The Caixin services purchasing managers' index (PMI), a private gauge of the country's service sector, rose to 52.9 in December, increasing 1.4 percentage points over the previous month and hitting the highest level in the past five months, according to a private survey released on Thursday.
The index for service activity remains above the expansion-contraction line for consecutive 12 months in 2023, indicating the continuous rebound of the country's service sector, according to the Caixin report.
"It signaled the country's service sector has strong and improved growth momentum at the end of 2023, as the PMI readings have kept going up over time ," read the report, noting that both services supply and demand expanded, as the market continued to recover. The gauges for business activity and total new orders have seen a considerable growth in the past six months.
Meanwhile, companies and entrepreneurs expressed greater optimism over the year-ahead outlook. Employment has also ticked up, the first recorded improvement in past three months, though some firms have maintained cautious approach to hiring.
Malaysian artist Mohamad Rusli Bin Ahmad makes a kite during an intangible cultural heritage exhibition on the Maritime Silk Road in Quanzhou, southeast China's Fujian Province, Dec. 9, 2023.(Photo: Xinhua)
The 9 kilometers of dusty streets of Tangerang, a city near to the Indonesian capital Jakarta, has become an open air gallery, colorful and beautified by more than 50 mural and graffiti artists from different nations.
Dika Badik Adrian, a 28-year-old from Indonesia's West Sumatra province, painted a row of three pop art-style characters squabbling over a basketball in a mural.
The figure he developed in 2018 and appears as the main subject in all of his works is called Fresnot, an acronym meaning freedom is not free. This time, the Fresnots wore hats and brightly hued polka-dot masks in shades of blue, red, and purple.
"Wear a mask, so they don't get exposed to street dust," Badik told Xinhua recently.
This painting is a part of the Epicentrum street art festival, organized by the local community and has attracted artists from countries including Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and also Indonesia.
Sports, together with art and culture, are the primary topics of the painting process which run from Sept. 10 to Sept. 17.
The topic of sports is also present in the creation by Tangerang muralist Yosua Tan. He sketched a picture of a man with sunglasses and a football, a global favorite sport, and wrote "mafia" next to it. This illustrates a moral critique of football, which he said frequently turns into a political arena for certain parties.
"We hope that football doesn't turn into a political event; sport should stay sport," he said.
Ibnu Jandi, the festival's conceptualizer, said Tangerang is an urban area which was in the past a deep forest but quickly transformed with expansion of the development of the capital, with thousands of industries emerging and migrants coming from different provinces.
Similar to urban areas in other nations, not only the wooded areas vanished but also the local culture in many cases, many roads are clogged with traffic, and public spaces are congested, he remarked.
Akid One, 37, a Malaysian muralist, tried to showcase urban traffic in his works finished with classic tan colors, like an ancient landscape.
He said that after arriving in Indonesia, he observed the Legok highway, took pictures of it, and then used the images to create a mural showing the commotion of streets, in which there are many motorcycles travelling at high speeds, some with helmetless riders, or overloaded with woman and children, street merchants, and vehicles hauling cargo.
This scene also brought back him memories of his home country Malaysia, where he said streets were congested with cars.
"This is young people's expressions, they are not only trying to make the streets more attractive, but they are also 'rebelling' against crowded, dirty streets and shrinking public areas," Jandi explained.
The festival's art director, Edi Bonetski, added that every street has its story, and they chronicle a city's extensive history.
"When the street is our canvas," he remarked, "creativity is limitless."
Spaces for expression are expanding into the meta world as technology develops, Bonetski said, while offline works are still being done.
Evidently, a city's old walls are now lovely, its aspirations are on show, and anybody may view and appreciate them.
People and pooches may have struck up a lasting friendship after just one try, a new genetic study suggests.
New data from ancient dogs indicates that dogs became distinct from wolves between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago, researchers report July 18 in Nature Communications. Dogs then formed genetically distinct eastern and western groups 17,000 to 24,000 years ago, the researchers calculate. That timing and other genetic data point to dogs being domesticated just once.
That idea contrasts with a hypothesis put forward last year that dogs were domesticated separately in Europe and East Asia, with the Asian dogs eventually replacing the European mutts (SN: 7/9/16, p. 15). Scientists agree that dogs stem from wolves, but where, when and how many times dogs were domesticated — passing down tameness and other traits over generations — has been rethought many times in the last few years (SN: 7/8/17, p. 20).
