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In mid-December 2022, after China started to ease COVID-19 restrictions that had lasted for three years, the world keenly anticipated a swift and robust recovery in China's economy in 2023. But at a tone-setting economic conference, top Chinese policymakers, while stressing that "an overall recovery and improvement is expected," also offered a sobering assessment of the difficulties that lay ahead.

"Economic work in 2023 will be complex," Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, Chinese president and chairman of the Central Military Commission, concluded in a speech at the Central Economic Work Conference (CEWC) on December 15, 2022. The meeting, aimed at setting priorities for economic work in 2023, demanded making economic stability a top priority and pursuing steady progress while ensuring economic stability.

As 2023 draws to an end, what transpired in the Chinese economy over the last year is consistent with that assessment. The economy faced serious downward pressure from shrinking demand, supply shocks, and weakening expectations - "triple pressures" as officials put it. But it also mounted an impressive recovery, with the GDP growth rate widely expected to meet or even exceed an initial target of around 5 percent, a remarkable improvement from the previous three years during the pandemic. More crucially, China also achieved solid progress in high-quality development, with the rise of domestic consumption, scientific and technological innovation, and green development.

All told, China's recovery has become one of the biggest highlights for the global economy in 2023 amid a severe downturn and a complex geo-economic situation - China is expected to be the fastest-growing major economy and contribute roughly one-third of global growth, according to Chinese and foreign economists. Beyond the direct contribution to growth, faster growth in China also has positive spillover effects on the rest of the world: A single percentage point of growth in China, on average, increases output in other economies by 0.3 percent over the medium term, according to the IMF.

Behind such a hard-won, impressive outcome are objective and scientific decision-making by Chinese policymakers under Xi's leadership, a series of targeted and effective policies to tackle risks and challenges head-on, as well as the effective execution of those policies - the quintessential Chinese governance model that underpins China's long-running economic miracle, economists said.

This also vividly demonstrated how Xi Jinping's economic thought, which, among other things, stresses high-quality development, is put into practice to address problems and promote high-quality development, they noted.

Hard-won, impressive outcome
China's economic recovery was by no means smooth in 2023.

"In fact, the post-pandemic economic recovery was full of difficulties and challenges. Some were unprecedented. Despite all these [challenges], China took a series of measures and deepened reforms and opening-up. We achieved an effective improvement in quality and reasonable growth in quantity," Guan Tao, global chief economist at BOC International under the Bank of China, told the Global Times. "This indeed is a very hard-won outcome."

China's economy grew by 5.2 percent year-on-year in the first three quarters, and the full-year GDP growth rate is expected to exceed the official growth target of around 5 percent. That is a remarkable comeback from a 3 percent rate in 2022 and significantly higher than the average growth rate of 4.5 percent between 2020 and 2022. Globally, a 5-percent growth rate in China would also largely outpace a projected global growth rate of 3 percent, 1.5 percent in advanced economies, and 4 percent in emerging markets and developing economies, according to the IMF.

What's more, international organizations have constantly upgraded China's growth forecasts, in stark contrast to grim predictions hyped by some Western economic pundits and media outlets.

"We recently upgraded our 2023 forecast to 5.4 percent. This forecast was increased by 0.4 percentage points in November," Steven Alan Barnett, senior IMF resident representative in China, told the Global Times in an exclusive interview. "At 5.4 percent growth, China by itself would explain around one-third of global growth in 2023."

Apart from growth in quantity, China's high-quality development also made significant strides in 2023, reflected in the rapid rise of new emerging industries, breakthroughs in critical technologies, the transition toward consumption-led growth, and the expansion of green development.

High-quality development
Barnett highlighted China's rapid growth in new industries like electric vehicles (EVs) and green technologies that offered a cushion against other downward pressures. "China, in fact, stands out as a technological leader in the production of green technologies such as solar panels and EVs," he said.

