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This is NEWS Plus Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing. Here is the news.
China has launched a nationwide campaign against surrogate pregnancy.
The campaign started this month and will run to the end of the year. Surrogate motherhood is banned in China. The campaign will focus on identifying and punishing medical personnel and intermediary agencies that are involved in the surrogate motherhood business.
Online, TV, radio and print media that carry surrogacy advertisements will also be checked. The authorities will step up supervision over the sale and circulation of assisted reproductive technology, drugs and medical equipment.
Despite the ban in China, the wombs-for-rent business has thrived. Studies show that an estimated one in eight couples have fertility problems.
China's health authorities say cracking down on illegal surrogacy is a long-term task, and the campaign will continue until it is effectively controlled. They have set up a special hotline: 12356. People can provide information on any medical personnel, intermediary, media organization or individual involved in the illegal practice.
This is NEWS Plus Special English.
Many great discoveries started with whimsical questions.
When David Hu from the Georgia Institute of Technology saw a mosquito braving heavy rain to land on a man's face, the question that popped up in his mind was how do the pests survive an onslaught of raindrops, each more than 50 times the creature's own weight.
Such thoughts may be fleeting for many, but Hu and his colleagues spent years solving this mystery. By observing mosquito-raindrop collisions with high-speed cameras, they discovered that the mosquito is protected by a strong exoskeleton and can perform a dive upon impact with raindrops to lighten its force.
The study, believed to offer insight to the development of insect-sized flying robots, won Hu a Pineapple Science Prize for physics recently in Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province.
China's equivalent of Ig Nobel Prizes, the U.S. parody of the real Nobel, the Pineapple awards honor the curiosity behind amusing and amazing experiments. The fourth annual awards ceremony was co-hosted by Zhejiang Science Museum and Guokr.com, China's leading popular science website.
Its mathematics prize this year went to Huang Jinzi and his team from New York University, whose mathematical models answered the long sought-after question from childhood: How many licks does it take to finish a lollipop?
It was initially an experiment on how water currents dissolve solids, using hard candy as a subject, but the theory developed from the experiment was later used to answer the lollipop conundrum -- a lollipop with a diameter of 1 centimeter can be licked 1,000 times.
The invention prize was awarded to Jia Wenzhao and his colleagues from the University of California, San Diego, who invented a sticky device that can generate electricity from sweat. With its help, you can get an extra second for your cellphone by several hours of sweaty exercise.
Others on this year's prize list included proof that "loving one's own name makes one feel happier" for the psychology prize; and the "a monkey's face looks like its mother's" experiment for medicine and biology prize. A blogger also won a special prize for spending a year documenting a meat's rotting process.
Launched in 2012 to honor imaginative research and to arouse public enthusiasm for science, the Pineapple Prize is so named because of the difficulty of peeling the fruit, its inexpensive price and popularity with ordinary people.
This year, the list of winners was more international. Around one third of the recipients were from overseas.
You are listening to NEWS Plus Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
Arrangements for Muslims in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region who wish to take part in State-organized visits to Mecca for the annual hajj pilgrimage are being enhanced by the local authorities.
Aisha Imish, a senior religious leader in Baicheng in the south of the region, participated in one of the official trips in 2013.
50-year-old Imish says the group was accompanied by a translator, a doctor, a chef and other staff members, and enjoyed life in Islam's most holy city, Mecca.
All able-bodied Muslims who can afford to go on the hajj are required to do so at least once in their lifetime. This year's pilgrimage is expected to run from Sept 21 to 26.
Last year, trips to Mecca were organized for 14,000 pilgrims from China, 3,200 of them came from Xinjiang.
The region has more than 13 million Muslims, and has a long waiting list for the government-organized visits.
The Xinjiang Ethnic and Religious Affairs Bureau says the quota is almost the same every year, far short of the number of applicants in the region.
Applications are submitted to the State Administration of Religious Affairs. Applicants can see the waiting list on the administration's website and check how many people are ahead of them.
This is NEWS Plus Special English.
China's Supreme People's Court has announced that by 2020, all courts in China's ethnic minority areas will be staffed with judges capable of using both Mandarin and local ethnic languages.
The Supreme People's Court and the State Ethnic Affairs Commission have jointly issued a circular on improving the education and training of bilingual judges for ethnic minority areas. They have pledged to train at least 1,500 bilingual judges as by 2020.
The authorities will work to ensure that every court in such areas has no fewer than four judges with bilingual competence and legal expertise.
China has 56 ethnic groups, and citizens of all ethnic groups have statutory right to use their own ethnic language in litigations according to the Constitution and law.
You are listening to NEWS Plus Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
China's health regulator says hospitals offering medical
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