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Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region has ushered in a travel peak as summer vacations travel season continues to sizzle. Many of the region's airports have set new records for passenger volumes, according to local media outlet ts.cn on Tuesday.

Since the beginning of the summer travel season, the passenger flow through Urumqi Diwopu International Airport has hit record highs. From July 28 to August 12, the single-day passenger throughput exceeded 90,000 for 16 consecutive days, ts.cn reported on Tuesday.

Single-day passenger flow on August 5 reached 96,800, which is the highest record since the opening of the airport.

As of August 12, Urumqi Dewoqi International Airport has carried out 108,000 flights in 2023, with passenger throughput exceeding 15 million. It has also completed cargo and mail throughput of 84,000 tons.

Among them, leading destination cities of domestic inbound and outbound passenger flow to Urumqi are Beijing, Chengdu, Xi'an, Zhengzhou, Kashi, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chongqing, Hangzhou and Lanzhou, accounting for 53 percent of the cumulative passenger throughput.

For international flights, top destinations are Almaty, Dushanbe, Tashkent, Islamabad and Tbilisi.

As of July 31, Urumqi International Airport has opened 210 routes. A total of 22 cities within Xinjiang, 70 domestic cities outside of Xinjiang, and 13 foreign cities have direct flights to Urumqi.

In addition to Urumqi, transport volume of other airports in Xinjiang including Kashi, Yutian continue to break records. .

The Kashi International Airport also experienced the operational peak during the summer season. It is hosting more than 12,000 inbound and outbound passengers per day, operates 16 airlines, and has flights to 11 Xinjiang cities and 16 other Chinese cities.

At 08:11 am on Tuesday, the first direct flight route from Kashi to Guangzhou was officially opened, becoming the longest direct flight route in China.

As of August 12, the passenger throughput of Kashi International Airport exceeded 2 million, two months ahead of reaching the same benchmark in 2019.

On August 9, inbound and outbound cargo and mail throughput of Kashi International Airport exceeded 100 tons, making it the first regional airport in Xinjiang with inbound and outbound cargo and mail throughput exceeding 100 tons in a single day.

Passenger throughput in Yutian Wanfang Airport in Hotan prefecture also reached 100,000 passengers as of August 11, three and a half months ahead of reaching the same benchmark in 2019. It is also 155.1 percent higher than the same period in 2022, and is expected to exceed 150,000 in 2023.

Currently, Yutian Wanfang Airport is operating four airlines and has opened six routes to seven cities inside and outside of Xinjiang, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Urumqi.

Xinjiang has become a hot tourist destination over recent years. Enjoying an unprecedented tourism rebound in 2023, Xinjiang welcomed 102 million visits, a year-on-year increase of 31.49 percent, with tourism revenue reaching 92.27 billion yuan ($12.82 billion), a year-on-year increase of 73.64 percent, according to data released by the Department of Culture and Tourism of Xinjiang region on July 8.

 Beijing municipal health authorities have started soliciting public opinions  on a set of trial measures aimed at regulating online diagnosis and treatment. The trial measures require medical institutions to strengthen drug management and prohibit the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to generate prescriptions automatically, the Beijing Daily reported on Monday. It is a move to further improve and regulate online medical services in the face of growing demand.

The public can give feedback to the Beijing municipal health commission before September 16.

Based on the trial measures, medical institutions shall conduct real-name certification of medical personnel who carry out online medical services. Doctors who conduct internet medical services should obtain the corresponding qualification, as well as possess more than three years of independent clinical work experience and the consent of their registered medical institutions.

Other personnel or AI software shall not be falsely used or replace a doctor in providing diagnosis and treatment services, according to the trial regulations.

In a bid to promote the sound development of the AI sector and safeguard national security and public interest, China's internet watchdog and several other authorities issued temporary rules for managing generative AI services in July. 

Additionally, online diagnosis and treatment must be implemented under a real-name mechanism. This requires patients to provide their real identity and basic information. They should also provide medical records with a clear diagnosis, such as outpatient medical records before receiving online medical services.

The Beijing municipal health commission will establish a platform to supervise medical institutions that carry out internet diagnosis and treatment. Medical institutions should upload and update relevant practice information in a timely manner and undergo supervision.

More and more people have become interested in remote medical services due to the convenience they provide. Local authorities are also promoting internet-based digital medical services to provide better services to the public. For instance, in Qingdao, East China's Shandong Province, a citywide health platform has connected with 10 districts and 3,498 medical institutions, according to Qingdao health authorities on Saturday. 