In a remarkable example, China surpassed Japan to become the world's biggest auto exporter in the first quarter of 2023, thanks to the new-energy vehicles (NEVs) sector. In the first 11 months, NEVs output grew by 34.5 percent to 8.426 million units, while sales increased by 36.7 percent to 8.304 million units, according to the latest industry data. More than 64 percent of global NEVs sales were in China during the period, according to the 2023 World New Energy Vehicle Congress.

Also highlighting progress in China's innovation-driven high-quality development, in November, the added value of high-tech manufacturing above designated size increased by 6.2 percent year-on-year, 4.4 percentage points faster than that of the previous month. High-tech products such as solar cells, service robots, and integrated circuits continued their stellar performance, with their output rising 44.5 percent, 33.3 percent, and 27.9 percent, respectively.

That helped promote high-quality development in China's foreign trade, with the upgrade of the export structure. In the first 11 months, China's exports of NEVs, lithium batteries, and solar cells - collectively known as "the three new items" of China's exports - jumped by 41.7 percent to about 79.9 billion yuan.

Also underscoring China's optimizing trade structure, "during a period of declining orders from the US and Europe, China's trade with emerging markets continues to grow," Wei Jianguo, former Chinese vice minister of commerce and executive deputy director of the China Center for International Economic Exchanges, told the Global Times.

Another highlight of China's high-quality development is the rise of domestic consumption as the main economic growth driver. In the first 11 months, total retail sales, a main gauge of consumption, grew by 7.2 percent year-on-year to about 42.8 trillion yuan, with a 10.1 percent growth in November. "Consumption explained around 80 percent of growth in the first three quarters of the year," Barnett said.

Innovation-led and consumption-driven growth is a crucial part of China's high-quality development, which is at the front and center of China's economic policymaking. This year's CEWC, held on December 11 and 12, stressed that it is imperative to uphold high-quality development as the unyielding principle of the new era. The phrase has drawn much attention as it resembles the popular Chinese saying "development is the absolute principle," popularized during the decades of reform and opening-up that ushered in China's rapid economic rise.

Decisive top-down leadership

How did China overcome difficulties and challenges and achieve these hard-won gains? Decisive top-down leadership is the key, economists said.

Over the last year, at major meetings and inspection tours across the country, Xi has repeatedly called for efforts to tackle challenges, stabilize growth, and promote high-quality development.

In his speech at the CEWC last year, Xi stressed "We need to bear in mind the overall strategic picture and focus on major problems" and offered clear guidance on how to tackle them. He called for efforts to expand domestic demand, build a modern industrial system, develop the public sector and support the non-public sector, attract and utilize foreign investment, and forestall and defuse risks in areas such as real estate, financial market and local government debt.

This guidance has since turned into policy actions over the last year. Overall, China has adopted proactive fiscal and prudent monetary policies that have supported economic recovery. In the budget adopted in March, consumption, technological innovation, and high-quality development were prioritized.

Throughout the year, Chinese officials both at the central and local levels released an array of policy measures to support consumption, investment, and the private sector.

China also welcomed a long stream of global business executives and hosted many high-level trade fairs to boost cooperation.

Then in July, amid new challenges and weakening expectations, Xi presided over a meeting of the Political Bureau of the CPC, to set priorities for economic work in the second half of the year. While noting "new difficulties and challenges," the meeting called for solid efforts to expand domestic demand, shore up confidence, and prevent risks. That also led to strong policy measures in the second half of the year, including a plan to issue an additional 1 trillion yuan in treasury bonds in the fourth quarter.

The meeting also stressed that China's economic recovery was a "wave-like" and "zigzag" process. That demonstrated top officials' confidence in the economy, as they are trying to convey a message that China's economy may face high waves but it will always break through and it may zigzag but it will always move forward.

This is very typical of Chinese policymaking - confident in China's development, responsive to new situations, and swift and effective in responding to them, economists said.

"[Top officials] grasp issues in a very objective manner and take measures in a very swift and targeted manner," Guan said.

This has not only helped underpin China's stable economic recovery in 2023 but has also boosted confidence in China's 2024 economic recovery, despite lingering risks and challenges.

