The 18th Straits Forum will be held in east China's Fujian Province in mid-June, a mainland spokesperson said on Wednesday.
The main conference of the event is scheduled for June 13, with the coastal city of Xiamen serving as the primary venue, according to Zhu Fenglian, a spokesperson for the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council.
A series of related events will also be held across other parts of Fujian, Zhu said.
"The trees you helped fund all those years ago have grown into a vast forest. When will you come to see them? I really want to meet you again," said Yin Yuzhen, a national model worker in China, in a heartfelt video message to Ronald Sakolsky in the U.S.
Across the Pacific, 69-year-old Sakolsky was deeply moved by the video. He replied that he would do his best to make the trip and hoped to plant a tree with Yin. The two have agreed to meet in China in the near future.
In 1985, Yin married into Salawusu village in Uxin banner, Ordos, north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Situated deep in the heart of the Mu Us sandy land, the village was surrounded by endless dunes.
Yin knew that the only way to tame the sands was to plant trees. In 1986, she sold one of her family's sheep to buy 600 saplings, which she planted around her home. Soon after, a fierce sandstorm struck, leaving fewer than 10 trees alive. But Yin refused to be discouraged.
"If around 10 survived, later it might be 100, then 1,000," she recalled.
Undaunted, she and her husband Bai Wanxiang headed deep into the sand dunes, bringing saplings and tools along. For 40 years, a roughly 2-meter-long steel rod was Yin's trusted tool. She would jab it into the sand to make a hole, drop in a sapling, water it, and press the soil firmly with her foot. After decades of relentless use, the rod had worn down by about 67 centimeters.
Over the past four decades, government-led efforts and desertification fighters like Yin have driven a dramatic transformation of the landscape. More than 70,000 mu (about 4,667 hectares) of sandy land around Yin's home have been reclaimed, with over 8 million trees planted.
Today, about 85 percent of the Mu Us sandy land in Uxin banner — around 8.4 million mu — has been brought under control, and forest coverage has risen to 32.92 percent.
In 1999, Sakolsky, who was then teaching at a school in central China's Henan Province, happened to see a TV show about Yin's efforts and was deeply moved. He raised $5,000 through a foundation to support Yin's tree-planting work.
Yin was stunned when she received the donation.
"A complete stranger had raised such a large sum for me without even checking who I was. I had to make sure those trees thrived. I couldn't let that trust go to waste," she said.
"With more people worldwide showing concern, I came to understand that this is a dream shared by all humanity," Yin said.
Further down the tree-lined road stands a stone monument engraved with the words "Citizens of Earth." On its reverse side are the names of supporters from both China and abroad, each of whom contributed to the woodland in their own way.
Yin's perseverance has inspired more than 240 households in the surrounding areas to take up tree planting, with each planting over 3,000 mu of forest.
The Global Times "Overseas China Week" event landed in Bishkek, capital of Kyrgyzstan on Wednesday, launching the "Linked by Mountains and Rivers, Bound by Shared Hearts - China and Kyrgyzstan Hand-in-Hand for the Future" photo exhibition, during the 2026 China-Kyrgyzstan Media Cooperation Forum.
Attendees included Cui Shixin, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the People's Daily; Salkyn Sarnogoeva, Deputy Minister of Culture, Information, Sports and Youth Policy of the Kyrgyz Republic; Galina Baitekerek, head of Kyrgyz Tuusu Publishing House in Kyrgyzstan; and Sun Dapeng, counselor of the Chinese Embassy in Kyrgyzstan. Many representatives from mainstream media, academic experts and business leaders of both countries also visited the exhibition.
At the 25th Meeting of the Council of Heads of State of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Chinese President Xi Jinping chaired the meeting and delivered a speech titled "Staying True to SCO Founding Mission And Ushering in a Better Future" in Tianjin, North China, on September 1, 2025. "Looking ahead, we should carry forward the Shanghai Spirit in a world fraught with challenges and changes, forge ahead with solid steps, and better tap into the potential of our Organization," he said in the speech.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of the SCO. Over the past quarter-century, it has been the world's largest regional international organization by both geographical area and population. As good neighbors, good friends and good partners enjoying close people-to-people ties, China and Kyrgyzstan continue to align their development strategies and expand pragmatic cooperation under the SCO framework.
Against this backdrop, the Global Times held the "Overseas China Week" event in Bishkek. The photo exhibition centered on four themes: "shared security responsibilities," "integrated development opportunities," "joint ecological construction," and " mutual learning among civilizations." It presented solid efforts by China and other SCO member states including Kyrgyzstan to uphold multilateralism and building a community with a shared future for humanity, striking a chord with local visitors.
