Chinese regulators have required apps and WeChat mini programs by domestic developers to register via the same system as domestic websites. Experts said the move will help optimize registration and management procedures and mechanisms for apps and mini programs while helping to better deal with the issues that have arisen with the expansion of the internet such as online fraud and pornographic content.

According to a notice released by WeChat on Wednesday, starting from September 1 mini programs on the platform have to register with the Internet Content Provider (ICP) system before they can become available on WeChat. The registration has to be completed in accordance with national regulations and rules such as the Law on Combating Telecom and Online Fraud, and Internet Information Service Management Measures, the notice said.

The move came one day after China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) issued a notice requiring all domestic app developers to complete registration procedures.

China started to require ICP registration in 2000. The mechanism has played an active role in promoting the development of the internet in China over the past two decades. Along with the rapid development of the internet, apps have become the main content carrier of internet service and should register with the same requirements as websites, including registering the developers' real name, network resources and services, according to the notice.

Along with the rapid development of the internet in China over the years, apps and mini programs became widely used. So it is necessary to standardize and optimize the registration and management mechanism for these products, Xie Yongjiang, executive director of the Internet Management and Legislation Research Center at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunication, told the Global Times on Wednesday.

Xie highlighted some issues that have come along with the wide usage of apps and mini programs such as gambling, telecom fraud and pornographic content in education apps for children. Strict registration and review procedures will help to prevent such problems in the future, he said.

This optimized mechanism will also help deal with emerging problems such as private information leakage given the rapid development of big data and artificial intelligence technologies, the expert said.

Mini programs already on the platform also have to finish registration by the end of March 2024 or they will be shut down starting April 1, 2024.

According to the MIIT notice on Tuesday, app developers who started providing apps in the Chinese market before the notice was issued have to register with provincial-level communications administrations where the developer is based between September 2023 and March 2024. MIIT will carry out an inspection in April-June 2024 and developers who have not registered by that time will be dealt with according to the law, the notice said.

The notice stressed that app developers in the fields of journalism, publishing, education, film and television, and religion should also provide approval documentation from provincial-level communication administrations while registering their apps.

Along with EG.5, a sublineage of the Omicron variant, being classified as a "variant of interest" by the World Health Organization (WHO), the topic of a third COVID-19 wave has triggered discussions among Chinese netizens in recent days with many sharing their infection experiences. Experts noted that the COVID-19 situation in China is still stable and that there is no need to panic.

Some netizens on Monday who said on social media that they had been reinfected a third time noted that their symptoms were lighter than previous infections. However, some shared different experiences.

The current COVID-19 infections are more hidden, but generally still at a relatively stable level. There isn't an obvious seasonal pattern for COVID-19 transmission, but usually it will show a small infection peak every five to six months. Generally, "the infection peak is decreasing, with no impact on the country's overall prevention work," Lu Hongzhou, head of the Third People's Hospital of Shenzhen, told the Global Times on Monday.

Generally speaking, fewer people have been infected for a third or more time in Shenzhen, South China's Guangdong Province, according to Lu.

Peng Jie, director of the Difficult Infectious Disease Center at Nanfang Hospital in Guangzhou, also in Guangdong, said since the peak reinfection wave in May, some patients who thought they had ordinary fevers only found out they had COVID-19 after nucleic acid testing. Among them, only a few were infected for the third time, and their symptoms are relatively light, said Peng, according to a report issued on the Guangdong authorities' WeChat account on Saturday.

National fever outpatient treatment and the number of severe COVID-19 cases have shown a fluctuating downward trend, according to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC).

In July alone, the Chinese mainland reported 455 new serious cases of COVID-19, with 65 deaths. The patients had underlying health issues, and no one died of respiratory failure due to COVID-19, the China CDC said in its latest report issued on August 3. In June, the country reported 1,968 new serious cases, with 239 deaths, said the China CDC.

Based on the July data, the genome sequences of 9,591 local COVID-19 samples were all Omicron variant strains, covering 116 evolutionary branches, and the XBB variant strains were the main circulating ones, said the report released by the China CDC.

Due to the highly infectious nature of COVID-19 and the natural decrease in antibodies in individuals over time, basically most people can expect to be infected one to three times in a year. However, "for people with normal immune function, it will not have a significant impact on them," Lu explained. 

