million domestic passenger trips were made in China during the eight-day Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day holidays, a year-on-year increase of 71.3 percent and up 4.1 percent from 2019. Holiday tourism generated 753.43 billion yuan ($104.68 billion), up 129.5 percent year-on-year and 1.5 percent increase from 2019, official data from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism showed on Friday.

Some 59.89 million trips were expected to be made on Friday during the return peak, a year-on-year increase of 58.4 percent, data from the Ministry of Transport showed on Friday. Among them, a total of 18.8 million passengers will travel via the railway with 12,571 trains to be operated, according to China Railway.

Domestic consumption experienced a strong pickup during the holidays, showing the best performance since 2019. For instance, the average daily consumption scale of service retail jumped by 153 percent compared with the same period of 2019, while the consumption scale for dine-in surged by 254 percent, according to data from China's e-commerce platform Meituan.

Multiple provincial-level regions rolled out their tourism reports for the holidays on Friday and Thursday, which returned to or even exceeded the 2019 level.

Shanghai welcomed a total of 21.30 million tourists for the holidays with transactions related to tourism recording a year-on-year increase of 29.7 percent to 29.24 billion yuan, official data showed on Friday.

The Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region received a total of 14.53 million domestic tourists in the first five days of the holidays, a yearly increase of 5.38 times and 1.29 times more than the same period in 2019, thepaper.cn reported on Thursday. The region generated a total of 9.93 billion yuan in tourism revenue, a year-on-year increase of 6.31 times and 1.12 times increase compared with 2019.

Chinese tourists were able to experience the holidays in diverse forms, from touring domestic and international scenic spots and enjoying leisure time in third- and fourth-tier cities to becoming involved in emerging experiences such as cultural and tourism integration projects, night markets, and musicals, according to reports from Chinese travel agencies.

Flight bookings for top domestic destinations during the holidays surged by nearly five times compared to before the COVID-19 pandemic, with bookings for flights departing on September 29 - the first day of the holidays - hitting a record high on Chinese online travel agency platform Qunar, the company told the Global Times on Friday. Bookings for domestic hotels in popular destinations doubled compared with the pre-COVID period. The top destinations included Beijing, Chengdu, Chongqing, Shanghai and other cities.

In addition to visiting well-known cities and metropolises, some Chinese travelers also opted to enjoy the nation's rich cultural heritage and breathtaking natural scenery.

A female traveler surnamed Zhao from Southwest China's Chongqing visited the Bingling Temple Grottoes in Northwest China's Gansu Province -a world cultural heritage with a history stretching back more than 1,600 years. Zhao told the Global Times on Friday that she also encountered some foreign visitors during her visit.

Meanwhile, the ongoing 19th Asian Games in Hangzhou, East China's Zhejiang Province, sparked a consumption craze in sports and related fields throughout the holidays. The order volume for service consumption within the province exceeded 195 percent this year compared with 2019, while the dine-in order volume in Hangzhou increased by 443 percent and orders related to sports and fitness increased by 762 percent, per media reports.

At the same time, outbound tourism witnessed a strong rebound for the recently passed holidays. Orders for overseas travel on Chinese online tourism platform Ctrip.com increased by more than eight times year-on-year, according to a report sent to the Global Times on Friday. Meanwhile, bookings for international flights for the holidays on Fliggy reached a peak within the year.

The boom in tourism also spurred a consumption craze. In the first seven days of the holidays, sales of key monitored retail and dining enterprises increased by 9 percent year-on-year, while the major passenger flow in key commercial areas in 36 cities increased by 164 percent year-on-year, data from the Ministry of Commerce showed on Friday. The domestic box office also topped 2.5 billion yuan, a yearly increase of 70 percent.

Experts attributed the rebound in consumption to China's steady economic recovery and effective macroeconomic stimulus policies, showing the nation's strong resilience and huge potential in consumption, which will also play a vital role in bolstering economic growth in the fourth quarter.

Boosting GDP growth

China's economic performance outperformed 2019 in some aspects after nearly one year of post-epidemic growth, shown by the consumption rebound for the holidays and gradual recovery in trade along with other indicators, Cao Heping, an economist at Peking University, told the Global Times on Friday, expecting a full recovery by the end of 2023 or at the latest by February next year.

