The President of the 77th Session of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly Csaba Kőrösi visited the China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research (IWHR) on Friday during his trip to China, applauding China's wisdom in dealing with water crises in ways that provides valuable experience to other countries.

At the invitation of Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang, Korosi visited China from February 1 to 4, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

Korosi believes that China's measures to deal with water crises are scientific and advanced, after gaining comprehensive knowledge of China's water science and technology development, and water engineering achievements in exchanges with relevant Chinese officials and water experts.

For the world today, the water crisis is imminent. In his speech, Korosi said that with climate change, floods, and droughts becoming more frequent around the world. It is estimated that in the next 20 years, about 400 million people around the world will be forced to leave their homes due to floods and droughts, which is unprecedented in human history.

In response to the global water challenge, the United Nations will convene the UN 2023 Water Conference from March 22 to 24 to steer a shift in water decision-making and truly improve water security and stability. 

"To meet such challenges, we must rely on scientific evidence," said Korosi.

He thanked China for its contribution to the realization of the water goals set by the UN Sustainable Development Agenda, and affirmed that science-based solutions to the water crisis would also provide valuable experience for other fields to fully realize the Sustainable Development Goals.

Water is the source of all living things and the cornerstone of all the Sustainable Development Goals. The world today faces a series of global challenges, such as climate change, and water is the key to meeting them. The world must use a united, sustainable, and scientific approach to solve the problem, said Kuang Shangfu, head of the IWHR.Chen Houqun, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a senior engineer at the IWHR, elaborated on specific technical difficulties that China's large water conservancy projects such as the South-to-North Water Diversion Project and the Three Gorges Dam have overcome. He offered examples of cases to demonstrate the contributions made by these major projects and contributed to China's economic boom and social development, such as in low-carbon emission reduction.

Chinese regulators have required apps and WeChat mini programs by domestic developers to register via the same system as domestic websites. Experts said the move will help optimize registration and management procedures and mechanisms for apps and mini programs while helping to better deal with the issues that have arisen with the expansion of the internet such as online fraud and pornographic content.

According to a notice released by WeChat on Wednesday, starting from September 1 mini programs on the platform have to register with the Internet Content Provider (ICP) system before they can become available on WeChat. The registration has to be completed in accordance with national regulations and rules such as the Law on Combating Telecom and Online Fraud, and Internet Information Service Management Measures, the notice said.

The move came one day after China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) issued a notice requiring all domestic app developers to complete registration procedures.

China started to require ICP registration in 2000. The mechanism has played an active role in promoting the development of the internet in China over the past two decades. Along with the rapid development of the internet, apps have become the main content carrier of internet service and should register with the same requirements as websites, including registering the developers' real name, network resources and services, according to the notice.

Along with the rapid development of the internet in China over the years, apps and mini programs became widely used. So it is necessary to standardize and optimize the registration and management mechanism for these products, Xie Yongjiang, executive director of the Internet Management and Legislation Research Center at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunication, told the Global Times on Wednesday.

Xie highlighted some issues that have come along with the wide usage of apps and mini programs such as gambling, telecom fraud and pornographic content in education apps for children. Strict registration and review procedures will help to prevent such problems in the future, he said.

This optimized mechanism will also help deal with emerging problems such as private information leakage given the rapid development of big data and artificial intelligence technologies, the expert said.

Mini programs already on the platform also have to finish registration by the end of March 2024 or they will be shut down starting April 1, 2024.

According to the MIIT notice on Tuesday, app developers who started providing apps in the Chinese market before the notice was issued have to register with provincial-level communications administrations where the developer is based between September 2023 and March 2024. MIIT will carry out an inspection in April-June 2024 and developers who have not registered by that time will be dealt with according to the law, the notice said.

The notice stressed that app developers in the fields of journalism, publishing, education, film and television, and religion should also provide approval documentation from provincial-level communication administrations while registering their apps.

Along with EG.5, a sublineage of the Omicron variant, being classified as a "variant of interest" by the World Health Organization (WHO), the topic of a third COVID-19 wave has triggered discussions among Chinese netizens in recent days with many sharing their infection experiences. Experts noted that the COVID-19 situation in China is still stable and that there is no need to panic.

Some netizens on Monday who said on social media that they had been reinfected a third time noted that their symptoms were lighter than previous infections. However, some shared different experiences.

The current COVID-19 infections are more hidden, but generally still at a relatively stable level. There isn't an obvious seasonal pattern for COVID-19 transmission, but usually it will show a small infection peak every five to six months. Generally, "the infection peak is decreasing, with no impact on the country's overall prevention work," Lu Hongzhou, head of the Third People's Hospital of Shenzhen, told the Global Times on Monday.