However, more regulations are needed in the rapidly developing online medical services industry as some platforms lack pricing standards or internet diagnosis and treatment qualifications, according to media reports.

According to the Digital China Development Report 2022 released in May, by October 2022, more than 2,700 internet hospitals had been set up across the country, providing online medical services to more than 25.9 million people.

In March 2022, the country's health authorities released a trial guideline on internet-based diagnosis and treatment. Similar to the Beijing measures, doctors are required to conduct real-name certification before providing medical services. Other personnel or AI software shall not be falsely used or replace a doctor in providing diagnosis and treatment services, the regulation said.

As China experiences post-COVID summer tourism peak, 74.9 percent of respondents have encountered difficulties in making reservations for main attractions or venues, according to a recent survey which interviewed 1,501 participants, revealing that the challenges of reserving scenic spots and their limited operating hours have inconvenienced many parents and children during their travel. 

During the survey, 61.4 percent of the respondents suggested that some attractions and venues should extend operating hours. To enhance the comfort of summer travel, 59.0 percent of the respondents recommended choosing off-peak periods to take a holiday.

The heat of the summer tourism market in 2023 is expected to surpass that of the same period in 2019, according to media reports. During the months of July and August when students are on summer break, the number of domestic tourist trips is expected to reach 1.331 billion, accounting for 20.18 percent of the total annual domestic tourism, according to a forecast model published by the China Tourism Academy.

As the main consumers in the summer tourism market, the significant growth of student and family traveler segments represents a crucial indicator of the resurgence of the peak season activity over the summer months. 

Huangshan Mountain in East China's Anhui Province announced on August 21 that the number of tourists received by the scenic area this year has exceeded 3 million, 60 days ahead of 2019 to break this threshold, and it is also the earliest year in the history of Huangshan Scenic Area to cross the 3 million people market.

At Shanghai Disney Resort, one of the most popular tourist attractions in the city, the waiting time for several rides exceeds 60 minutes, and some even reaches about 240 minutes, according to media reports.

Data revealed that the two age groups of under 18 and 34-43 years old accounted for the highest proportion of tourists, adding up to more than 50 percent, of which children accounted for 10 percent.

"It was impossible to secure tickets for the popular museums and science centers. We had to change our strategy and only managed to secure tickets for a few niche museums," said a mother who brought her children to Beijing for summer vacation.

In addition to the difficulty of making reservations for attractions, the survey also revealed that 71.8 percent of respondents felt crowded, experienced long queue. About 69.0 percent of participants perceived a rise in prices during the peak travel season, leading to increased expenses. Moreover, 63.0 percent of those surveyed expressed concern about the hot weather, with a risk of heatstroke.

"Almost every scenic spot in Beijing is full of people, and this summer is particularly hot, which impacts the experience," a visitor to Beijing said, adding that summer nights are a good time to visit, but many scenic spots and venues still provide services according to the original business hours, which makes it difficult for tourists.

In order to improve the tourist experience, some popular sites in Beijing have extended their opening hours on the premise of ensuring safety and service quality, and eligible tourist spots have opened night shows and increased night tours.

The Beijing Municipal Cultural Heritage Bureau announced earlier that in order to meet the needs of visitors during the summer vacation, 46 museums in Beijing will cancel the policy of closing on Mondays until August 31, allowing visitors to visit museums every day.

Additionally, museums in Beijing are proactively adapting their reservation systems based on the number of tourists, exhibition content, and demands of audiences. They are also actively exploring flexible extended opening hours tailored to the tourism experience and visitor needs, all in the pursuit of enhancing the enjoyment of these venues.

Taiwan billionaire and Foxconn founder Terry Gou Tai-ming announced on Monday that he will run in the 2024 elections for Taiwan's regional leader, making next year's vote a complicated four-way race. Analysts said that this is likely to further divide the island's opposition camp in favor of secessionist ruling party candidate Lai Ching-te. 

According to the latest polls conducted in mid August by Taiwan media outlets and institutions, without Gou's participation, ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate Lai, who is currently the deputy leader of the island, is now the front-runner with 37 to 42 percent, while Taiwan People's Party candidate Ko Wen-je ranks second with 25 to 28 percent, and Hou Yu-ih of the major opposition party Chinese Kuomintang (KMT) getting 20-22 percent. 

According to Taiwan polls that include Gou,  with Gou's participation, Lai's front-runner position is virtually unaffected while the opposition candidates are impacted significantly, as Ko gets only about 16-17 percent, KMT's Hou gets 15-16 percent, and Gou has only 12 percent. 