China's official manufacturing purchasing managers' index for September came in at 50.2, its first time in positive territory since April and after a consecutive increase over the last four months, the National Bureau of Statistics announced on September 30.

The consumption boom reflected the strong resilience and driving force of the spending power of Chinese residents, Zhang Yi, CEO of iiMedia Research Institute, told the Global Times on Friday.

Cong Yi, a professor at the Tianjin University of Finance and Economics, echoed Zhang's view and added that the targeted policy measures had further noticeable effects during the Golden Week, stressing the importance of continuing to implement the policies moving froward.

Cong told the Global Times on Friday that the consumption rebound during the holidays reflected China's huge consumption potential while also serving as a significant factor to further shore up market confidence and bolster domestic demand.

This confidence will play a vital role in promoting continuous economic growth while also elevating supply, Cong noted.

Zhang expected the consumption momentum to become an indispensable engine for advancing the economy, as the fourth quarter is also a peak season for domestic consumption, with major consumption events like the Double 11 online shopping festival.

In response to the bearish outlook on the Chinese economy painted by some Western media outlets and politicians, experts said China's consumer market is showing strong recovery and growth signs despite downward pressure with its strong market potential, resilience and confidence.

Cong noted that China maintains its market confidence as the world's second-largest consumption market, especially amid the process of rapid structural upgrading. He also stressed the importance of stepping up efforts in sectors such as infrastructure investment and support for the private economy to ignite market dynamics.

China's economic development should be the least worrying one during the global economic recovery process, Cong said.

Tianjin University's neuroscience team has made a groundbreaking achievement by launching a high-speed brain-computer interface (BCI) with 216 targets during the 7th World Intelligence Congress 2023.

This cutting-edge device enables users to type at impressive speeds using their thoughts while wearing a compact BCI device and interacting with a virtual keyboard featuring 216 keys. The system also incorporates commonly used syllables in both Chinese and English spelling, offering seamless one-click switching between Chinese and English input methods, Global Times learned from the team.

BCI establishes a "dialogue" between the brain's electrical activity and an external device. It is categorized into invasive and noninvasive types, with the noninvasive variant, based on electroencephalography (EEG) signals, being safer, more convenient, efficient, and holding tremendous potential for commercial and industrial applications, according to the team.

The number of targets and commands is a key indicator of how well BCIs can decode the brain's intentions, Xu Minpeng, a professor from the neuroscience team at Tianjin University, told the Global Times.

Tianjin University's team has gained global prominence by developing the first high-speed BCI with over 200 targets.

At present, the team has built a domestic full-chain noninvasive BCI technology including chip, electrode, algorithm and system. Three core indicators, the EEG recognition accuracy, the number of targets and information transmission rate have reached the highest international level, according to the team.

Some towns in Yancheng, East China's Jiangsu Province, were hit by a tornado on Sunday afternoon. The tornado took two lives and injured 15 people, according to the local authorities. 

The tornado hit Yancheng at around 4:15 pm Sunday, in some towns in Dafeng district, Yancheng, under the influence of strong convective weather. The tornado was identified by experts as EF2 level (medium intensity), China Central Television (CCTV) reported Sunday.

The wind speed of a EF2-level tornado is estimated at 178 to 217 km per hour and usually causes a considerable damage. Under a EF2-level tornado, whole roofs ripped off frame houses, interiors of frame homes damaged, and small, medium, and large trees uprooted. Weak structures such as barns, mobile homes, sheds, and outhouses have been completely destroyed. Cars were lifted off the ground.

According to local authorities, two deaths and 15 injuries were reported from the disaster. All of the injured have been sent to hospital for treatment and none of the injuries are life-threatening. 

According to preliminary verification, 283 agricultural houses and 32 vegetable greenhouses have been damaged. The damage is being further verified, CCTV reported.

All the affected people have now been properly relocated, while post-disaster recovery and reconstruction work is being carried out in an orderly manner, according to CCTV.

Nearly 35 percent of a group of 15.8 million Chinese adults were classified as overweight, while the prevalence of overweight and obesity was higher in northern China than southern China, according to media reports on Monday, citing a study on the prevalence of overweight and obesity in China. The topic of obesity triggered a wide discussion online on Monday, with many calling for a focus on healthier lifestyles.