Generally speaking, fewer people have been infected for a third or more time in Shenzhen, South China's Guangdong Province, according to Lu.

Peng Jie, director of the Difficult Infectious Disease Center at Nanfang Hospital in Guangzhou, also in Guangdong, said since the peak reinfection wave in May, some patients who thought they had ordinary fevers only found out they had COVID-19 after nucleic acid testing. Among them, only a few were infected for the third time, and their symptoms are relatively light, said Peng, according to a report issued on the Guangdong authorities' WeChat account on Saturday.

National fever outpatient treatment and the number of severe COVID-19 cases have shown a fluctuating downward trend, according to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC).

In July alone, the Chinese mainland reported 455 new serious cases of COVID-19, with 65 deaths. The patients had underlying health issues, and no one died of respiratory failure due to COVID-19, the China CDC said in its latest report issued on August 3. In June, the country reported 1,968 new serious cases, with 239 deaths, said the China CDC.

Based on the July data, the genome sequences of 9,591 local COVID-19 samples were all Omicron variant strains, covering 116 evolutionary branches, and the XBB variant strains were the main circulating ones, said the report released by the China CDC.

Due to the highly infectious nature of COVID-19 and the natural decrease in antibodies in individuals over time, basically most people can expect to be infected one to three times in a year. However, "for people with normal immune function, it will not have a significant impact on them," Lu explained. 

As long as the COVID-19 mutation doesn't completely break away from the Omicron subbranch, an individual will have a cross-immune memory, so when an individual encounters the EG.5 COVID-19 strain, it will respond fast and produce antibodies, according to Lu.

EG.5 was first reported in February, and designated as a variant under monitoring in July, according to a report released by the WHO on August 9. There has been a steady increase in the proportion of EG.5 reported globally. From July 17 to 23, the global prevalence of EG.5 was 17.4 percent, a notable rise from the data reported in the week from June 19 to 25, when the global prevalence of EG.5 was 7.6 percent, according to the WHO.

Lu suggested people with underlying health issues receive COVID-19 vaccinations regularly, including nasal spray vaccines or other multivalent vaccine strategies.

Though a slew of efforts have made to win back foreign tourists, Myanmar has been spurned due to rising security concerns caused by high profile telecom fraud cases and domestic political turmoil. Bookings for five-star hotels in the country still have been desolate even though the prices of some rooms have dropped to 300 yuan ($40) per night, Chinese media reported.

Some starred hotels in Myanmar have even been forced to give 40 percent discounts to lure in tourists. Earlier this year, the famous Sedona Hotel Yangon was forced to sell to a Singaporean company and a $130 million Peninsula hotel project in Yangon was suspended due to political instability and other factors, media reports said.

When reached by the Global Times on Thursday, several travel agencies, including Beijing China International Travel Service Co, Shanghai China International Travel Service Co, Spring Tour, tuniu.com and Shanghai Airlines Tours International, replied that they have no tourism products for Myanmar on offer at the moment. 

They were uncertain about when these tours would resume. A staffer from tuniu.com told the Global Times that they can only provide business visa services at the moment. 

According to a notice issued by the General Office of China's Ministry of Culture and Tourism on August 10, travel agencies and online tourism service providers across the country have been permitted to resume outbound group tours and "airline tickets plus hotel" services for Chinese citizens to destinations listed in the third batch of permitted countries and regions. Myanmar is included on the list of Asian countries. 

It is no longer surprising to see Chinese people say they are worried about being caught in telecom scams due to stereotypes involving Myanmar. The unfavorable perceptions about the South Asian nation were once again reinforced by No More Bets, a crime action drama currently dominating the box office in the Chinese mainland.

In a poll conducted by Chinese media on Thursday inquiring about whether Chinese netizens would travel to Myanmar, 8,901 respondents out of 9,298 said they wouldn't consider going due to safety concerns. 

Chinese tourists' unfavorable perception toward Myanmar is a result of multiple factors - political turmoil, rising concerns over rampant telecom fraud cases and the relatively poor tourism reception capability comparing to other South Asian countries, Song Qingrun, a senior research fellow from the School of Asian Studies at Beijing Foreign Studies University, told the Global Times on Thursday. Limited direct flights could also be one of the reasons why there hasn't been a jump in the number of Chinese tourists traveling to the country, Song noted. 

Myanmar's political society has been continually torn apart in the past few years. The struggle between the military and its supporters and the opposition has turned violent. Some extremist rebels have formed shadow governments along the border, carrying out scattered violent attacks on government departments and military and political officials, Song noted. 