"Amid high winds and strong waves in the global economy, China's economy is making solid progress toward the future, forming synergy through optimization and balance, continuously releasing strong development momentum, and demonstrates bright prospects," Cheng Shi, chief economist of ICBC International, told the Global Times.

This year's CEWC, which sets the economic agenda for 2024, noted that some difficulties and challenges must be tackled to achieve further economic recovery and pledged a series of policy measures in a wide range of areas.

"The favorable conditions for China's development outweigh the unfavorable ones, and the overall trend of economic recovery and long-term improvement remains unchanged," it said.

Chinese tech company EHang Holdings Limited has begun to sell its self-developed unmanned electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft EH216-S on Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao at a cost of 2.39 million yuan ($332,032) per unit, the Global Times observed on Monday.

He Tianxing, a deputy president of EHang, told the Global Times that it was not only for online sale, but also aimed to inform the public the development potential of low-altitude economy in the future. 

The EH216-S last December obtained the standard Airworthiness Certificate from the Civil Aviation Administration of China, which marked the eVTOL aircraft becoming eligible for commercial operation. 

EH216-S Passenger-Carrying UAV System Obtains Standard Airworthiness Certificate from CAAC and the Certified Aircraft Delivered to Customer in Guangzhou.

Aside from its main selling points including its small size, easy take-off, landing and re-charge ability, as well as quietness, EHang made multiple backups for core parts such as propellers, electric engine, flying control system and batteries.

The Government Work Report released during the recently concluded two sessions earlier this month stated that China will foster new growth engines in fields such as biomanufacturing, commercial spaceflight, and the low-altitude economy.

Analysts pointed out that low-altitude transport can help reduce waste once ground transport has reached its limit in megacities. 

Following the announced policy, many cities have taken measures to develop the sector. As the country's first trial province for low-altitude air space management, Southwest China's Sichuan Province simplified low-altitude flight test applications. East China's Anhui also crafted rules to develop low-altitude economy, stating to accelerate the development of the industry in Hefei and Wuhu, two major cities there. 

In addition, Shenzhen city in South China's Guangdong Province has published a set of documents and government regulations supporting the development of the low-altitude economy in the province, according to Xinhua News Agency. 

As of 2025, the output value of low-altitude economy in China is estimated to reach 3 to 5 trillion yuan, according to a recent survey by the International Digital Economy Academy.

In his first public appearance before media since taking his new post, Wu Qing, head of China's securities watchdog, outlined on Wednesday his plan to ensure the stable development of the capital market, the world's second largest, and vowed to beef up institutional buildup and to better ensure investor protection.

Chinese analysts noted that the institutional and holistic approach outlined by the head of China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC), who takes a harsh tone on illegal behavior while being considerate to small investors, is a pragmatic approach that suits the market reality, and is set to boost market confidence, stabilize expectations and shore up the overall investment value of China's capital market.

A number of delegates to the ongoing two sessions also contributed their thoughts on the topic, which is under the global media spotlight and has become a target for Western doomsayers in recent weeks.

Wu's appearance at the press conference, held during the ongoing two sessions, along with several other top government officials in charge of China's economic and trade affairs, is one of the highlights of the political event, as ensuring the stability of the capital market was mentioned in the Government Work Report for the first time following a period of turbulence in the Chinese A-share market ahead of China's Spring Festival holidays in February.

The Government Work Report, delivered by Chinese Premier Li Qiang on Tuesday at the opening meeting of the second session of the 14th National People's Congress, set a growth target of around 5 percent for the country's economy in 2024.

Notably, the report pointed out that "the underlying stability of the capital market should be enhanced."

Giving his insight on how to ensure the stable development of the capital market, Wu the CSRC chairman, who is one day short of completing his first month in the new post, said enhancing institutional buildup and attracting long-term investment into the market will be among the measures to be taken to accomplish the task outlined in the Government Work Report.

Acknowledging that market operation has its own rules and should not be interfered with under normal circumstances, Wu told the press conference that the regulator "won't hesitate to act to correct extreme situations when the market seriously deviates from its fundamentals, irrational and violent fluctuations occur, liquidity is exhausted, market panic occurs and serious draining of confidence appears."

