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The 2023 Guilin Festival, came to an end on Sunday in Guilin, a famous tourist destination in South China's Guangxi Province. The ten-day festival had a theme of coexistence, seamlessly integrating art, theater, and the natural splendor of the region, according to a report by the Xinhua News Agency on Thursday.

The event was hosted by the Guilin Municipal People's Government and the Central Academy of Drama. A total of 140 activities and performances, featuring plays, folk music, operas, and monologues in different languages from 14 countries and regions.

While theater remains at the heart of the festival, the 2023 edition transcended traditional boundaries, allowing audiences to immerse themselves in a rich tapestry of experiences. 

From the grand processions of the Classic of Mountains and Seas to exuberant New Zealand Maori dance performances that captivated throngs of enthusiastic spectators, the festival pulsed with energy. 

Over 80 percent of this year's performances took place outdoors, harmoniously blending with Guilin's natural beauty. Unique venues like the "Mountain Theater," "Water Theater," "Cave Theater," "Grass Theater," and "Island Theater" allowed the landscape to become an integral part of the theatrical experience.

The stunning surroundings have inspired artists. The Russian cast of The Cherry Orchard remarked on the picturesque setting, while the German ensemble performing The Threepenny Opera along the Li River reveled in the unique stage, where the sky served as the backdrop, the earth as the stage, the mountains as scenery, and the water as a mirror.

This year's festival was marked by its youthful spirit. Across seven major sections - drama performances, urban arts, academic forums, children's programs, and more - the themes of "youth," "vitality," "diversity," and "innovation" resonated. 

The opening spectacle, Camel Xiangzi, directed by He Nian of the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre, reimagines a classic work for modern audiences, inviting them to explore the timeless wisdom embedded in literary masterpieces.

Two productions from the "Global Chinese Youth Theatre Directors Talent Program," namely Huang Ying's new adaptation of Journey to the West (2023) and Zhao Miao's physical theater piece Fearless Mother and Her Children, garnered acclaim from international audiences and received multiple awards from the Scottish Asian Arts Foundation.

Director Wang Xiaoying aptly summarized the festival's essence, saying that the future of theater lies in young talent. Guilin Festival's focus on nurturing young theater professionals infuses it with dynamism. These emerging artists carry the cultural legacy forward, embodying the essence of Chinese artistry.

In August, the festival made history by hosting an international press conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, becoming the first Chinese arts festival to venture beyond its borders for a high-profile promotional event. 

The festival has captured the attention of over 200 domestic and international media outlets, as well as social media influencers. 

Topics related to the festival have been read about more than 900 million times on Sina Weibo, Douyin, life-style platform Xiaohongshu, and the Meitu Xiuxiu platform, the Xinhua report said.

Hao Rong, director of the Festival Organizing Committee, chairman of the Art Committee, and president of the Central Academy of Drama, said that the Guilin Festival is not only a response to the call of historical context, but also an inheritance of traditional literary and artistic spirit. It is also a reflection of the development of literature and art in the new era. 

"We hope to build the Guilin Festival into a 'Chinese-style art festival,' an international people's art festival based on diversity, mutual learning, and inclusive public benefit, based on the subjectivity of Chinese culture," he noted.

The "Out of Africa - Celebrating the Beijing Swifts" seminar was successfully held on Monday evening in the Belgian Residence in Beijing, coinciding with the World Migratory Bird Day to promote the conservation of migratory birds such as the Beijing Swifts and their habitats. 

Ambassador of Belgium to China H.E. Bruno Angelet, deputy director-general of the Beijing Municipal Forestry and Parks Bureau Wang Xiaoping, deputy director of the Wildlife and Wetland Protection Division Ji Jianwei, Beijing Normal University professor Zhao Xinru, professor of Ornithology at the Sun Yat-sen University, Liu Yang and Beijing-based wildlife conservationist Terry Townshend, and several ambassadors attended the event.

