Bird Family Tree

An international team led by Chinese researchers has sequenced the genomes of 48 species of birds to create the most reliable avian tree of life to date.

This massive project, which took more than four years to complete and involved hundreds of researchers from 20 different countries around the world, analyzed at least one genome from every major bird lineage, including the woodpecker, owl, penguin, hummingbird and flamingo lineages, and produced dozens of reports, eight of which are published on December 11 in Science.

The findings supported a "big bang" theory for the evolutionary expansion of birds during the 10 million to 15 million years that followed a mass extinction event about 66 million years ago that killed off all dinosaurs and left some species of birds.

This contradicted the idea that birds blossomed 10 million to 80 million years earlier before the mass extinction event, as some recent studies suggested.

Based on this new genomic data, a few bird lineages that survived the mass extinction gave rise to more than 10,000 species that comprise 95 percent of all bird species living with us today, the researchers said.

The researchers also found that birds lost thousands of genes in their early evolution after birds split from other reptiles, many of which have essential functions similar to mammals.

Shrinking Glaciers

China's glaciers have retreated by about 7,600 square km, an 18-percent decline since the 1950s, Chinese scientists have found.

A survey using remote sensing data between 2006 and 2010 showed China had 48,571 glaciers covering 51,840 square km in the western region, according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), which released its second catalog of the country's glaciers on December 13.

An average of 243.7 square km of glacial ice had disappeared every year over the past half century, according to the survey by the CAS Cold and Arid Regions Research Institute.

The worst shrink was detected on the Altai Mountains located in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and the Gangdise Mountain in Tibet Autonomous Region, with retreat hitting 37.2 percent and 32.7 percent respectively over the past five decades.

Major glaciers on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, especially the east part of Gangdise as well as the southern and western Himalayas were melting at the most rapid pace, with areas shrinking by 2.2 percent every year, according to the survey.

Taiwan Tourism

Individual tourists from the Chinese mainland to Taiwan this year had reached 1.07 million by the end of November, the State Council Taiwan Affairs Office said on December 17.

Office spokesperson Fan Liqing said on the day that this represented growth of 123 percent compared to the same period of last year.

Taiwan opened its doors to group tourists from the mainland in 2008 and to individual tourists in June 2011. According to statistics from Taiwan, of all mainland tourists that visited the island province, only 51 did not return home.

College Enrollment

Math, science and sport competition winners will no longer receive extra points on their college application, the Education Ministry announced on December 17.

The ministry also canceled bonus points added to results on the national college entrance exam, or gaokao. In China, gaokao results are the major assessment standard for college enrollment of students.

The latest move does not mean that the students' achievement in some areas have become useless, according to the ministry. The specialty and achievement of students will be recorded for college references and in a pilot program, some "extra special" students may be directly enrolled by some colleges through an internal selection without assessing their performance in the national exam.

On December 16, the ministry issued two documents to stress evaluating the students by overall competency, including their skills, physical health, art cultivation and social practice, as opposed to exam scores alone.