A study titled "Prevalence of obesity and associated complications in China: A cross-sectional, real-world study in 15.8 million adults" was published in Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism, a journal of pharmacology and therapeutics on August 17.

The study showed a digital version of the China obesity situation based on the BMI (body mass index) classification of overweight and obesity in the country, with 34.8 percent of the 15.8 million adult participants being considered overweight, and 14.1 percent diagnosed as obese.

Being overweight and obesity were more prevalent in male than female participants, with 41.1 percent of male participants being overweight. The prevalence of being overweight peaked at age 50-54 years-old in males and at age 65-69 years-old in females, according to the study.

The study was based on data obtained from 519 Meinian health check-up centers across 243 cities, with eligible participants aged 18 years-old and above. The prevalence rates of overweight and obesity nationwide were standardized according to the 2010 China census by age group and sex, according to the study.

According to both WHO and Chinese BMI classifications, the prevalence of both overweight individuals and obesity was higher in northern China than southern China, with the highest prevalence seen in North China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, East China's Shandong Province and North China's Hebei Province, according to the study. 

Experts have noted that several factors have contributed to the high obesity rates in China such as sedentary lifestyles and a decrease in physical activity. Especially in teenagers, instances of being overweight or obese have become one of the serious challenges faced by young people, as it is reported that about 30 million teenagers are dealing with being either overweight or obese. 

The country has recognized the severity of the obesity and has carried out measures to address the rising trend.  In a notice released in July on improving China's basic public health services in 2023, the country has stressed the work in health services on key groups including prevention of overweight and obesity in children.

In 2020, Chinese authorities set a goal of reducing the average annual growth rates of overweight and obese children and adolescents by 70 percent from a baseline in the next 10 years.

The Senj Wind Farm, a project of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), is an example of the mutually beneficial and win-win cooperation between Croatia and China, said Luci Veljacic, manager of the Grupa Company in southern Croatia, in a recent interview with Xinhua.

"For me and my company it was a great honor to be part of the Senj Wind Farm project," Veljacic said, adding that in July 2019, the Grupa Company was offered a contract for supervision and implementation of safety and health protection, fire protection and environmental protection during construction of the Senj Wind Farm project.

Despite numerous unfavourable conditions, including the extremely complex mountainous terrains, the COVID-19 pandemic, snow, strong winds and thunderstorms during the construction process, the Senj Wind Farm, undertaken by China's Norinco International Cooperation Ltd. (Norinco International), was completed on schedule and "without any worker injuries, deaths or incidents," Veljacic noted.

"During the construction, all legal regulations of Croatia and the European Union (EU) and all safety measures were observed to the maximum," Veljacic said.

The Grupa Company is one of the more than 70 contractors from across Croatia participating in the construction, and among the daily turnover of about 300 workers during the construction, more than half of them were from Croatia, Veljacic said, adding that most Croatian workers were from the local Lika-Senj County.

Moreover, participation in the project has made many Croatian companies gain extensive professional experience, which will certainly make them more competitive in the EU market, not just in Croatia, Veljacic said.

Veljacic hailed the "exceptional" cooperation with the Chinese side during the construction process.

"We had an exceptional cooperation, both professional and friendly, with all Chinese companies and workers at the Senj Wind Farm project," Veljacic said, noting that in spite of the language barrier, "we successfully communicated, negotiated, solved daily problems and performed work safely."

In addition, "We also found time to socialize during the project, getting to know the cultures of the two countries ... we talked about history, music, education, customs and the like," Veljacic added.

Veljacic was deeply impressed by the hard work and expertise of the Chinese workers during the construction process.

"During this project, Chinese workers performed the most demanding work and showed exceptional expertise, professionalism, endurance and technological progress," she said, adding that she and her company colleagues also received a lot of help from Chinese engineers who "were always ready to help with their professional knowledge and experience."

The Senj Wind Farm, located on the Adriatic coast of western Croatia and inaugurated in December 2021, produces about 530 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) of green electricity each year and reduces Croatia's carbon dioxide emissions by about 460,000 tonnes per year.