Ambassador Angelet, the host of the event delivered a speech. He declared a love for birds, especially the Swifts as they are intelligent, social, gentle and free, adding that he was also a birdwatcher in Belgium and after arriving in Beijing in August, he was pleasantly surprised at the great variety of birds in the city, including sparrows, which have almost disappeared in Belgium, but can be found everywhere in Beijing. 

"I was so excited to discover that European and Chinese scientists have studied specific aspects of their journey. Through this study, we have discovered that the Swifts which nest in Beijing also come every spring from Africa, mostly from Namibia, Botswana, and South Africa," he told the Global Times. 

Ambassador Angelet also expressed his hope that embassies and their Chinese counterparts will join forces to improve bilateral international scientific cooperation.

Professor Zhao and Professor Liu, two of the best-known Chinese scientists who have been studying the bird species shared the results of the citizen science surveys to count the Swifts in Beijing to help understand the bird's population trends.  

The Beijing Swift, as a migratory bird named after "Beijing," is a landmark species and one of the ecological symbols of Beijing. It spends three months a year in Beijing to breed before undertaking an incredible migration to southern Africa in mid-July for the northern hemisphere winter, professor Zhao said at the event.

The Sino-Dutch sports exchanges and reception for the Dutch delegation to the Chengdu World University Games was successfully held on July 29 to celebrate the Sino-Dutch sports relations.

The event, hosted by the Consulate General of the Netherlands in Chongqing, greeted all the student athletes from the Student Sport Netherlands attending the Games. 

The guests of honor included Rob Cuppen, head of the Dutch delegation to the Chengdu World University Games, Wim Koch, deputy head of the Dutch delegation and more than 60 participants in 11 sports.

Huub Buise, Consul General of the Netherlands in Chongqing, delivered a speech at the event. Buise said that, "After working together for the last three years, we are finally witnessing the opening of the Chengdu Universiade and the competitions being held as scheduled. Everyone has put in a lot of effort in this process, including our head of delegation, official representatives, and all of you here, all working together. I am very happy to be here with all of you and wish you all the best in the competition."

Silke Jonkman, the student athlete representative from the Dutch delegation touched on the feelings and experiences of participating in the Games and expressed the delegation's expectations for Sino-Dutch sports exchanges and friendship. She said that, "I am very grateful for the welcome reception prepared for us. At the same time, we are very happy to be here in China, in Chengdu, where we ate a lot of food, saw pandas, attended the grand opening ceremony, and were deeply impressed by the friendliness, warmth, and helpfulness of the Chinese people."

Buise also stressed that Chengdu is the engine of the entire western economy in China and the world has seen its internationalization. He expressed special thanks to liaisons at the Chengdu Foreign Affairs Office for building a bridge of friendship between China and the Netherlands.

Deepening mutual understanding between Chinese and Grenadian people will be realized through a multifaceted approach, which entails expanding cultural exchanges, promoting educational endeavors, and facilitating direct connections between individuals from both nations, Chad Vincent John, a 34-year-old Grenadian who is currently a kindergarten teacher and has been living in China for more than a decade, told the Global Times in a recent interview. 

By organizing diverse cultural programs, offering language courses, and creating opportunities for personal interactions, we can cultivate stronger bonds, John said. Additionally, leveraging digital platforms and social media will enable the seamless sharing of personal stories, experiences, and cultural insights, ultimately fostering a more profound and lasting connection between our two communities, he noted. 

Learnroom International Kindergarten in Beijing, known for its commitment to fostering cultural understanding, recently hosted a successful Culture Day that had a profound effect on attendees. John, a respected member of the school's management team, spearheaded the event with the generous support of the Grenadian Embassy.

Among the showcases by various countries, the Grenada exhibit stood out, captivating both children and parents with its displays.

"The Chinese audience's response to this event was remarkable. As they entered the exhibition room, they were captivated by the vibrant displays," John said. 

