BEIJING, May 30 (Xinhua) -- The following are the highlights of China's science news from the past week:

ENDANGERED TREES

A group of Craigia Yunnanensis, a rare and endangered flowering plant, has been found in a nature reserve in southwest China's Yunnan Province, according to Gaoligong Mountain National Nature Reserve.

The biggest of the 31 trees is nearly 30 meters high and takes four adults linking hands to embrace. Researchers put its age at around 200 years.

They collected some seeds for research and after more than a month of cultivation, two seeds have sprouted.

COVID-19 DISPERSAL PATTERN

Chinese researchers have discovered that more than half of the confirmed novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) cases occurred in places with air temperatures of 5 to 15 degrees Celsius.

The researchers from Lanzhou University hoped to learn about the environmental parameters within which the SARS-CoV-2 can survive in order to understand its global dispersal pattern.

They investigated the impact of ambient temperature on global dispersal of COVID-19, according to their recent research article published in the journal of Science of The Total Environment.

OCEAN HEAT

Chinese researchers have said that the layer of water between depths of 200 and 1,000 meters in the South China Sea stored more heat during the last glacial period, a finding that could throw more light on the warming of the atmosphere.

Ocean heat plays an important role in influencing Earth's climate. Researchers from the South China Sea Institute of Oceanology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences hoped to investigate the changes in ocean heat content over a millennial scale, as well as the mechanisms that control the transmission of heat in the ocean's interior.

PRECIPITATION CHANGES

Chinese researchers have reconstructed precipitation changes in the recent 12,000 years of a transition zone in north China's arid and semi-arid regions.

The East Asian summer monsoon (EASM) variability is primarily influential for climate change in East Asia.

The lakes in the transition zone of north China's arid and semi-arid regions at the fringe of the EASM is sensitive about the response of the EASM. However, the pattern and mechanisms of the EASM change during the Holocene that began approximately 11,650 years ago are still debated.

The researchers conducted a systematical geomorphologic survey along a closed-basin lake located on the southern Mongolia plateau and reconstructed the precipitation quantity in the recent 12,000 years of the lake. Enditem

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