The first-time ever mentioning of enhancing the underlying stability of the capital market sends a strong signal of China's commitment to building itself into a financial powerhouse and sets the tone for the future development in related fields, delegates to the two sessions said.

Outside of the two sessions venue, Chinese scholars also shared their views on what Wu had said at the press conference.

Dong Shaopeng, a senior research fellow at the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China, told the Global Times on Wednesday that the announcement made by CSRC chairman Wu, with an emphasis on both strength and toughness, laid out a clear-cut vision on improving the construction of fundamental institutions and better regulating the capital market, and is a "pragmatic approach in line with reality."

"The dual emphasis by the CSRC on strengthening regulation and bolstering investor protection are set to improve the stability and quality of the Chinese capital market," Dong noted.

Dong said that the emphasis on protecting small and medium-sized investors addresses the root of the problem facing China's capital market, as their ranks formed the ultimate source of long-term funding for the Chinese A-share market.

The stock market has drawn much attention during this year's two sessions, with members, legislators, and officials putting forward practical and broad-perspective suggestions and motions on stabilizing the capital market, Xi Junyang, a professor at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, told the Global Times on Wednesday.

Wu's remarks at the press conference will be heard by both domestic and overseas investors, Xi Junyang noted. "And his remarks, including protecting investors' interests, lifting the quality of listed companies, and implementing a stricter delisting system, are conducive to boosting investor confidence and the overall investment value of China's capital market."

"We can expect proactive measures to be announced in these areas," Xi Junyang said.

The Government Work Report set priorities and the direction for this year's economic work, and also offers much-needed reassurance to the capital market, Yang Delong, chief economist at Shenzhen-based First Seafront Fund Management Co, told the Global Times on Wednesday.

"The stock market is a barometer of a country's economy," Yang said. "Stepped-up macro-policies and stable economic recovery will contribute to a rebound in the A-share market."

A note of reassurance

With the sound development of the capital market a matter of vital concern, delegates to the two sessions are also contributing their ideas, with some pointing out that the Government Work Report has brought "a certain sense of reassurance to the market."

"The Chinese equities market was on a turbulent ride at the beginning of 2024, so the statement in the Government Work Report gives investors a sense of encouragement as well as a certain sense of reassurance," Fang Jie, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and president of Hubei University of Economics, told the Global Times on Wednesday.

There is a lot of work to be done to improve the underlying stability of the capital market and ensure its sound development, and first and foremost is to continue shoring up the macroeconomy, which provides a foundation for market performance, noted Fang, who has also served as the deputy secretary general of Wuhan government in Central China's Hubei Province and the director of the Wuhan Financial Work Bureau.

Chinese financial authorities also need to further carry out sweeping market reforms, such as creating more innovative capital market products to help release market vigor, and improve the systemic design of the capital market through measures such as increasing the transparency of listed companies' information disclosure and carrying out holistic supervision over the A-share market, Fang said.

Yang Chengzhang, a member of the National Committee of the CPPCC and chief economist with Shenwan Hongyuan Securities, told the Global Times on Wednesday that in order to ensure the stable development of the capital market, the government should also continuously put efforts and resources into stemming risks in the property sector, local debt and small and medium-sized financial institutions, as these three sectors are major sources of concern for capital market investors in 2023.

The Government Work Report's call to tackle risks in key areas and beef up security in key sectors will help ease excessive worries and curb the pessimistic outlook in the market, according to Yang Chengzhang.

In order to promote the sound development of the capital market and protect investors' rights and interests, the CSRC has held symposiums to solicit opinions and suggestions on improving the basic system of the capital market, strengthening the protection of the rule of law, and it has also paid visits to listed firms to help them address difficulties to achieve high-quality development.

Since Wu took office, the Chinese A-share market has recovered much of its losses from the recent cycle, finishing at 3,039.93 points at the Shanghai bourse and 9,395.65 points at the Shenzhen bourse on Wednesday.