The delightful aroma of Grenadian spices and cocoa intrigued them, sparking their curiosity about our culture. Attendees received goodie bags with Grenadian spices, T-shirts, bandanas, and brochures, enhancing their experience. They also enjoyed seeing their children dressed in carnival costumes, adding to the event's charm, he noted. "Overall, the positive reactions underscored the power of cultural exchange."

The 34-year-old Grenadian who has been working in China for over 10 years, called the country "a second home" to him. "I have found the experience of living and working here to be truly enriching." 

However, it's worth noting that many Chinese people are not familiar with Grenada, he said. "Whenever I'm asked about my origin, I often find myself explaining that Grenada is a beautiful island located in the Caribbean Sea, situated to the south of Cuba, Jamaica, and Haiti, and to the north of South America and Trinidad and Tobago, among others," John said. 

I refer to these nearby countries to provide context and help people understand where Grenada is situated geographically. This interaction provides an opportunity for cultural exchange and helps bridge the gap in understanding between our two nations, he said.

Sometimes it’s surprising to discover how little we know about common plants or animals. Consider the ruby-throated hummingbird. If you live in the eastern half of Canada or the United States and have spotted a hummingbird hovering around a feeder in the backyard in summer, this is the bird you saw. But while scientists have documented many of the feeding and mating behaviors of the birds and that the birds migrate south to Central America and Cuba, there are still plenty of mysteries, such as whether the birds go the long way through Mexico when they migrate or whether they take a shortcut across the Gulf of Mexico.

It turns out that the tiny birds, some of which are small enough to fit in your hand, could easily take the shortcut, even though they’d get no break on the journey. Based on analyses of wing shape, body size and fat reserves, some of these tiny birds could fly more than 2,000 kilometers in the right winds. That’s more than enough to get them the 1,000 kilometers across the Gulf, researchers report March 9 in The Auk.
Theodore Zenzal Jr. and Frank Moore of the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg studied ruby-throated hummingbirds at the Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge in Alabama, one of the birds’ stopovers on their journey south. From 2010 to 2014, they captured birds in the refuge during late summer and early fall. Birds were weighed, measured, banded and released.

Zenzal and Moore found that older birds tended to arrive at the refuge earlier and stayed for shorter times than younger birds. They also had more fat that could fuel a long voyage, and older males had the most. Based on these fuel loads, the birds could fly for another 2,260 kilometers on average without stopping for food, the team calculates.

That was just the average, though. Some very skinny birds arrived at the refuge, and had enough fat for just a short trip of less than 20 kilometers. This may explain why some hummingbirds stuck around in the refuge for a couple of weeks — they may have needed to bulk up before taking off again. Other birds had plenty of fat, though, enough to go more than 4,000 kilometers.

Hummingbirds’ small size may actually be an advantage when it comes to long-distance flight, the researchers note. These birds are really good at taking in a lot of fuel, and being small means that they can carry a larger percentage of their body weight as fat than can larger birds.

But just because the hummingbirds may be capable of taking the shortcut across the water doesn’t mean they actually do. Weather patterns aren’t favorable for such a flight until late fall, Zenzal and Moore say. So it may make more sense, especially for juveniles, to take the long way around since there are opportunities for pit stops should they be needed.

There’s nothing like a guy doing all the child care to win female favor, even among giant water bugs.

Thumbnail-sized Appasus water bugs have become an exemplar species for studying paternal care. After mating, females lay eggs on a male’s back and leave him to swim around for weeks tending his glued-on load.

For an A. major water bug, lab tests show an egg burden can have the sweet side of attracting more females, researchers in Japan report May 4 in Royal Society Open Science. Given a choice of two males, females strongly favored, and laid more eggs on, the one already hauling around 10 eggs rather than the male that researchers had scraped eggless.

Females still favored a well-egged male even when researchers offered two males that a female had already considered, but with their egg-carrying roles switched from the previous encounter. That formerly spurned suitor this time triumphed.

A similar preference, though not as clear-cut, showed up in the slightly smaller and lighter A. japonicus giant water bug. “We conclude that sexual selection plays an important role in the maintenance of elaborate paternal care,” says study coauthor Shin-ya Ohba of Nagasaki University.