In the eyes of Veljacic, the Senj Wind Farm is a project valuable and important not only for the Lika-Senj County but also for the whole Croatia, as it can significantly contribute to the total annual production of electricity from clean and renewable sources, reduce electricity imports and further promote low-carbon development.

"With this project, Norinco International has become one of the largest investors in green energy and the green economy in Croatia ... The example of the Senj Wind Farm project, the joint successful cooperation of Chinese and Croatian workers and companies will certainly be further developed," Veljacic said.

Most people don’t live close to a coral reef. If we want to visit one, we have to travel far, to the tropical waters that are home to these beautiful and diverse ecosystems. But, it turns out, most coral reefs aren’t that far from people. And it’s those really accessible reefs that we should be worrying about, a new study argues.

Eva Maire of the University of Montpellier in France and colleagues started by breaking up all of the world’s coral reefs into 1-kilometer-square cells. They then calculated how much travel time sat between each of those cells and the nearest human settlement, doing their best to account for whether a person would have to use a boat, a road or a meager track to reach the reef.
Fifty-eight percent of the cells are less than 30 minutes from people, the group reports February 15 in Ecology Letters. Most of those reefs can be found in the Caribbean, the Coral Triangle off Southeast Asia, the Western Indian Ocean and around islands in the Pacific. Others, such as those in the Coral Sea or the northwest Hawaiian Islands, are largely inaccessible, requiring 12 hours or more to reach — too far for a quick fishing jaunt.

Being close to people means that a reef and its resources can be more easily accessed and exploited. Proximity to a market — a source of income for fishermen with easy access to a rich catch — may make that even easier. The researchers found that a quarter of the reefs were within four hours of a major market, and nearly a third were more than 12 hours away. And how close a reef sat to a market appears to matter when it comes to the amount of fish swimming on the reef — those that are closer have lower amounts of fish, the team calculated.

Then the group looked at the pattern of protection for reefs. Many reefs are in marine protected areas that have been set up to limit exploitation. But the reefs most likely to be in a protected area are those that are far from people. An isolated coral reef is more than twice as likely to be protected than average.

The pattern is easy to explain. To set up a protected area, a government has to get everyone who is using that swath of ocean — for fishing, recreation, tourism or anything else — on board with the restrictions that will be placed on usage. And it’s a lot easier to do that with remote patches that not many people are using.

The problem with this, Maire and her colleagues note, is that it means that we may be protecting areas of the ocean that don’t really need protection. And it’s possible that the global goal of protecting 10 percent of the ocean by 2020 “can be met without actually reducing human impacts on the seascape,” they write.

There needs to be more work analyzing the pattern of marine protected areas before any such conclusion can be drawn. And there’s also something to be said for protecting coral reefs now, before they’re totally exploited. Corals already face an uphill battle for survival, given the threats of climate change and ocean acidification. Setting some reefs aside before fishermen and others can do damage doesn’t seem like a bad idea.

Resistance may soon be futile. With machine implants worthy of a Star Trek villain, a new breed of beetle takes walking instructions from its human overlords.

Hirotaka Sato and his colleagues at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore inserted electrodes into flower beetles (Mecynorrhina torquata) to stimulate specific leg muscle groups. By altering the order of electrical zap sequences, the team was able to control a beetle’s gait. Changing the duration of the electrical signals also altered the insects’ speed and step length, Sato and colleagues report March 30 in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

Scientists have already made cyborg insects that can fly, scuttle, and crawl, but controlling things like speed could allow biobots to do more complex tasks. Cyborg beetles and other insects provide a more energy efficient and easier-to-assemble alternative to plain old robots and double as a means to study insect locomotion, the researchers argue.

Dome effect dōm ih-fekt n.
Airborne black carbon, also called soot, can cause the dome effect by warming the atmosphere’s top layer and blocking sunlight that would otherwise warm the surface air. The reduced temperature difference between the two layers lowers the boundary between them. This effect traps pollution around major cities, worsening air quality, new research suggests.

Researchers observed the dome effect around several of China’s megacities in December 2013. The compressed near-surface layer of the atmosphere led to thick hazes of pollution, the researchers report online March 16 in Geophysical Research Letters. Reducing local black carbon emissions from industry, biofuel burning, diesel vehicles and coal burning would quickly improve air quality around many megacities, the researchers propose.