At the "shared security responsibilities" section, Cholponai Turdakunova, an editor of Silk Road: Cultural Development, told the Global Times that she was deeply impressed by photos of joint counter-terrorism drills among SCO members. Under the SCO framework, China and Central Asian countries have deepened practical security cooperation with fruitful outcomes in joint counter-terrorism and safeguarding border stability. The photos allowed visitors to directly feel the SCO's efforts to safeguarding peace and stability.
Extending from security to development, China-Kyrgyzstan cooperation has delivered tangible benefits to people's daily lives. In the "joint ecological construction" section, a photo of Bishkek's waste-to-energy project resonated strongly with local visitors. Rysbekova Aishoola Rysbekovna, a Chinese language teacher at the Kyrgyz National University, shared her experience with the Global Times, saying that she had paid a visit to the city's first waste incineration power plant invested and built by a Chinese enterprise. She observed that since the two countries promoted the construction of waste treatment facilities last year, local environmental sanitation has improved notably, ecological governance has yielded steady results, and the concept of green development has gradually taken root among local residents.
"China and Kyrgyzstan have numerous common grounds and connections for deeper cooperation," said Rysbekova Aishoola Rysbekovna. Current bilateral cooperation spans economy, politics, environmental protection and people-to-people exchanges. Bilateral ties are growing closer and moving steadily forward. "I hope the two countries can engage more frequently and achieve more win-win results in the future."
The "integrated development opportunities" section illustrated deepening connectivity, featuring images from the SCO Countries Worker Skills Contest and the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway. Meanwhile, the "mutual learning among civilizations" section captured people-to-people bonds - from cultural performances to booming tourism.
Elena Zholobova, Editor-in-Chief of Kyrgyz newspaper Slovo Kyrgyzstana, told Global Times reporters after visiting the exhibition that the event was vivid and lively, with information and visual displays complementing each other. She noted that the media industry is now swept by a digital wave, and many media outlets struggle to balance quality content with appealing visuals. By contrast, this exhibition is both visually engaging and thought-provoking, and demonstrates outstanding professionalism in information organization and visual presentation.
In addition to the photo exhibition, this "Overseas China Week" event also presented the Russian-language edition of the Volume IV of the book series Xi Jinping: The Governance of China, displayed a series of Global Times feature reports on the Chinese president's important thoughts, including the special series "Decoding the Book Xi Jinping: The Governance of China," as well as reports on the practical achievements of cooperation under the framework of the SCO and the tangible progress made in building the China-Kyrgyzstan comprehensive strategic partnership in the new era.
Custom cultural and creative products at the exhibition were also well received by visitors. Among them, LLVision AR translation glasses attracted crowds of local residents who stopped to try them on. Many Kyrgyz guests said they expect smart technology to further break down language barriers for China-Kyrgyzstan people-to-people exchanges, economic and trade cooperation, and media dialogue.
While technology facilitates communication, sincere messages in the visitor book were equally touching. Visitors wrote heartfelt notes such as "Long live China-Kyrgyzstan friendship" and "Smooth cooperation between China and Kyrgyzstan." Some left their names with the message "We are here to witness," expressing joy at witnessing the friendly exchanges between the two countries.
Prior to the Bishkek event, the Global Times' "Overseas China Week" has been held in South Africa, South Korea, Brazil, Argentina, Germany, Kazakhstan and other countries. Using photography as a medium, it shares China's development stories with the world, conveys China's openness, and builds a bridge for closer people-to-people ties between China and global communities.
A 2,400-meter-deep physics laboratory in Southwest China's Sichuan Province was put into scientific operation on Thursday, making it the deepest and largest underground laboratory globally, Xinhua News Agency reported.
The deep underground and ultra-low radiation background facility designed for frontier physics experiments is located beneath Jinping Mountain in Sichuan's Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture. The facility, with a total room capacity of 330,000 cubic meters, is the second phase of China Jinping Underground Laboratory.
The first grouping of 10 experimental project teams from Tsinghua University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Beijing Normal University among others, have settled in and started scientific experiments within the facility.
Li Hongbi, chief engineer of the engineering and technology department said that the facility construction was started in December 2020, and the wind, water and power system of the whole laboratory has been built and put into use, meeting the condition for the experiment groups to settle in.