Following robust travel and tourism activity during the eight-day Spring Festival holidays, the Chinese economy is off to a good start.

Preliminary economic indicators suggest that China is poised to achieve a good start in the first quarter, Zheng Shanjie, head of the National Development and Reform Commission, the country's top economic planner, said at the same press conference.

Zheng revealed that industrial power use grew at 9.7 percent in the January-February period, exports are likely to grow 10 percent year-on-year, indicating robustness in the economy.

Back in 2004, archaeologists excavated two pits in northern China that looked a lot like homebrewing operations. Constructed between 3400 and 2900 B.C. by the Yangshao culture, each pit contained the remnants of a stove and assorted funnels, pots and amphorae.

Now, Jiajing Wang of Stanford University and colleagues report that the pottery shards contain residue and other evidence of starches, chemicals and plant minerals from specific fermented grains. The ancient beer recipe included broomcorn millet, barley, Job’s tears and tubers — that probably gave the beer a sweet flavor, the team writes May 23 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The findings predate the earliest evidence of barley in China by around 1,000 years. Beer may have been consumed at social gatherings, and brewing, not agriculture, spurred the introduction of barley to China, the researchers argue.

Climate commotion
In “Changing Climate: 10 years after An Inconvenient Truth” (SN: 4/16/16, p. 22), Thomas Sumner reported on the progress scientists have made revising forecasts of the far-reaching effects of climate change — from extreme temperatures and sea level rise to severe drought and human conflict — in the decade since the Oscar-winning film’s release.

Reader response to the article was overwhelming, with hundreds of online comments. Some people enjoyed the in-depth look at climate change science, while others expressed skepticism about humans’ contribution to climate change and a general distrust of climate scientists.

“One of my goals for this article was to highlight that climate change research has itself changed over the last decade,” Sumner says. Scientists are still working to understand how the consequences of atmospheric warming will play out in the coming centuries. But one big message from the last decade of research is that the fundamentals have held up: Natural variability exists, says Sumner, but human activities are largely responsible for the current warming trend.
“The question now is what impact will human contributions have down the line and what should we do to prevent and mitigate those effects,” he says.
Plastic feast
Sarah Schwartz wrote about the discovery of a microbe, Ideonella sakaiensis, that chows down on a hard-to-degrade polymer in “This microbe makes a meal of plastic” (SN: 4/16/16, p. 5).
Online commenters were amazed by this new plastic-gobbling organism. “This is great news,” Dan said. “Our world would be doomed if there wasn’t a microbe able to do this.” Chuckawobbly wondered how long it takes I. sakaiensis to digest the plastic. And Jean Harlow was concerned about the potential by-products of worldwide plastic digestion. “The waste product would be a significant amount … of what?” she asked.

Researchers observed that I. sakaiensis almost completely degraded a thin film of polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, after six weeks in a laboratory. But when extracted from the bacterium, the proteins used to break down plastic begin working in about 18 hours.

I. sakaiensisappears to break PET into smaller molecules, like amino acids and carbon dioxide, says coauthor Kenji Miyamoto of Keio University in Yokohama, Japan. But it would probably be hard for the microbe to break down plastic in the outdoors because of its specific growth requirements, he says. Miyamoto envisions that it could be possible to use the specialized proteins in a closed environment to break PET down into molecules such as terephthalic acid— one of the plastic’s main building blocks, which seems benign in the environment.

Prairie dog predators
Herbivorous prairie dog mothers routinely kill baby ground squirrels that encroach on their territories, researchers found. Competition for resources may be a contributing factor to the killings, Susan Milius reported in “Killer prairie dogs make good moms” (SN: 4/16/16, p. 14).

One reader had other ideas. Audrey Boag wondered if prairie dog moms kill ground squirrels to protect their pups from predation or from diseases carried by the squirrels. “In either case, minimizing the number of ground squirrels would pay in lifetime biological fitness,” she wrote.