The Chinese Embassy in Myanmar frequently reminds Chinese citizens not to believe high-salary recruitment information online, engage in illegal or criminal activities, so as to avoid damage to life and property during their stay in Myanmar. Previously, the UK warned British citizens not to travel to the conflict zone in Myanmar and the US State Department has also issued a Level 4 advisory against travel to the country, quoting civil unrest and armed conflicts.

According to figures from the Myanmar's Ministry of Hotels and Tourism, from April 2022 to the end of March in 2023, Myanmar received a total of 367,368 international tourists, of which Chinese tourists topped the list at 48,342, accounting for 13.15 percent. This is not even a fraction of what it used to be.

The latest data during the first half of 2023 showed that Myanmar attracted just 450,000 foreign tourists, led by Chinese and Thai tourists. Although it saw an increase compared to the same period last year, that increase is far less than that of neighboring countries, media reported. 

Song told the Global Times that the peak influx of Chinese travelers to the South Asian country in 2016 and 2017 has not returned despite the resumption of China's group tours to the country. However, Song said that since Myanmar is a close neighboring country of China and contains vast abundant tourism resources, it is still attractive to many Chinese travelers. He also called for a rational view of the country since the stereotype that it is plagued by crimes may have been amplified by media. 

Myanmar has been making efforts to optimize its domestic tourists market. Myanmar's ambition to win back more Chinese tourists can clearly be seen at the ongoing seventh China-South Asia Expo in Kunming, Southwest China's Yunnan Province, Song said. 

Myanmar has arranged for more than 100 entrepreneurs to participate in the exhibition and for the first time used naked eye 3D screens to display the beautiful cultural scenes of the country, the China News Service has reported. 

Some tourism insiders pointed out that the gloomy tourism enthusiasm from Chinese people in the post COVID-19 era does not specially target the country, but the entire South Asian tourism market. An employee surnamed Sun from Shanghai Airlines Tours International told the Global Times that tours to Southeast Asian countries have all shown average poor performances these days except for the Philippines.

Here’s a good idea for the next presidential candidate debate: They can insult each other about their ignorance of statistics.

Actually, it’s a pertinent topic for political office seekers, as public opinion polls use statistical methods to measure the electorate’s support (or lack thereof) for a particular candidate. But such polls are notoriously unreliable, as Hillary Clinton found out in Michigan.

It probably wouldn’t be a very informative debate, of course — just imagine how Donald Trump would respond to a question asking what he thought about P values. Sadly, though, he and the other candidates might actually understand P values just about as well as many practicing scientists — which is to say, not very well at all.
In recent years criticism about P values — statistical measures widely used to analyze experimental data in most scientific disciplines — has finally reverberated loudly enough for the scientific community to listen. A watershed acknowledgment of P value problems appeared this week when the American Statistical Association issued a statement warning the rest of the world about the limitations of P values and their widespread misuse.

“While the p-value can be a useful statistical measure, it is commonly misused and misinterpreted,” the statistical association report stated. “This has led to some scientific journals discouraging the use of p-values, and some scientists and statisticians recommending their abandonment.”

In light of these issues, the association convened a group of experts to formulate a document listing six “principles” regarding P values for the guidance of “researchers, practitioners and science writers who are not primarily statisticians.” Of those six principles, the most pertinent for people in general (and science journalists in particular) is No. 5: “A p-value, or statistical significance, does not measure the size of an effect or the importance of a result.”

What, then, does it measure? That’s principle No. 1: “… how incompatible the data are with a specified statistical model.” But note well principle No. 2: “P-values do not measure the probability that the studied hypothesis is true, or the probability that the data were produced by random chance alone.” And therefore, always remember principle No. 3: “Scientific conclusions … or policy decisions should not be based only on whether a p-value passes a specific threshold.”

In other words, the common convention of judging a P value less than .05 to be “statistically significant” is not really a proper basis for assigning significance at all. Except that scientific journals still regularly use that criterion for deciding whether a paper gets published. Which in turn drives researchers to finagle their data to get a P value of less than .05. As a result, the scientific process is tarnished and the published scientific literature is often unreliable.
As the statistical association statement points out, this situation is far from merely of academic concern.

“The issues touched on here affect not only research, but research funding, journal practices, career advancement, scientific education, public policy, journalism, and law,” the authors point out in the report, published online March 7 in The American Statistician.

Many of the experts who participated in the process wrote commentaries on the document, some stressing that it did not go far enough in condemning P values’ pernicious influences on science.