Scientists believe that the laboratory offers an environment free from interference, which allows them to pursue the invisible substance known as dark matter. They said that the significant depth of the laboratory helps block most cosmic rays that interfere with observation, Xinhua reported.
The facility will become a world-class interdisciplinary deep underground scientific research center integrating multiple disciplines including particle physics, nuclear astrophysics and life sciences, to facilitate the development of China's research in relevant frontier fields, according to the report.
The China Jinping Underground Laboratory was inaugurated in 2010, which is an underground research facility with the deepest rock overburden and largest space by volume in the world. It is located in the Jinping tunnel in Sichuan Province, according to the lab.
As one of the oldest art schools in the world, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (RAFA) in Antwerp has constantly reinvented itself since it was founded in 1663. To promote the exchange of ideas and strive for greater creativity, RAFA established an exchange program with the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing. This year marks RAFA's 360th anniversary. To celebrate this momentous occasion, RAFA and CAFA organized a unique project.
On November 2, the first collaboration between students from both schools materialized. For this project, students from the two schools exchanged artworks and, as a result, works by students of the RAFA were shown at the CAFA Art Museum until November 12. The works by CAFA students will be displayed at RAFA from November 30 to December 8. What makes this exchange even more profound is that all these magnificent works will be preserved in the archives of both schools, creating a lasting connection between the two institutions.
To support this great initiative, the Public Diplomacy Counsellor, Johan Van hove, attended the RAFA exhibition opening ceremony at CAFA and met its new president Lin Mao, several well-known professors from CAFA, the director of RAFA Johan Pas, and curators Peter Bosteels from Antwerp and Qiu Zhijie from Beijing. They discussed the development of cultural exchanges between both institutions and countries.
Art knows no borders; art does not have a nationality. It is a bridge that connects two countries. Through this incredible exchange between Antwerp and Beijing, it celebrates the diversity of human creativity and the countless possibilities of even more exceptional collaborations between China and Belgium in the years to come.
Some bedbugs are better climbers than others, and the bloodsuckers’ climbing prowess has practical implications.
To detect and monitor bedbugs, people use an array of strategies from DIY setups to dogs. Pitfall traps, which rely on smooth inner walls to prevent escape, are highly effective for detecting and monitoring an infestation. The traps are sold around the world, but they have only been tested with common bedbugs (Cimex lectularius) — the most, well, common species in the United States.
As it turns out, tropical bedbugs (C. hemipterus) can easily scale the walls of pitfall traps, Chow-Yang Lee, an entomologist at Malaysia’s University of Science, and his colleagues found in lab tests. While 24 to 76 percent of tropical bedbug strains escaped traps, only 0 to 2 percent of common strains made it out. In measurements of vertical frictional force, tropical bedbugs also came out on top. Further investigation of the species’ feet revealed extra hairs on the tibial pads of tropical bugs. These may give their legs a better grip on trap walls, the researchers propose March 15 in the Journal of Economic Entomology.
Tropical bedbugs live in some regions of Africa, Australia, Japan, China and Taiwan — and have recently resurfaced in Florida.
Many babies born early spend extra time in the hospital, receiving the care of dedicated teams of doctors and nurses. For these babies, the hospital is their first home. And early experiences there, from lights to sounds to touches, may influence how babies develop.
Touches early in life in the NICU, both pleasant and not, may shape how a baby’s brain responds to gentle touches later, a new study suggests. The results, published online March 16 in Current Biology, draw attention to the importance of touch, both in type and number.
Young babies can’t see that well. But the sense of touch develops early, making it a prime way to get messages to fuzzy-eyed, pre-verbal babies. “We focused on touch because it really is some of the basis for communication between parents and child,” says study coauthor Nathalie Maitre, a neonatologist and neuroscientist at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.
Maitre and her colleagues studied how babies’ brains responded to a light puff of air on the palms of their hands — a “very gentle and very weak touch,” she says. They measured these responses by putting adorable, tiny electroencephalogram, or EEG, caps on the babies.
The researchers puffed babies’ hands shortly before they were sent home. Sixty-one of the babies were born early, from 24 to 36 weeks gestation. At the time of the puff experiment, they had already spent a median of 28 days in the hospital. Another group of 55 babies, born full-term, was tested in the three days after birth.
Full-term babies had a strong brain reaction to the hand puff. (This reaction was missing when researchers pointed the air nozzle away from the babies, a control that ruled out the effects of the puff’s sound.) Preterm babies had weaker brain reactions to the hand puff, the researchers found.
But the story doesn’t stop there. The researchers also looked at the number and type of touches — positive or negative — the preemies received while in the hospital.