Brain waves during REM sleep solidify memories in mice, scientists report in the May 13 Science.

Scientists suspected that the eye-twitchy, dream-packed slumber known as rapid eye movement sleep was important for memory. But REM sleep’s influence on memory has been hard to study, in part because scientists often resorted to waking people or animals up — a stressful experience that might influence memory in different ways.

Richard Boyce of McGill University in Montreal and colleagues interrupted REM sleep in mice in a more delicate way. Using a technique called optogenetics, the researchers blocked a brain oscillation called theta waves in the hippocampus, a brain structure involved in memory, during REM sleep. This light touch meant that the mice stayed asleep but had fewer REM-related theta waves in their hippocampi.
Usually, post-learning sleep helps strengthen memories. But mice with disturbed REM sleep had memory trouble, the researchers found. Curious mice will spend more time checking out an object that’s been moved to a new spot than an unmoved object. But after the sleep treatment, the mice seemed to not remember objects’ earlier positions, spending equal time exploring an unmoved object as one in a new place. These mice also showed fewer signs of fear in a place where they had previously suffered shocks.

Interfering with theta waves during other stages of sleep didn’t seem to cause memory trouble, suggesting that something special happens during REM sleep.

Sea turtles do not have an easy start to life. After hatching, they have to break out of their shell, dig their way out from beneath the sand, then make a mad dash across the beach to the water where they may or may not find food and safety — hopefully without getting snapped up by a predator. All of this requires a bit of luck and a lot of energy. And the energy a hatchling expends on breaking out of the nest is energy that can’t be used on surviving the rest of the journey.

Now, a new study has quantified the amount of energy a baby sea turtle uses to dig itself to the surface. Having lots of siblings — and, thus, lots of help — can really be a time and energy saver, researchers report May 18 in the Journal of Experimental Biology. That also implies that the conservation technique of dividing clutches may instead make hatchlings worse off.

Figuring out the energy expenditure of baby sea turtles took some trial and error. Mohd Uzair Rusli of the University of Malaysia Terengganu and colleagues started by burying newly hatched green turtles beneath 40 centimeters of beach sand, but the hatchlings never started digging and the researchers abandoned the experiment after 48 hours. They suspected that the turtles might need a pocket of air, something that would naturally be found in between eggs.

The team then tried eggs that were just starting to hatch, orienting them so that the top of the egg — where a turtle had started to emerge — would be toward the sand surface. But instead of digging upwards, many of the turtles dug toward the side of the big sand-filled chamber. The researchers thought that the babies may have been drawn to light entering through the transparent chamber walls. “It appears that they can be attracted to light even when buried underground,” they note. This is perhaps not all that surprising given that researchers knew that baby turtles use cues from the sun to emerge most often at night or on cloudy days.

For the final experiment, the scientists buried clutches of eggs just about to hatch beneath 40 centimeters of beach sand in a chamber with opaque walls. Just above the eggs sat a strip of aluminum foil that, when broken, signaled the start of the digging-out process. A 24-hour webcam monitored the top of the sand so researchers could see when digging ended. The whole setup was then enclosed so that the scientists could measure oxygen consumption — a stand-in for energy expenditure. And the team was careful to stay quiet near the experiment, because they learned that talking near the buried turtles prompted the tiny hatchlings to dig.

Escaping from the sand took between 3.7 and 7.8 days, with larger clutches taking less time to emerge and also using less oxygen per hatchling. Digging behavior was not consistent during the whole time; the oxygen consumption rate rose and fell in peaks as the turtles dug and dug and dug together, rested and then started again. “In nature, it is likely that hatchlings receive a significant benefit by belonging to a large clutch,” the team concludes. They use less energy in their escape, leaving more for the mad dash to the sea and finding a first meal.

The researchers note that in some regions of the world, it is a common conservation strategy to split up clutches when relocating them into hatcheries. But this practice, they warn, could leave baby turtles with reduced energy reserves when they reach the ocean.