As long as the COVID-19 mutation doesn't completely break away from the Omicron subbranch, an individual will have a cross-immune memory, so when an individual encounters the EG.5 COVID-19 strain, it will respond fast and produce antibodies, according to Lu.

EG.5 was first reported in February, and designated as a variant under monitoring in July, according to a report released by the WHO on August 9. There has been a steady increase in the proportion of EG.5 reported globally. From July 17 to 23, the global prevalence of EG.5 was 17.4 percent, a notable rise from the data reported in the week from June 19 to 25, when the global prevalence of EG.5 was 7.6 percent, according to the WHO.

Lu suggested people with underlying health issues receive COVID-19 vaccinations regularly, including nasal spray vaccines or other multivalent vaccine strategies.

Though a slew of efforts have made to win back foreign tourists, Myanmar has been spurned due to rising security concerns caused by high profile telecom fraud cases and domestic political turmoil. Bookings for five-star hotels in the country still have been desolate even though the prices of some rooms have dropped to 300 yuan ($40) per night, Chinese media reported.

Some starred hotels in Myanmar have even been forced to give 40 percent discounts to lure in tourists. Earlier this year, the famous Sedona Hotel Yangon was forced to sell to a Singaporean company and a $130 million Peninsula hotel project in Yangon was suspended due to political instability and other factors, media reports said.

When reached by the Global Times on Thursday, several travel agencies, including Beijing China International Travel Service Co, Shanghai China International Travel Service Co, Spring Tour, tuniu.com and Shanghai Airlines Tours International, replied that they have no tourism products for Myanmar on offer at the moment. 

They were uncertain about when these tours would resume. A staffer from tuniu.com told the Global Times that they can only provide business visa services at the moment. 

According to a notice issued by the General Office of China's Ministry of Culture and Tourism on August 10, travel agencies and online tourism service providers across the country have been permitted to resume outbound group tours and "airline tickets plus hotel" services for Chinese citizens to destinations listed in the third batch of permitted countries and regions. Myanmar is included on the list of Asian countries. 

It is no longer surprising to see Chinese people say they are worried about being caught in telecom scams due to stereotypes involving Myanmar. The unfavorable perceptions about the South Asian nation were once again reinforced by No More Bets, a crime action drama currently dominating the box office in the Chinese mainland.

In a poll conducted by Chinese media on Thursday inquiring about whether Chinese netizens would travel to Myanmar, 8,901 respondents out of 9,298 said they wouldn't consider going due to safety concerns. 

Chinese tourists' unfavorable perception toward Myanmar is a result of multiple factors - political turmoil, rising concerns over rampant telecom fraud cases and the relatively poor tourism reception capability comparing to other South Asian countries, Song Qingrun, a senior research fellow from the School of Asian Studies at Beijing Foreign Studies University, told the Global Times on Thursday. Limited direct flights could also be one of the reasons why there hasn't been a jump in the number of Chinese tourists traveling to the country, Song noted. 

Myanmar's political society has been continually torn apart in the past few years. The struggle between the military and its supporters and the opposition has turned violent. Some extremist rebels have formed shadow governments along the border, carrying out scattered violent attacks on government departments and military and political officials, Song noted. 

The Chinese Embassy in Myanmar frequently reminds Chinese citizens not to believe high-salary recruitment information online, engage in illegal or criminal activities, so as to avoid damage to life and property during their stay in Myanmar. Previously, the UK warned British citizens not to travel to the conflict zone in Myanmar and the US State Department has also issued a Level 4 advisory against travel to the country, quoting civil unrest and armed conflicts.

According to figures from the Myanmar's Ministry of Hotels and Tourism, from April 2022 to the end of March in 2023, Myanmar received a total of 367,368 international tourists, of which Chinese tourists topped the list at 48,342, accounting for 13.15 percent. This is not even a fraction of what it used to be.

The latest data during the first half of 2023 showed that Myanmar attracted just 450,000 foreign tourists, led by Chinese and Thai tourists. Although it saw an increase compared to the same period last year, that increase is far less than that of neighboring countries, media reported. 

Song told the Global Times that the peak influx of Chinese travelers to the South Asian country in 2016 and 2017 has not returned despite the resumption of China's group tours to the country. However, Song said that since Myanmar is a close neighboring country of China and contains vast abundant tourism resources, it is still attractive to many Chinese travelers. He also called for a rational view of the country since the stereotype that it is plagued by crimes may have been amplified by media. 