Analysts said this doesn't mean the DPP is popular, as most polls show that Taiwan residents who want to end the DPP rule are in the majority, as the combined support of opposition candidates is more than Lai's, but the problem is that the opposition camp is becoming divided due to the power struggle between the two opposition parties, and now the independent candidate Gou is dividing the field further. 

The three opposition candidates are yet to reach a consensus on forming an alliance to run in the elections. Even if they do reach agreement on running together, which is very unlikely as they all refuse to give in and serve as deputy candidate, Lai is very likely to win, and unfortunately, the will of the majority on the island to end the DPP rule might not be realized, Li Fei, a professor at the Taiwan Research Center at Xiamen University, told the Global Times on Monday.

"If Lai gets elected, cross-Taiwan Straits relations will be in danger, so the mainland is preparing for any possible scenario, including the worst one," Li noted. "But there are still a few months to go, and it would still be too early to say who can win eventually." 

In an apparent response to Gou's announcement to run, the KMT said in a post on its Facebook account Monday, after his announcement without mentioning him, that "if we share similar values, then we can work together," but vowed that mainstream public opinion will not accept any act that "hurts comrades and favors adversaries." 

Gou has been labeled by Taiwan media as a pro-mainland figure who has deep business relations in the mainland, and in order to preserve and resume cross-Straits cooperation that significantly benefit Taiwan, he also supports peace and opposes secessionism. However, experts said that his decision driven by political ambition is in fact helping the DPP authorities.

However, many Chinese mainland netizens and pro-reunification Taiwan residents have an interesting theory: If the DPP's Lai wins next year, this could speed up the reunification process, as the mainland will find it easy to completely abandon "the illusion of peaceful reunification" and make tough decisions to solve the Taiwan question immediately. Therefore, these people welcome Gou's act to run for the election, as they believe this will consolidate Lai's advantage.

Zheng Bo-yu, manager of the Vstartup Station of Taiwan, a company serving Taiwan youth seeking to study, work and launch startups on the mainland, said, "Many friends of mine in Taiwan who support cross-Straits cooperation and exchanges made a joke about the current election: Why don't we just vote for Lai and let the DPP win, so that the mainland will have an easier time making the decision to solve the Taiwan question once and for all, so that we don't need to be worried about the uncertain cross-Straits tension and US intervention anymore."

Li said the Chinese mainland has enough measures available to deter and counter secessionists and foreign interference forces, but the mainland is still making great efforts and showing great patience to seek peaceful reunification. 

"But it's possible that, if Lai eventually wins, deeper and more reckless collusion between the DPP and the US will wipe out the possibility of peaceful reunification, and the mainland will be forced to take action," Li warned. 

Got questions about Zika virus? Mosquito-borne diseases? Genetically engineered mosquitoes? Three Science News reporters will be answering questions Friday, March 4, as part of Reddit’s Ask Me Anything series.

Staff writer Meghan Rosen, molecular biology writer Tina Hesman Saey and biology writer Susan Milius will be responding to questions from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. Eastern at this link.

See Science News’ coverage of these topics in our Zika Virus Editor’s Pick and Mosquitoes & Disease Editor’s Pick.

If some of the most bizarre zoo animals merged into one cartoonish creature, it might look something like the “Tully monster.”

Fossils of Tullimonstrum gregarium, a soft-bodied animal that lived roughly 300 million years ago in what is now Illinois, feature wide-set eyes like a hammerhead shark, a nose like an elephant, and a mouth that could pass for a crab claw with teeth. It’s one of the “weird wonders” of its time, and for more than 50 years, it has stymied scientists debating its identity.
Now, an analysis of more than 1,200 museum specimens, reported March 16 in Nature, says the Tully monster was a vertebrate (not a slug, or a worm, or an arthropod). A long, thin tube running down the creature’s back, for example, was not part of the gut, as some scientists had suggested, but a notochord, a structural hallmark of vertebrates.

The creature was probably an ancestor of lampreys, jawless fish that can latch onto prey like a vacuum cleaner hose with teeth, study coauthor Victoria McCoy of Yale University and colleagues suggest.

Even among lampreys, the Tully monster stands out. With its stubby body and potentially tail-propelled swimming style, the creature’s place in the lamprey family tree might be best likened to yet another zoo animal: black sheep.

Prime numbers, divisible only by 1 and themselves, hate to repeat themselves. They prefer not to mimic the final digit of the preceding prime, mathematicians have discovered.

“It is really, really bizarre,” says Stanford University postdoctoral researcher Robert Lemke Oliver, who, with Stanford number theorist Kannan Soundararajan, discovered this unusual prime predilection. “We are still trying to understand what is at the heart of this,” Lemke Oliver says.