Preemies who received a greater number of positive early touches, such as breastfeeding, skin-to-skin cuddles and massage, had stronger brain responses to the puffs than preemies who received fewer. More worryingly, preemies who had a greater number of negative touch experiences, including heel pricks, IV insertions, injections and tape removal, tended to have diminished brain responses to the puffs.
About a third of the premature babies in the study didn’t receive any positive touches that the researchers counted. Between birth and the time of the hand-puff experiment, the median number of positive touch experiences for the preemies in the study was 4. In contrast, the median number of painful procedures was 32.
The study turns up links, not cause. That means scientists can’t say whether the early touches, both positive and negative, are behind the differences in brain response. But it’s possible that early tactile experiences pattern the brain in important ways, Maitre says. If so, then the results have big implications.
Oftentimes, parents don’t have the luxury of snuggling their baby, particularly when parental leave is limited and babies are being treated far from home. Nurses, doctors and other medical professionals provide other forms of care. But anything parents, medical professionals or even volunteer cuddlers can do to shift the balance of positive and negative touches might encourage babies’ development, giving these smallest and newest of people the best start possible.
The heavy-duty material used to build bridges and sculpt skyscrapers could learn a few tricks from humble bones.
Steel’s weakness is its tendency to develop microscopic cracks that eventually make the material fracture. Repeated cycles of stress — daily rush hour traffic passing over a bridge, for example — nurture these cracks, which often aren’t apparent until the steel collapses. Bones, however, have a complex inner structure that helps them deal with stress. This structure differs depending on the scale, with tiny vertically aligned fibers building up into larger cylinders.
To mimic this variability, researchers fabricated steel with thin, alternating nanoscale layers of different crystal structures, some of which were just unstable enough to morph a bit under stress. That complicated microstructure prevented cracks from spreading in a straight line, slowing their take-over and preventing the material from collapsing, the scientists report in the March 10 Science. This experimental steel requires much more testing before it can be used in construction, says study coauthor C. Cem Tasan, a materials scientist at MIT. But the principles could be applied to other mixed-composition metals, too.
Sickness makes some corals lose their glow.
Disease reduces a coral’s overall fluorescence even before any sign of the infection is visible to the naked eye, a new study finds. An imaging technique that illuminates the change could help with efforts to better monitor coral health, researchers report November 6 in Scientific Reports.
Many corals naturally produce fluorescent proteins that glow in a wavelength of light that human eyes can’t see in natural light. Previous studies have shown that heat stress and wounding, among others stressors, can affect coral fluorescence, but the new study is the first to look at the relationship between fluorescence and infectious disease.
Jamie Caldwell, a disease ecologist now at Stanford University, and colleagues used a technique called live-imaging laser scanning confocal microscopy to compare fluorescence in living fragments of healthy and diseased Montipora capitata coral. The reef coral, common in Hawaii, fluoresces in red and cyan, and can contract a bacterial infection called Montipora white syndrome, which causes coral lesions and tissue loss.
The diseased bits looked healthy at the macroscopic level, but under the researchers’ microscope, the sick coral’s pallid complexion was pronounced. Computer analyses of the microscopy images quantified the lost glow (red is the total area of fluorescence, black regions are where fluorescence was lost, and white lines indicate edges between the two zones). Among the samples studied, healthy coral had on average 1.2 times as much fluorescence area as diseased fragments. Diseased coral had disorganized and fragmented patterns of fluorescence — similar to a forest that has been logged extensively, the researchers found.
Such research “is transformative in our struggle to visualize the dance between pathogen attack and host response in the initial attack,” says Drew Harvell, a disease ecologist at Cornell University.
Many coral diseases appear to be increasing around the world, even when accounting for increased research effort, Caldwell says. Along with bleaching events and pollution, disease is considered one of the major contributors to reef declines globally. The new technique could be used for other coral species and diseases, she says.
THE WOODLANDS, Texas — It’s been six months since NASA’s Cassini spacecraft plunged to its doom in the atmosphere of Saturn, but scientists didn’t spend much time mourning. They got busy, analyzing the spacecraft’s final data.
The Cassini mission ended September 15, 2017, after more than 13 years orbiting Saturn (SN Online: 9/15/17). The spacecraft’s final 22 orbits, dubbed the Grand Finale, sent Cassini into the potentially dangerous region between the gas giant and its rings, and its final orbit sent it directly into Saturn’s atmosphere.
That perspective helped solve mysteries about the planet and its moons that could not be tackled any other way, scientists said March 19 at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas.