“Viewed alone, p-values calculated from a set of numbers and assuming a statistical model are of limited value and frequently are meaningless,” wrote biostatistician Donald Berry of MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. He cited the serious negative impact that misuse and misinterpretation of P values has had not only on science, but also on society. “Patients with serious diseases have been harmed. Researchers have chased wild geese, finding too often that statistically significant conclusions could not be reproduced. The economic impacts of faulty statistical conclusions are great.”

Echoing Berry’s concerns was Boston University epidemiologist Kenneth Rothman. “It is a safe bet that people have suffered or died because scientists (and editors, regulators, journalists and others) have used significance tests to interpret results,” Rothman wrote. “The correspondence between results that are statistically significant and those that are truly important is far too low to be useful. Consequently, scientists have embraced and even avidly pursued meaningless differences solely because they are statistically significant, and have ignored important effects because they failed to pass the screen of statistical significance.”

Stanford University epidemiologist John Ioannidis compared the scientific community’s attachment to P values with drug addiction, fueled by the institutional rewards that accompany the publication process.

“Misleading use of P-values is so easy and automated that, especially when rewarded with publication and funding, it can become addictive,” Ioannidis commented. “Investigators generating these torrents of P-values should be seen with sympathy as drug addicts in need of rehabilitation that will help them live a better, more meaningful scientific life in the future.”

Although a handful of P value defenders can still be found among the participants in this discussion, it should be clear by now that P values, as currently used in science, do more harm than good. They may be valid and useful under certain specific circumstances, but those circumstances are rarely relevant in most experimental contexts. As Berry notes, statisticians can correctly define P values in a technical sense, but “most statisticians do not really understand the issues in applied settings.”

In its statement, the statistical association goes a long way toward validating the concerns about P values that have been expressed for decades by many critical observers. This validation may succeed in initiating change where previous efforts have failed. But that won’t happen without identifying some alternative to the P value system, and while many have been proposed, no candidate has emerged as an acceptable nominee for a majority of the scientific world’s electorate. So the next debate should not be about P values — it should be about what to replace them with.

Modern-day Melanesians carry a two-pronged genetic legacy of ancient interbreeding that still affects their health and well-being, researchers say.

Unlike people elsewhere in the world, these Pacific islanders possess nuclear DNA that they inherited from two Stone Age hominid populations, say population geneticist Benjamin Vernot, formerly of the University of Washington in Seattle, and his colleagues. At least some of that ancient DNA contains genes involved in important biological functions, the researchers find. Nuclear DNA is passed from both parents to their children.
The finding means that ancestors of people now living in the Bismarck Archipelago, a group of islands off Papua New Guinea’s northeastern coast, mated with Neandertals as well as with mysterious Neandertal relatives called Denisovans, the scientists conclude online March 17 in Science.

In support of previous research, the researchers find that non-Africans — including Melanesians — have inherited an average of between 1.5 and 4 percent of their DNA from Neandertals. But only Melanesians display substantial Denisovan ancestry, which makes up 1.9 to 3.4 percent of their DNA, the researchers say. (Present-day African populations possess little to no Neandertal or Denisovan DNA.)

The bits of Neandertal and Denisovan DNA carried by Melanesians encompass genes involved in metabolism and immunity, indicating that interbreeding influenced the evolutionary success of ancient humans, Vernot’s group reports.

The new study reconstructs the microscopic landscape of Neandertals’ and Denisovans’ contributions to Melanesians’ DNA “in impressive detail,” says Harvard University paleogeneticist Pontus Skoglund.

Vernot’s team studied DNA from 35 Melanesians at 11 locations in the Bismarck Archipelago. Analyses concentrated on DNA from 27 unrelated individuals. The researchers also looked for evidence of ancient interbreeding in previously acquired genomes of close to 1,500 modern-day individuals from different parts of the world. Denisovan DNA for comparisons came from fragmentary fossils found in a Siberian cave; comparative Neandertal DNA came from a genome previously extracted from a 50,000-year-old woman’s toe bone.
Among Melanesians, DNA sequences attributed to Neandertals and Denisovans encompassed several metabolism genes. One of those genes influences a hormone that increases blood glucose levels. Another affects the chemical breakdown of lipids. Other Melanesian genetic sequences acquired through ancient interbreeding either include or adjoin genes that help to marshal the body’s defenses against illness.

These findings follow evidence suggesting that once-useful genes that ancient humans inherited from Neandertals now raise the risk of contracting certain diseases (SN: 3/5/16, p. 18). Vernot’s group reaches no conclusions about good or bad effects of ancient hybrid genes in Melanesians.

No sign of Neandertal or Denisovan DNA appears in areas of Melanesians’ genomes involved in brain development, the scientists say. So brain genetics, for better or worse, apparently evolved along a purely human path.