Myanmar has been making efforts to optimize its domestic tourists market. Myanmar's ambition to win back more Chinese tourists can clearly be seen at the ongoing seventh China-South Asia Expo in Kunming, Southwest China's Yunnan Province, Song said. 

Myanmar has arranged for more than 100 entrepreneurs to participate in the exhibition and for the first time used naked eye 3D screens to display the beautiful cultural scenes of the country, the China News Service has reported. 

Some tourism insiders pointed out that the gloomy tourism enthusiasm from Chinese people in the post COVID-19 era does not specially target the country, but the entire South Asian tourism market. An employee surnamed Sun from Shanghai Airlines Tours International told the Global Times that tours to Southeast Asian countries have all shown average poor performances these days except for the Philippines.

The Culture and Tourism Department of Northwest China's Qinghai Province issued an announcement on Monday, strictly prohibiting tourists from entering unmanned scenic areas for activities such as exploration and tourism, adding that the full cost of rescue operations will be borne entirely by the involved individuals and groups as the rescue work is extremely challenging, in the event of getting stranded.

With the increasing popularity and fervor of self-driving tours and adventure sports in recent years, a growing number of tourists and adventurers are opting to venture into uninhabited areas. Consequently, a series of incidents involving missing people and fatalities have unfolded in tandem.

Located within the heart of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, Qinghai Province is situated in a cold and high-altitude region. In certain areas, communication signals can be weak or nonexistent. The region features numerous "dangerous zones" and "uninhabited areas," with complex terrain and environmental conditions.

The announcement issued by local authorities highlighted that individuals venturing into uninhabited, unreleased, and undeveloped scenic areas, whether on foot or by vehicle, will face unpredictable risks. Travelers might encounter life-threatening situations such as dehydration, oxygen deficiency, getting lost, vehicle breakdowns, and communication loss at any time.

The latest case is that one of the vehicles carrying four people on a driving holiday has gone missing while crossing the Xinjiang Lop Nur Wild Camel National Nature Reserve without authorization, resulting in four deaths, according to media reports and local police from Ruoqiang County in Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region on July 28.

Following extensive search and rescue operations, the missing vehicle was located, with four individuals found dead. The rest of the convoy members have safely returned to Dunhuang in neighboring Gansu Province.

Industry experts said on Saturday that entering the Lop Nur in summer is very risky, as surface temperatures in the area would reach as high as 70 C. Vehicle breakdowns, communication malfunctions, and the lack of adequate logistical support can all lead to adventurers being unable to safely exit unpopulated areas.

The local government emphasized in the statement that tourists should further enhance their self-protection awareness. They should refrain from leaving designated roads and venturing deep into dangerous areas such as uninhabited, unopened, and undeveloped scenic spots for adventure, tourism, and crossings.

Furthermore, the statement particularly underscores that without proper authorization or reporting to relevant authorities, no individual or organization shall organize tourist groups under the pretext of exploration, crossing, or scientific research to venture deep into natural conservation areas. In the event of getting stranded, the full cost of rescue operations will be borne entirely by the involved individuals and groups.

Travelers should carefully assess their routes, and pay attention to weather forecasts, geological hazards, and traffic conditions while also maintaining ample reserves of supplies and ensuring vehicle maintenance, which is essential to ensure the safety of the journey, said the statement.

The dumping of nuclear-contaminated wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan has raised concerns among Chinese citizens about the state of the marine environment. Chinese environmental authorities on Monday vowed to strengthen the monitoring of marine environmental pollution through multiple means, including conducting baseline surveys of marine pollution and utilizing satellites for monitoring.

China has launched its third marine pollution baseline survey, with the goal of completing a thorough investigation and assessment by 2025, said Wang Juying, the director of the National Marine Environmental Monitoring Center, at the ministry's monthly press conference on Monday.

According to Wang, this survey follows the overall approach of "understanding the current situation, identifying problems, analyzing causes, and proposing countermeasures," and focuses on China's coastal waters and the country's 283 bays, with the aim of understanding the baseline levels of various pollutants in China's jurisdictional waters, the ecological conditions of various bays, and the impact of human activities. 

"The survey aims to comprehensively grasp the basic state and trends of the marine ecological environment," Wang said.

China previously conducted the first and second national marine pollution baseline surveys in 1976 and 1996, respectively.