Generally speaking, primes are thought to behave much like random numbers. So whenever some kind of order is revealed, it gives mathematicians pause.
“Any regularity you can show about primes is beguiling, because there may lurk there some new structure,” says number theorist Barry Mazur of Harvard University. “Revealing some bit of architecture where we thought there was none may lead to inroads into the structure of the mathematics.”

Once primes get into the double digits, they must end in either a 1, 3, 7 or 9. Mathematicians have long known that there are roughly the same number of primes ending with each digit; each appears as the final number about 25 percent of the time. The prime number theorem in arithmetic progressions proved this distribution about 100 years ago, and the still unsolved Riemann hypothesis predicts that the rates rapidly approach 25 percent. This property has been tested for many millions of primes, says Soundararajan.

And without any reason to think otherwise, mathematicians just assumed that the distribution of those final digits was basically random. So given a prime that ends in 1, the odds that the next prime ends in 1, 3, 7 or 9 should be roughly equal.

“If there’s no interaction between primes, that’s what you would expect,” says Soundararajan. “But in fact, something funny happens.”
Despite each final digit appearing roughly the same amount of the time, there’s a bias in the order in which these final digits appear. A prime that ends in 7, for example, is far less likely to be followed by a prime that also ends in 7 than a prime that ends in 9, 3 or 1.

The discovery of the final digit bias has “no conceivable practical use,” says Andrew Granville, a number theorist at the University of Montreal and University College London. “The point is the wonder of the discovery.”

The peculiar pattern had been noted previously by two separate teams of researchers, but the Stanford duo is the first to articulate a mathematical explanation for the pattern, which they posted online March 11 at arXiv.org. When the researchers crunched the numbers, their predictions based on the hypotheses fit the results remarkably, says Granville, who calls the work “rigorous, refined and delicate.”

You might think this “anti-sameness” bias follows naturally from the order of numbers. After all, 67 is followed by 71, which is followed by 73. But this explanation doesn’t fit the data, says Lemke Oliver, who ran computer calculations out to 400 billion primes.“The bias is way too large,” he says. What’s more, the bias isn’t equal for the nonrepeating final digits. So among the first hundred million primes, for example, a prime that ends in 3 is followed by a prime that ends in 9 about 7.5 million times, whereas it is followed by a prime that ends in 1 about 6 million times. A final 3 is followed by a final 3 a mere 4.4 million times.

Yet as the number of primes approaches infinity, the bias slowly disappears. This restoration of seeming randomness makes sense mathematically, but the slow rate at which the bias disappears is notable.

“It would almost be perverse if it didn’t even out,” says Lemke Oliver. “It would bother me a little.”

Dinosaurs Among Us
Now open
With help from fossils and life-size models, this exhibit lays out the evidence — from feathers to nesting behavior — that links dinosaurs to birds.

American Museum of Natural History, New York City
Life in One Cubic Foot
Now open
In this interactive exhibit, count up the different types of organisms that pass through a cubic foot of land or water in a single day in various habitats, including a coral reef in French Polynesia.
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C.
Benjamin Dean Astronomy Lectures: Tiny Moons Around Asteroids
April 4
A researcher from the SETI Institute will discuss the technology that astronomers use to image asteroids that have satellites, as well as describe potential future missions to these space rocks.

California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco
COURTESY OF U-M KELSEY MUSEUM OF ARCHAEOLOGY
Leisure and Luxury in the Age of Nero: The Villas of Oplontis Near Pompeii
Through May 15
Opulent jewelry and art, along with a collection of more mundane artifacts, recovered from ruins near Pompeii help visitors appreciate the economic disparities between ancient Rome’s wealthy elite and lower socioeconomic classes.

University of Michigan Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, Ann Arbor
Invisible Boundaries: Exploring Yellowstone’s Great Animal Migrations
Opens May 27
The migrations of elk, deer and other animals of Yellowstone National Park are highlighted in this exhibit, which also examines conservation efforts to protect these creatures, whose travels take them well beyond the park’s boundaries.

Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, Wyo.

Hobbits disappeared from their island home nearly 40,000 years earlier than previously thought, new evidence suggests.

This revised timeline doesn’t erase uncertainty about the evolutionary origins of these controversial Indonesian hominids. Nor will the new evidence resolve a dispute about whether hobbits represent a new species, Homo floresiensis, or were small-bodied Homo sapiens.