Denisovans’ evolutionary history remains poorly understood. Previous DNA comparisons suggest that Denisovans must have reached Southeast Asia. Skoglund suspects that’s where the ancestors of Melanesians bred with Denisovans.

Substantial interbreeding of humans with Denisovans probably occurred only once, Vernot and his colleagues suspect. Genetic exchanges of humans with Neandertals took place at least three times, they add. These estimates are derived from comparisons of shared Denisovan and Neandertal DNA sequences among individuals in different parts of the world.

A new X-ray telescope run by the Japan Aerospace Agency has gone silent a little more than a month after its launch. JAXA reported online March 27 that the telescope, ASTRO-H (aka Hitomi), stopped communicating with Earth. U.S. Strategic Command’s Joint Space Operations Center also reported seeing five pieces of debris alongside the satellite on March 26.

Attempts to figure out what went wrong with the spacecraft, which launched February 17, have not been successful. Up until now though, ASTRO-H seemed to be functioning. In late February, mission operators successfully switched on the spacecraft’s cooling system and tested some of its instruments.

ASTRO-H carries four instruments to study cosmic X-rays over an energy range from 0.3 to 600 kiloelectron volts. By studying X-rays, astronomers hope to learn more about some of the more feisty denizens of the universe such as exploding stars, gorging black holes, and dark matter swirling around within galaxy clusters. Earth’s atmosphere absorbs X-rays, so the only way to see them is to put a telescope in space.

NEW YORK — Lip-readers’ minds seem to “hear” the words their eyes see being formed. And the better a person is at lipreading, the more neural activity there is in the brain’s auditory cortex, scientists reported April 4 at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society.

Earlier studies have found that auditory brain areas are active during lipreading. But most of those studies focused on small bits of language — simple sentences or even single words, said study coauthor Satu Saalasti of Aalto University in Finland. In contrast, Saalasti and colleagues studied lipreading in more natural situations. Twenty-nine people read the silent lips of a person who spoke Finnish for eight minutes in a video. “We can all lip-read to some extent,” Saalasti said, and the participants, who had no lipreading experience, varied widely in their comprehension of the eight-minute story.

In the best lip-readers, activity in the auditory cortex was quite similar to that evoked when the story was read aloud, brain scans revealed. The results suggest that lipreading success depends on a person’s ability to “hear” the words formed by moving lips, Saalasti said.

It’s official: Zika virus causes microcephaly and other birth defects.

A new analysis by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirms what many earlier studies had suggested: The virus, typically passed via the bite of an infected mosquito, can travel from a pregnant woman to her fetus and wreak havoc in the brain.

“There is no longer any doubt that Zika causes microcephaly,” CDC director Tom Frieden said in a news briefing Wednesday. The findings, reported April 13 in the New England Journal of Medicine, follow a March 31 report from the World Health Organization that concluded nearly the same thing.

Because the connection between a mosquito-borne illness and such birth defects is so unprecedented, the CDC took time to carefully weigh the evidence, Frieden said. “Never before in history has there been a situation where a bite from a mosquito could result in a devastating malformation.”

In the NEJM analysis, researchers factored in molecular, epidemiological and clinical data, including recent reports of babies born with microcephaly in Colombia. The country has been suffering from a Zika outbreak for months, and thousands of pregnant women have been infected with the virus. Based on what scientists know about the virus, now is about the time they would have expected to see birth defects, said CDC public health researcher and study coauthor Sonja Rasmussen. WHO reports 50 cases of microcephaly in Colombia, seven of which have a confirmed link to Zika.

Researchers still can’t pin down the odds that an infection during pregnancy will lead to microcephaly, though. “What we don’t know right now is if the risk is somewhere in the range of 1 percent or in the range of 30 percent,” Rasmussen said.

Scientists do believe, however, that women who aren’t pregnant would probably clear a Zika infection within eight weeks, and not have problems with future pregnancies, Rasmussen said.

Bacterium effective when dusted on plants — The successful agent for destroying pesty insects, the microscopic bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis, is most effective when it is dusted onto tobacco or other plants…. The bacteria are now recommended for use against tobacco budworms and hornworms. From known results …. they look promising as biological control agents. — Science News, April 30, 1966

Update
Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt, is still used to combat agricultural pests. Different strains of the bacterium target different insects; one strain can even kill mosquito larvae in water. Organic farmers dust or spray Bt on crops and consider it a natural insecticide. In conventional farming, Bt DNA is often inserted into a plant’s genome, creating genetically modified crops that make their own pesticide (SN: 2/6/16, p. 22). In 2015, 81 percent of U.S. corn and 84 percent of U.S. upland cotton contained Bt genes.