Hu Songqin, deputy director of the Department of Marine Ecology and Environment of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, mentioned during the conference that the recent successful launch of a satellite to serve environmental protection and disaster management will significantly enhance data support and emergency response capabilities for sudden water environmental pollution events.

She stated that the Ministry of Ecology and Environment will actively collaborate with relevant research institutions and coastal regions, making effective use of data sources from monitoring systems. 

"These will provide crucial technical support for addressing sudden environmental events, pollution incidents, investigations of key risk sources, and enhancing marine ecological environmental governance capabilities," she noted.

In response to Japan dumping the contaminated water from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the ocean, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment has stated the specific measures that China has taken in terms of marine radiation environment monitoring.

At present, the ministry is actively conducting marine radiation environment monitoring in areas under China's jurisdiction for the year 2023, guided by a focus on critical regions, comprehensive coverage of jurisdictional waters, and a thorough understanding of key pathways, according to the ministry.

The ministry also vowed that in the future it will continue to strengthen relevant monitoring efforts, closely track and assess the potential impact of of contaminated water from the Fukushima nuclear plant on China's marine environment, and effectively safeguard the national interests and public health.

In 2021 and 2022, the ministry organized marine radiation environment monitoring in areas under China's jurisdiction, which provided insight into the baseline condition of the marine radiation environment in these regions. The monitoring results indicated that there were no abnormal levels of artificial radioactive isotopes in the seawater and marine organisms in China's jurisdictional waters, and overall, the concentrations remained within the historical fluctuation range.

Here’s a good idea for the next presidential candidate debate: They can insult each other about their ignorance of statistics.

Actually, it’s a pertinent topic for political office seekers, as public opinion polls use statistical methods to measure the electorate’s support (or lack thereof) for a particular candidate. But such polls are notoriously unreliable, as Hillary Clinton found out in Michigan.

It probably wouldn’t be a very informative debate, of course — just imagine how Donald Trump would respond to a question asking what he thought about P values. Sadly, though, he and the other candidates might actually understand P values just about as well as many practicing scientists — which is to say, not very well at all.
In recent years criticism about P values — statistical measures widely used to analyze experimental data in most scientific disciplines — has finally reverberated loudly enough for the scientific community to listen. A watershed acknowledgment of P value problems appeared this week when the American Statistical Association issued a statement warning the rest of the world about the limitations of P values and their widespread misuse.

“While the p-value can be a useful statistical measure, it is commonly misused and misinterpreted,” the statistical association report stated. “This has led to some scientific journals discouraging the use of p-values, and some scientists and statisticians recommending their abandonment.”

In light of these issues, the association convened a group of experts to formulate a document listing six “principles” regarding P values for the guidance of “researchers, practitioners and science writers who are not primarily statisticians.” Of those six principles, the most pertinent for people in general (and science journalists in particular) is No. 5: “A p-value, or statistical significance, does not measure the size of an effect or the importance of a result.”

What, then, does it measure? That’s principle No. 1: “… how incompatible the data are with a specified statistical model.” But note well principle No. 2: “P-values do not measure the probability that the studied hypothesis is true, or the probability that the data were produced by random chance alone.” And therefore, always remember principle No. 3: “Scientific conclusions … or policy decisions should not be based only on whether a p-value passes a specific threshold.”

In other words, the common convention of judging a P value less than .05 to be “statistically significant” is not really a proper basis for assigning significance at all. Except that scientific journals still regularly use that criterion for deciding whether a paper gets published. Which in turn drives researchers to finagle their data to get a P value of less than .05. As a result, the scientific process is tarnished and the published scientific literature is often unreliable.
As the statistical association statement points out, this situation is far from merely of academic concern.

“The issues touched on here affect not only research, but research funding, journal practices, career advancement, scientific education, public policy, journalism, and law,” the authors point out in the report, published online March 7 in The American Statistician.

Many of the experts who participated in the process wrote commentaries on the document, some stressing that it did not go far enough in condemning P values’ pernicious influences on science.

“Viewed alone, p-values calculated from a set of numbers and assuming a statistical model are of limited value and frequently are meaningless,” wrote biostatistician Donald Berry of MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. He cited the serious negative impact that misuse and misinterpretation of P values has had not only on science, but also on society. “Patients with serious diseases have been harmed. Researchers have chased wild geese, finding too often that statistically significant conclusions could not be reproduced. The economic impacts of faulty statistical conclusions are great.”