“In so many ways, the Grand Finale orbits provided information that was totally unexpected,” said Cassini project scientist Linda Spilker of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “So many of our models were not correct.”
Here are five things we now know and a few outstanding mysteries.
Astronomers this month announced a similar discovery for an even larger gas giant, reporting that the Juno spacecraft, which is orbiting Jupiter, had found that the planet’s rotating cloud belts reach roughly 3,000 kilometers below the top of the atmosphere.
Saturn’s clouds reach a few times deeper than that. “This was an astonishing result,” Spilker said.
“People used to think that maybe Saturn was just a slightly smaller version of Jupiter, but it’s evident that that’s not the case,” says planetary scientist Paul Schenk of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, who was not involved in the gravity measurements. The difference speaks to how diverse planets are, he says. “Every place you look, everywhere we’ve been to, it’s just been so dramatically different and unique.”
In its last five full orbits, Cassini found a zoo of organic molecules in and just above Saturn’s atmosphere, said planetary scientist Kelly Miller of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. The spacecraft found a lot of water, which wasn’t surprising — water makes up about 90 percent of the rings. But there were also a lot of hydrocarbons similar to propane, plus some methane and sulfur-bearing molecules.
The types of molecules became less well-mixed as the spacecraft looked deeper into Saturn’s atmosphere, which is what would happen if the particles came from the rings and sank at different speeds. The researchers think this material is especially raining from Saturn’s D ring, the thin innermost ring. Other Cassini data suggest this ring is losing mass.
“The D ring is slowly being eroded away and going into the planet,” Spilker said.
“We’ve had this debate going on for a couple of years now — are they red because of good old-fashioned rust like Mars, or because of the same kinds of organic materials … that make carrots and tomatoes and watermelon red?” said planetary scientist Jeff Cuzzi of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. “To me, this answers the question of what makes the rings red: It’s organics.”
It’s still not clear where the organics come from, though. They could be created within the rings, or they could come from cosmic dust from the tails of comets. Miller and her colleagues are comparing the ring rain molecules with data on comet 67P, which the Rosetta spacecraft observed, to see how well they match up (SN: 11/11/17, p. 32).
But Hayes presented newly analyzed data from August 2014, when Cassini looked at Kraken Mare, the moon’s largest northern sea, in radar and infrared wavelengths within two hours of each other. The radar images showed a magic island, and the infrared ones showed a peak in brightness at the same spot.
Because the observations were taken two hours apart, the island probably couldn’t have been due to bubbles, Hayes said — bubbles would pop or disperse too quickly. Instead, he thinks the brightening could be the glint of sunlight reflecting directly off of giant waves on the lake, like how the ocean ripples with gold at sunset. Simulations of Titan’s atmosphere suggest these waves could be raised by winds as slow as 0.5 meters per second, which would barely move a wind vane on Earth.
The spurts of liquid water were discovered in 2006. Over the next six years, scientists noticed that the plumes varied in brightness (a proxy for how much material is gushing from the moon) on a daily cycle, probably driven by Saturn’s different positions in Enceladus’ sky.
Then, in 2015 some researchers noted that the plumes’ overall brightness had been decreasing since the beginning of the Cassini mission.
One possible explanation was that the plumes changed with Saturn’s seasons. Another was that ice built up in the vents, clogging them and decreasing the flow. But looking at the full 13-year dataset, planetary scientist Francis Nimmo found that the plumes grow brighter in a regular cycle every four and 11 years. The pattern is too coherent to be explained by clogged vents, said Nimmo, of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Oddly, the plume grew brighter in 2017, so the seasonal explanation doesn’t fit either.
The variations could be explained by a neighboring moon, Dione. Every time Dione and Enceladus line up, their gravitational stress on each other could force Enceladus’ vents open a bit more, causing the plumes to grow brighter.
Unsolved enigmas
So far, analyzing data from Cassini hasn’t answered all of scientists’ questions. Is Enceladus the only moon with plumes? Dione showed signs of activity, too, but Cassini wasn’t able to confirm it. How thick is Enceladus’ ice sheet? Why are Titan’s smaller lakes full of clear, pure methane, when scientists expected the lakes to be clogged with hydrocarbon silt?
Even though the spacecraft is gone, it left decades’ worth of data to sift through in search of answers. “Cassini is going to keep on giving as long as we keep looking,” Hayes said.
Editors’ note: This story was updated on March 21, 2018, to include the affiliations of Jeff Cuzzi and Francis Nimmo.