Hobbits vanished about 50,000 years ago at Liang Bua Cave on Flores, an island situated between Borneo and Australia’s northern coast, say archaeologist Thomas Sutikna of the University of Wollongong, Australia, and his colleagues.
Cave sediment dating to about 12,000 years ago, which lies just above soil that yielded H. floresiensis remains, provided an initial estimate of when these diminutive hominids died out. But that sediment washed into the cave long after H. floresiensis was gone, covering much older, hobbit-bearing soil, the researchers report online March 30 in Nature.

Using the initial age estimate, researchers had previously concluded that hobbits survived for tens of thousands of years after Homo sapiens passed through Indonesia and reached Australia around 50,000 years ago. It now appears that hobbits instead hit an evolutionary dead end around that time, Sutikna’s group says.

The centerpiece of hobbit finds, a partial skeleton, comes from an individual who lived well before then, the scientists add. Measurements of the decay of radioactive elements in an arm bone from the partial skeleton indicate that the find dates to between 86,900 and 71,500 years ago. Until now, researchers suspected these bones were only about 18,000 years old.
Based on the new dates, “there was possibly no overlap or interactions between H. floresiensis and H. sapiens on Flores,” says paleoanthropologist Richard Potts of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
Hobbits disappeared before the earliest skeletal evidence of humans on Flores, says paleoanthropologist and study coauthor Matthew Tocheri of Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Canada. H. sapiens bones date to around 11,000 years ago on the Indonesian island. That undermines a controversial argument that a partial hobbit skeleton comes from a human with a developmental disorder (SN: 11/18/06, p. 330), Tocheri says.

Paleoanthropologist Russell Ciochon of the University of Iowa in Iowa City agrees. H. floresiensis probably descended from a large-bodied Asian Homo erectus group that reached Flores roughly 1 million years ago, he says. On islands, large-bodied mammals tend to become smaller, presumably in response to limited food sources and other factors.

But in a joint e-mail to Science News, two researchers who regard hobbits as humans — and the partial hobbit skeleton as displaying signs of Down syndrome — stick to their guns. Regardless of the new dates from Liang Bua Cave, hobbit bones fall within the range of skeletal sizes and shapes observed in people today, assert Robert Eckhardt of Penn State and Maciej Henneberg of the University of Adelaide in Australia. H. sapiens could have reached Flores and nearby islands (SN: 2/6/16, p. 7) when Sutikna’s group says hobbits were alive, they claim.

It’s not known whether humans or other Asian hominids, such as Denisovans (SN Online: 3/17/16), reached Flores more than 50,000 years ago at a time of lowered sea levels and possible drought on the island, Potts says. If they did, intruding species might have pushed an already reeling hobbit population to extinction.

Liang Bua Cave excavations also suggest that other Flores animals, including vultures, giant marabou storks and an extinct elephant relative, vanished around the same time that the hobbits did.

Annual excavations from 2007 through 2014 clarified how sediment accumulated in the cave. A thick soil deposit containing hobbit remains had substantially eroded before being covered by soil layers that washed into the cave starting around 20,000 years ago. Techniques for dating soil, rock, volcanic ash and bone indicated that hobbits’ skeletal remains ranged in age from 100,000 to 60,000 years ago. Stone tools probably made by hobbits dated to between around 190,000 and 50,000 years ago.

Liang Bua Cave preserves a late slice of H. floresiensis life on an island probably reached by toolmaking hobbit ancestors around 1 million years ago (SN: 6/3/06, p. 341), Tocheri says.

Researchers don’t know what happened during the roughly 800,000 years between hobbit ancestors’ arrival on Flores and hobbits’ last evolutionary stages. “If there was a book that chronicled the evolutionary history of H. floresiensis, we would have only a few tattered and torn pages with the rest missing,” Tocheri says.

A newly discovered microbe chows down on polluting plastic.

For humans, polyethylene terephthalate, also known as PET, is a stiff, strong plastic fiber that’s the main ingredient in polyester clothing and disposable bottles. But for the bacterium Ideonella sakaiensis, PET is dinner.

Researchers in Japan discovered the bacterium living in samples of soil, wastewater and recycling plant sludge, all contaminated with PET particles. PET is very stable, and few known microbes can break it down. But I. sakaiensis can use PET as its main food source, the scientists report in the March 11 Science. Tests revealed that the bacterium latches onto PET particles and releases a protein that decomposes the plastic into molecules the bacterium can munch on (SN: 2/20/16, p. 20).

Millions of tons of PET are manufactured yearly, and the long-lasting plastic can pose an environmental threat as it builds up in ecosystems. With its appetite for this environmental hazard, I. sakaiensis might be valuable in plastic waste cleanup, the researchers say.