An aerial view of a junction on the 522-kilometer-long highway that cuts through the Taklimakan Desert in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. [HU HUHU/XINHUA] Hard work has made Tazhong, the 'center of the desert', green and vibrant As the sun slowly descends and the Taklimakan Desert begins to cool, things start heating up in Tazhong, a small settlement in the far-western wilderness. Wisps of smoke are seen curling from chimneys, and restaurants heave with weary travelers and hungry workers. At 337,000 square kilometers, the Taklimakan, deep in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, is China's largest desert - known across the country as the sea of death. In the Uygur tongue, its name means go in and you won't come out. Trading posts once dotted the inhospitable land, offering refuge to caravans and adventurers on the ancient Silk Road. But Tazhong, whose name means center of the desert, did not bear witness to those ancient travelers. It was not formally established until 2015, after rising out of the dust when the world's longest desert highway opened to traffic in 1995. The 522-km-long highway brought residents and life to the Taklimakan. Later, oil workers came to exploit deposits hidden under the dunes. In a small restaurant, Li Jiansheng fries vegetables grown 300 km away. He left his hometown in Sichuan province to start a new life in Tazhong more than two decades ago. When he started work as a waiter in the restaurant, Tazhong was a dusty, barren land with no greenery. Over 20 years, he has seen saxaul and rose willow grow and flourish. He has turned his tiny home into a two-story house and now owns the restaurant. wristbands canadafuck cancer braceletdual-layer-wristbandembossed-wristbandprinted-wristbandcolor-filled-wristband
A woman wearing a face mask rides a bicycle on a bridge in front of the financial district of Pudong, which is covered in smog, during a polluted day in Shanghai on November 28, 2018. [Photo/Agencies] BEIJING, Jan. 27 -- Researchers have disclosed that air quality affects people's emotional expressions on social media. They collected and analyzed 210 million geotagged tweets on Sina Weibo across China's 144 cities from March to November in 2014 and constructed a daily city-level expressed happiness metric based on the sentiment. The researchers compared the PM2.5 concentrations with the mood index and found that the two numbers were inversely related. According to the study published in the journal of Nature Human Behavior, the researchers examined questions like: Does air pollution affect a citizen's expressed happiness in real time? Do the effects of pollution on happiness vary on different days such as weekends, holidays and very hot days? And whether different population groups are affected by air pollution? They found that people suffer more on weekends, holidays and days with extreme weather conditions. The expressed happiness of women, high-income people and the residents of both the cleanest and dirtiest cities are more sensitive to air pollution.