Echoing Berry’s concerns was Boston University epidemiologist Kenneth Rothman. “It is a safe bet that people have suffered or died because scientists (and editors, regulators, journalists and others) have used significance tests to interpret results,” Rothman wrote. “The correspondence between results that are statistically significant and those that are truly important is far too low to be useful. Consequently, scientists have embraced and even avidly pursued meaningless differences solely because they are statistically significant, and have ignored important effects because they failed to pass the screen of statistical significance.”

Stanford University epidemiologist John Ioannidis compared the scientific community’s attachment to P values with drug addiction, fueled by the institutional rewards that accompany the publication process.

“Misleading use of P-values is so easy and automated that, especially when rewarded with publication and funding, it can become addictive,” Ioannidis commented. “Investigators generating these torrents of P-values should be seen with sympathy as drug addicts in need of rehabilitation that will help them live a better, more meaningful scientific life in the future.”

Although a handful of P value defenders can still be found among the participants in this discussion, it should be clear by now that P values, as currently used in science, do more harm than good. They may be valid and useful under certain specific circumstances, but those circumstances are rarely relevant in most experimental contexts. As Berry notes, statisticians can correctly define P values in a technical sense, but “most statisticians do not really understand the issues in applied settings.”

In its statement, the statistical association goes a long way toward validating the concerns about P values that have been expressed for decades by many critical observers. This validation may succeed in initiating change where previous efforts have failed. But that won’t happen without identifying some alternative to the P value system, and while many have been proposed, no candidate has emerged as an acceptable nominee for a majority of the scientific world’s electorate. So the next debate should not be about P values — it should be about what to replace them with.

Modern-day Melanesians carry a two-pronged genetic legacy of ancient interbreeding that still affects their health and well-being, researchers say.

Unlike people elsewhere in the world, these Pacific islanders possess nuclear DNA that they inherited from two Stone Age hominid populations, say population geneticist Benjamin Vernot, formerly of the University of Washington in Seattle, and his colleagues. At least some of that ancient DNA contains genes involved in important biological functions, the researchers find. Nuclear DNA is passed from both parents to their children.
The finding means that ancestors of people now living in the Bismarck Archipelago, a group of islands off Papua New Guinea’s northeastern coast, mated with Neandertals as well as with mysterious Neandertal relatives called Denisovans, the scientists conclude online March 17 in Science.

In support of previous research, the researchers find that non-Africans — including Melanesians — have inherited an average of between 1.5 and 4 percent of their DNA from Neandertals. But only Melanesians display substantial Denisovan ancestry, which makes up 1.9 to 3.4 percent of their DNA, the researchers say. (Present-day African populations possess little to no Neandertal or Denisovan DNA.)

The bits of Neandertal and Denisovan DNA carried by Melanesians encompass genes involved in metabolism and immunity, indicating that interbreeding influenced the evolutionary success of ancient humans, Vernot’s group reports.

The new study reconstructs the microscopic landscape of Neandertals’ and Denisovans’ contributions to Melanesians’ DNA “in impressive detail,” says Harvard University paleogeneticist Pontus Skoglund.

Vernot’s team studied DNA from 35 Melanesians at 11 locations in the Bismarck Archipelago. Analyses concentrated on DNA from 27 unrelated individuals. The researchers also looked for evidence of ancient interbreeding in previously acquired genomes of close to 1,500 modern-day individuals from different parts of the world. Denisovan DNA for comparisons came from fragmentary fossils found in a Siberian cave; comparative Neandertal DNA came from a genome previously extracted from a 50,000-year-old woman’s toe bone.
Among Melanesians, DNA sequences attributed to Neandertals and Denisovans encompassed several metabolism genes. One of those genes influences a hormone that increases blood glucose levels. Another affects the chemical breakdown of lipids. Other Melanesian genetic sequences acquired through ancient interbreeding either include or adjoin genes that help to marshal the body’s defenses against illness.

These findings follow evidence suggesting that once-useful genes that ancient humans inherited from Neandertals now raise the risk of contracting certain diseases (SN: 3/5/16, p. 18). Vernot’s group reaches no conclusions about good or bad effects of ancient hybrid genes in Melanesians.

No sign of Neandertal or Denisovan DNA appears in areas of Melanesians’ genomes involved in brain development, the scientists say. So brain genetics, for better or worse, apparently evolved along a purely human path.

