【推荐1】24 Solar Terms: 8 things you may not know about Frost’s Descent

The traditional Chinese lunar calendar divides the year into 24 solar terms. Frost’s Descent (霜降), the 18th solar term of the year, begins this year on Oct 23 and ends on Nov 6.     1    , during which time the weather becomes much colder than before and frost begins to appear. Here are four things you should know about Frost’s Descent.

Frosty autumn

    2    . During Frost’s Descent, frost begins to appear. But in the lower reaches of the Yellow River region, frost first appears in late October or early November. As Frost’s Descent comes, the world is filled with the atmosphere of late autumn.

Eating fruit

Eating persimmons during Frost’s Descent can help people resist the cold and protect their bones. In the countryside, people believe that their lips will crack if they don’t eat persimmons during this period. The apple is one kind of recommended fruit during Frost’s Descent. Apples can moisten the lungs, quench one’s thirst and help one’s digestion.    3    . It can promote the secretion of body liquids, clear away heat and reduce sputum.

Eating duck

It’s a custom to eat duck on the first day of Frost’s Descent in south Fujian province. There is a saying in Fujian which goes, “Even nourishing all year is not as good as nourishing the human body on the first day of Frost’s Descent.”    4    .

    5    

People in areas such as Daxin county in Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region celebrate the first day of Frost’s Descent. In the Frost’s Descent Festival, the Zhuang people offer sacrifices, dance and sing folk songs. With a history of more than 360 years, the festival is to commemorate Cen Yuyin, a heroine in battles against foreign aggression.

【推荐3】Chinese mooncake is the representative food of the Mid-Autumn Festival. It is a kind of round cookie with various fillings and different artistic patterns on the surface.

In Chinese culture, roundness symbolizes completeness and togetherness. The mooncake is not just a food. It’s a profound cultural tradition deep in Chinese people’s hearts, symbolizing a spiritual feeling. At Mid-Autumn Festival, people eat mooncakes together with family, and present mooncakes to relatives or friends to express love and best wishes.

As early as the Shang and Zhou dynasties in what today are Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces in east China, there was a kind of “Taishi cake” thick at the center and thin at the edge, which was the origin of the mooncake. In the Han Dynasty, sesame (芝麻) and walnuts were introduced into China, and round cookies filled with these foods appeared. In the Tang Dynasty, the name “mooncake” was used for the first time. In the Northern Song Dynasty, mooncakes got popular in the royal palace. It was not until the Ming Dynasty that the custom of eating these cookies during the Mid-Autumn Festival became popular.

Mooncakes vary according to different regional styles and tastes. Cantonese-style mooncakes are known for their sweetness. Suzhou-style mooncakes have existed for more than a thousand years. They have soft layers of dough (面团) and lots of sugar and lard, making them available in sweet or salty tastes. Beijing-style mooncakes feature the delicate use of sweetness and fine decoration. Chaoshan-style mooncakes are usually larger than other mooncakes with common fillings of red bean paste and potato paste.

Most mooncakes contain high amounts of sugar and oil, which are not healthy. To decrease the harmfulness that high fat and calories bring to our body, some foods are recommended to eat together with mooncakes, including tea, sour fruit like grapes, and wine. They help digest, and take away fat in our body. Also, do not eat too much at one time.

【推荐2】BBYY, as the adult female was known, made a wild dash of more than 388 kilometers in 49 days—the longest distance ever recorded among hares, rabbits or any other relatives—researchers report online December 22 in Ecology.

“To think that such a small animal living under such extreme conditions averaged about eight kilometers per day across seven weeks is truly amazing,” says Joel Berger, a scientist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.

Arctic hares, also known as North-Pole hares—which weigh more or less the same as house cats, about four kilograms—are desirable targets for foxes and wolves on the tundra (苔原). Given the hares’ important role in the Arctic food chain, scientist Dominique Berteaux wanted to know how the animals move across the dry landscape where very few plants can grow.

In 2019, Berteaux and colleagues fixed satellite tracking rings on 25 hares caught near the northern tip of Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada. As the hares quickly ran away, the researchers had no idea the creatures were beginning a mind-blowing journey across the tundra, Berteaux says. That’s because hares and their relatives, typically spend their lives within a familiar area where food is plentiful and easy to find.

The Arctic hares behaved quite differently, with most traveling anywhere between 113 and 310 kilometers. None came close to BBYY, who died of unknown causes about a month after reaching her final destination.

For a hare to complete such a dangerous journey, it must balance the need to find food without becoming food, says Dennis Murray, a scientist. That makes BBYY’s adventure even more impressive, he says.

Berteaux and colleagues hope data from BBYY and the other hares can help shape conservation strategies for the desert system near the North Pole. But even at this early stage, it’s exciting to find “something unknown in an animal that we thought we knew quite well,” Berteaux says.