Americans have climate change to thank for a decades-long spate of milder winters. Around 80 percent of U.S. residents live in counties where the weather has become more pleasant over the last four decades (see map). That trend won’t last, however: Researchers predict in the April 21 Nature that 88 percent of Americans will experience noticeably worse weather by 2100 than they do today.

The researchers created a weather pleasantness index to rank weather conditions. Hot, humid summers cost points, while mild winters added points. In the contiguous United States, winter warming has outpaced increases in summertime temperature and humidity. But if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated, summer weather will become less pleasant over the coming decades, potentially sparking increased public interest in combating climate change, the researchers predict.

An experimental drug swept sticky plaques from the brains of a small number of people with Alzheimer’s disease over the course of a year. And preliminary results hint that this cleanup may have staved off mental decline.

News about the new drug, an antibody called aducanumab, led to excitement as it trickled out of recent scientific meetings. A paper published online August 31 in Nature offers a more comprehensive look at the drug’s effects.

“Overall, this is the best news that we’ve had in my 25 years doing Alzheimer’s clinical research,” study coauthor Stephen Salloway of Brown University said August 30 at a news briefing. “It brings new hope for patients and families most affected by the disease.”
The results are the most convincing evidence yet that an antibody can reduce amyloid in the brain, says Alzheimer’s researcher Rachelle Doody of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, who was not involved in the study.

Still, experts caution that the results come from 165 people, a relatively small number. The seemingly beneficial effects could disappear in larger clinical trials, which are under way. “These new data are tantalizing, but they are not yet definitive,” says neuroscientist John Hardy of University College London.

Like some other drug candidates for Alzheimer’s, aducanumab is an antibody that targets amyloid-beta, a sticky protein that accumulates in the brains of people with the disease. Delivered by intravenous injection, aducanumab appeared to get inside the brains of people with mild Alzheimer’s (average age about 73) and destroy A-beta plaques, the results suggest. After a year of exposure to the drug, A-beta levels had dropped. This reduction depended on the dose — the more drug, the bigger the decline in A-beta. In fact, people on the highest dose of the drug had almost no A-beta plaques in their brains after a year.

“I know of no other antibody that leads to this degree of amyloid removal,” study coauthor Alfred Sandrock of Biogen in Cambridge, Mass., said at the news briefing. For several decades, scientists have been trying to figure out whether A-beta is a cause, or just a symptom, of Alzheimer’s (SN: 3/12/11, p. 24). With its ability to reduce A-beta plaques in the brain, aducanumab may help settle the debate.

The bigger question is whether the drug can preserve thinking skills and memory. The new study was not designed to detect improvements in mental performance. Yet it turned up hints that aducanumab may help.
Compared with participants who received a placebo, people who took aducanumab showed less decline on standard tests of memory and thinking skills over the course of a year. And like the reductions in brain amyloid, better performance seemed to come with higher doses. During the study, people who received the placebo lost just under three points on average on a 30-point cognitive test. In contrast, people on the highest dose of aducanumab lost a little over half a point.

“One needs to take the cognitive data with a grain of salt at the moment, given the small number of people who enrolled and completed the study,” says neuroscientist Eric Reiman of the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute in Phoenix. But if larger studies show a similar benefit, “it would be a game changer for the field,” says Reiman, who wrote an accompanying commentary in Nature.

Aducanumab targets several forms of A-beta — including both small, soluble bits called oligomers and larger clumps called fibrils — that make up plaques. Both forms may cause trouble. Once aducanumab sticks to A-beta, specialized brain cells called microglia may come in and remove the buildup, lab experiments suggest.

Twenty-seven people in the study had an adverse drug reaction known as ARIA, marked by changes in brain fluid detected by brain scans. The side effect is often without symptoms, but can cause headaches or more serious trouble in some people. ARIA was more common at higher doses, the researchers found. The larger studies of aducanumab that are under way may help scientists pinpoint the most effective dose with the fewest side effects.