A century and a half ago, a young paleontologist named Othniel Charles Marsh persuaded his uncle, philanthropist George Peabody, to give Yale University $150,000 for a museum of natural history. And so Yale’s Peabody Museum was born, an institution that has repeatedly upended how people understand Earth’s past. In House of Lost Worlds, Richard Conniff tells the story of the Peabody through the curious characters connected to it.
Marsh is arguably the best known, for his fossil-collecting rivalry with Edward Drinker Cope (the infamous Bone Wars) and as the discoverer (or describer) of Stegosaurus, Brontosaurus, Triceratops and Allosaurus, to name a few. Other characters include James Dwight Dana, who Conniff calls “the Linnaeus of the geological world”; G. Evelyn Hutchinson, the father of modern ecology; and Hiram Bingham III, who brought Machu Picchu to public attention in the 1910s (and is thought, by some, to have been the inspiration for Indiana Jones). The book is celebration, not exposé, but Conniff still conveys the researchers’ full personalities, including their competitive natures, along with academic squabbling.

Squeezed in throughout is the story of the building itself — perpetually undersized and often underappreciated — yet, as Conniff seems to remind us, the place where the soul of the science resides. As Hutchinson said, the museum “began to play a great part in my life as soon as I stepped into it.”

Conniff doesn’t go so far as to suggest that the museum makes the man (and, through no fault of Conniff’s, most of the leading characters are men). But he views the Peabody as a rich repository of knowledge. Its walls enclose over 150 years of insights built on discoveries built on insights, ad infinitum. Without the artifacts brought back from Machu Picchu (later returned to Peru after a bitter battle), anthropologists wouldn’t have redefined the site as an estate for Incan emperors. It was Marsh’s studies of dinosaurs, and horses, that positioned the Peabody to teach evolution when others were attacking it. And the first reconstruction of a feathered dinosaur’s colors (SN: 2/27/10, p. 9) depended on a fossilized squid left mostly unnoticed in the Peabody for over a century.

Throughout the book, Conniff emphasizes the discoveries yet to be made and the pleasure of finding out something new. “Please,” he invites readers, “step inside.”

Raging wildfires could burn away efforts to reduce Arctic-damaging soot emissions. Soot produced by burning fossil fuels and plants, also called black carbon, can cause respiratory diseases and greenhouse warming, and can accelerate the melting of ice.

Rising temperatures and changing weather patterns will shift where and how fiercely wildfires burn and spew soot, new simulations show. Outside of the tropics, fire seasons will last on average one to three months longer during the 2090s than they do currently, researchers report online April 8 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres. Soot emissions from wildfires will as much as double in regions that border the Arctic and counteract projected reductions in soot from human activities, the researchers predict.
“Humankind would do well to proactively develop adequate land and fire management strategies to have at least some control on future wildfire emissions,” says study coauthor Andreas Veira, an earth system scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg.

Predicting the future of fires is difficult because many factors — from weather to vegetation — influence wildfires. Veira and colleagues strung together three different computer simulations that projected the impact of climate change on wildfires (SN Online: 7/15/15). The first predicted future changes in global vegetation, which fed into the second, a wildfire simulation called SPITFIRE. Finally, the researchers plugged their predicted fires into a climate simulation.

If carbon emissions aren’t cut, overall soot emissions from wildfires will stay fairly steady but shift in location. Outside of the tropics, wildfire soot emissions will increase 49 percent by the end of the century as fire seasons get longer, the researchers predict. In the tropics, changing land usage and fewer human-caused ignitions due to urbanization will help decrease emissions there by 37 percent.

A northward shift in wildfires will push more soot emissions toward the Arctic, the researchers warn. Fallen soot darkens ice and snow, accelerating melting (SN: 10/5/13, p. 26). A 2009 study estimated that soot was responsible for more than a third of Arctic warming between 1976 and 2007. The new simulations show that about 53 percent more soot will fall on the Arctic at the end of the century, even if humans cut their own soot emissions in half.

Many factors that could influence future wildfires remain uncertain, says atmospheric scientist Shane Murphy of the University of Wyoming in Laramie. “We shouldn’t take the absolute numbers to mean too much, just to inform us that there’s the potential for severe consequences.”