The new study “puts dog origins into one time and place again. That’s really important,” says Peter Savolainen, an evolutionary geneticist at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm who was not involved in either study. These new data indicate “there’s a single origin, and it wasn’t in Europe,” says Savolainen, a proponent of an East Asian origin of dogs.
The new study examined the complete genetic blueprints, or genome, from a 7,000-year-old dog from Herxheim in Germany, and a 4,700-year-old dog from Cherry Tree Cave (also known as Kirshbaumhöle) in Germany. The scientists also analyzed DNA data from a 4,800-year-old dog from Newgrange, Ireland, that had been described in the previous study positing two domestication events. A claim of multiple domestications for dogs requires extraordinary evidence, says study coauthor Krishna Veeramah, an evolutionary geneticist at Stony Brook University in New York. But complete genomes of the ancient dogs suggest a simpler story. “We can explain all of our data just using one domestication event,” Veeramah says. Although Veeramah and colleagues see a split between eastern and western dogs, that split probably happened after domestication took place. Modern European dogs still share heritage with Stone Age canines on the continent, hinting that all the pups came from a common source rather than separately domesticated Asian dogs replacing their European counterparts.
These new data don’t completely rule out multiple domestications (the single event is just the simpler explanation), nor do they indicate where humans and canines became BFFs, Veeramah says. A family tree constructed from the DNA data puts today’s Southeast Asian breeds on the earliest branch, implying an origin in Asia. But a dog breed’s present-day location may not reflect where dogs were actually domesticated more than 20,000 years ago, Veeramah says.
The team that proposed double domestication is not convinced of a single origin. The new study is based on genetic data alone and doesn’t take archaeological evidence into account, says Greger Larson, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Oxford.
“There’s no smoking gun here, and there’s no direct contradiction,” says Larson. “Our hypothesis of a dual origin remains a possibility, as does a single origin.” Researchers won’t know for sure until they’ve analyzed older dogs from multiple places.
The ancient doggy data also challenge a recently proposed idea that dogs were domesticated when early mongrels developed the ability to digest starch better than wolves could (SN Online: 1/23/13), allowing them to eat grains in early farmers’ trash heaps. A previous study found that today’s dogs have many copies of the AMY2B gene, which produces an enzyme that helps break down starch, while wolves have only two copies.
The new study finds that both ancient German dogs had two copies of AMY2B, while the Newgrange dog had three. Since those dogs lived thousands of years after domestication, the findings suggest the first domesticated dogs were no better equipped to digest starch than wolves were. But the ancient dogs do have other genetic variants that made it possible for the amylase gene to be copied later, Veeramah says. Exactly when that happened isn’t clear.
Vaping e-cigarettes with high amounts of nicotine appears to impact how often and how heavily teens smoke and vape in the future, a new study finds.
In 2016, an estimated 11 percent of U.S. high school students used e-cigarettes. Past research has found that that teen vaping can lead to smoking (SN: 9/19/15, p. 14). The new study, published online October 23 in JAMA Pediatrics, is the first look at whether vaping higher amounts of nicotine is associated with more frequent and more intense vaping and cigarette use in the future. Researchers at the University of Southern California surveyed 181 10th-graders from 10 high schools in the Los Angeles area who had reported vaping in the previous 30 days, then followed up six months later, when the students were 11th-graders. The teens answered questions about how much and how often they had smoked and vaped in the past 30 days and about the amount of nicotine in their vaping liquid. The researchers categorized the amount of nicotine as none, low (up to 5 milligrams per milliliter), medium (6 to 17 mg/mL) or high (18 mg/mL or more).
With each step up in nicotine concentration, teens were about twice as likely to report frequent smoking versus no smoking at the six-month follow-up. Teens who vaped a high-nicotine liquid smoked seven times as many cigarettes per day as those who vaped without nicotine.
Also with each nicotine level increase, teens were about 1½ times as likely to report frequent vaping than no vaping at all. Vaping high-nicotine liquid led to almost 2½ times as many episodes of vaping per day compared with no-nicotine vaping, and kids took more puffs each time they vaped.
“This study is important because it begins to chip away at the ‘black box’ that links e-cigarette use with later use of regular cigarettes,” says sociologist Richard Miech of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “Ideally, studies like this will encourage government agencies to develop policies that will make it very difficult for youth to obtain e-liquids with nicotine.” In 2016, then-U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released a report on e-cigarettes, concluding that using nicotine-containing products in any form is not safe for youth. Studies find an association between nicotine use in teens and problems with learning, attention and impulse control, as well as addiction (SN: 7/11/15, p. 18).