Denisovans’ evolutionary history remains poorly understood. Previous DNA comparisons suggest that Denisovans must have reached Southeast Asia. Skoglund suspects that’s where the ancestors of Melanesians bred with Denisovans.

Substantial interbreeding of humans with Denisovans probably occurred only once, Vernot and his colleagues suspect. Genetic exchanges of humans with Neandertals took place at least three times, they add. These estimates are derived from comparisons of shared Denisovan and Neandertal DNA sequences among individuals in different parts of the world.

A new X-ray telescope run by the Japan Aerospace Agency has gone silent a little more than a month after its launch. JAXA reported online March 27 that the telescope, ASTRO-H (aka Hitomi), stopped communicating with Earth. U.S. Strategic Command’s Joint Space Operations Center also reported seeing five pieces of debris alongside the satellite on March 26.

Attempts to figure out what went wrong with the spacecraft, which launched February 17, have not been successful. Up until now though, ASTRO-H seemed to be functioning. In late February, mission operators successfully switched on the spacecraft’s cooling system and tested some of its instruments.

ASTRO-H carries four instruments to study cosmic X-rays over an energy range from 0.3 to 600 kiloelectron volts. By studying X-rays, astronomers hope to learn more about some of the more feisty denizens of the universe such as exploding stars, gorging black holes, and dark matter swirling around within galaxy clusters. Earth’s atmosphere absorbs X-rays, so the only way to see them is to put a telescope in space.

Clownfish and anemones depend on one another. The stinging arms of the anemones provide clownfish with protection against predators. In return, the fish keep the anemone clean and provide nutrients, in the form of poop. Usually, several individual clownfish occupy a single anemone — a large and dominant female, an adult male and several subordinates — all from the same species. But with 28 species of clownfish and 10 species of anemone, there can be a lot of competition for who gets to occupy which anemone.

In the highly diverse waters of the Coral Triangle of Southeast Asia, however, clownfish have figured out how to share, researchers report March 30 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Anemones in these waters are often home to multiple species of clownfish that live together peacefully.

From 2005 to 2014, Emma Camp, of the University of Technology Sydney and colleagues gathered data on clownfish and their anemone homes from 20 locations that had more than one species of clownfish residents. In 981 underwater survey transects, they encountered 1,508 clownfish, 377 of which lived in groups consisting of two or more fish species in a single anemone.

Most of those cohabiting clownfish could be found in the waters of the Coral Triangle, the team found, with the highest levels of species cohabitation occurring off Hoga Island in Indonesia. There, the researchers found 437 clownfish from six species living among 114 anemones of five species. Every anemone was occupied by clownfish, and half had two species of the fish.

In general, “when the number of clownfish species exceeded the number of host anemone species, cohabitation was almost always documented,” the researchers write.

The multiple-species groups divvied up space in an anemone similar to the way that a single-species group does, with subordinate fish sticking to the peripheries. That way, those subordinate fish can avoid fights — and potentially getting kicked off the anemone or even dying. “Living on the periphery of an anemone, despite the higher risk of predation, is a better option than having no host anemone,” the team writes.

These multi-species groups might even be better for both of the clownfish species, since they wouldn’t have to compete so much over mates, and perhaps even less over food, if the species had different diets.

This isn’t the first time that scientists have found cohabitation to be an effective strategy in an area of high biodiversity. This has also been demonstrated with scorpions in the Amazon. But it does show how important it is to conserve species in regions such as this, the researchers say — because losing one species can easily wipe out several more.

NEW YORK — Lip-readers’ minds seem to “hear” the words their eyes see being formed. And the better a person is at lipreading, the more neural activity there is in the brain’s auditory cortex, scientists reported April 4 at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society.

Earlier studies have found that auditory brain areas are active during lipreading. But most of those studies focused on small bits of language — simple sentences or even single words, said study coauthor Satu Saalasti of Aalto University in Finland. In contrast, Saalasti and colleagues studied lipreading in more natural situations. Twenty-nine people read the silent lips of a person who spoke Finnish for eight minutes in a video. “We can all lip-read to some extent,” Saalasti said, and the participants, who had no lipreading experience, varied widely in their comprehension of the eight-minute story.

In the best lip-readers, activity in the auditory cortex was quite similar to that evoked when the story was read aloud, brain scans revealed. The results suggest that lipreading success depends on a person’s ability to “hear” the words formed by moving lips, Saalasti said.