“We never observed a ground squirrel kill or injure an adult or juvenile prairie dog,” says study coauthor John Hoogland. “Perhaps such attacks sometimes occur underground.” Hoogland notes that the majority of ground squirrels killed by prairie dogs were juveniles, which are too small to be a threat.

One threat, however, is a species of disease-carrying flea that infests both animals. Hoogland found that prairie dog killers and their offspring had fewer fleas than nonkillers and their offspring, “but this trend was not significant,” he says.

No, that’s not the sun. It’s Jupiter, ablaze with infrared light in new images taken in preparation for the Juno spacecraft’s July 4 arrival at the king of the planets. This image shows how heat welling up from deep within the planet gets absorbed by gas in the atmosphere, which can tell researchers how stuff moves around beneath Jupiter’s thick blanket of clouds. Juno won’t look for infrared light, but it will (among other things) measure how much microwave radiation is being blocked by water lurking within Jupiter’s atmosphere.

The map is pieced together from multiple images obtained at the Very Large Telescope in Chile over the past several months. Ground-based images such as these will help researchers understand what Juno is peering at each time it swoops in close to Jupiter’s clouds over the next 20 months.

For women thinking about fertility treatments, there may be one less thing to worry about.

A long-term study shows that women who underwent in vitro fertilization are not significantly more likely to develop breast cancer than women in the general public or women who opted for other fertility treatments. The results are reported July 19 in JAMA.

The fertility treatment alters progesterone and estradiol levels in women trying to get pregnant. Yo-yoing hormones have been linked to an increase in a woman’s odds of developing breast cancer, but studies are divided on whether IVF itself actually ups cancer risk.

Alexandra van den Belt-Dusebout of the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam and her colleagues tracked 19,158 women who underwent in vitro fertilization treatment between 1983 and 1995 and 5,950 women who underwent other fertility treatments between 1980 and 1995.

Following up two decades later, the team found that 948 of the women had developed breast cancer. But breast cancer rates didn’t differ much between groups: 163.5 per 100,000 women for those who had IVF compared to 167.2 women on other fertility treatments and 163.3 women in the general public.

These orderly patterns of dark blue dots indicate where individual chlorine atoms are missing from an otherwise regular grid of atoms. Scientists manipulated these vacancies to create a supersmall data storage device.

The locations of vacancies encode bits of information in the device, which Sander Otte of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and colleagues describe July 18 in Nature Nanotechnology. The team arranged and imaged the vacancies using a scanning tunneling microscope. The storage system, which can hold a kilobyte of data, must be cooled to a chilly −196° Celsius to work.
To demonstrate the technique, the researchers transcribed an excerpt from a famous 1959 lecture by physicist Richard Feynman, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” which predicted the importance of nanotechnology. In each block, paired rows represent letters. Blocks marked with an “X” were unusable. The encoded 159 words of text fill a region a ten-thousandth of a millimeter wide.

If scaled up, the researchers say, the technology could store the full contents of the U.S. Library of Congress in a cube a tenth of a millimeter on each side.

Plastic cling wrap with nano-sized pores could give “cool clothes” a new meaning.

The material lets heat escape, instead of trapping it like traditional fabrics, Stanford University materials scientist Yi Cui and colleagues report in the Sept. 2 Science. It could help people keep cool in hot weather, Cui says, and even save energy by reducing the use of air conditioning.

“It’s a very bold new idea,” says MIT physicist Svetlana Boriskina, who wrote an accompanying commentary. Demand for the new material could be far-reaching, she says. “Every person who wears clothes could be a potential user of this product.”
Current cooling devices include wearable fans and wicking fabrics; both rely on evaporation to cool human skin. But skin also sheds heat in another way — as infrared radiation. Clothing holds this heat close to the body, Cui says. If infrared radiation could instead pass through fabric, he reasoned, people would feel a lot cooler.

But the fabric would have to be transparent only to infrared wavelengths. To visible light, it would need to be opaque. Otherwise, the clothing would be see-through.

Cui found just one material that satisfied both requirements: a commercially available plastic used in lithium-ion batteries. The material, called nanoporous polyethylene, or nanoPE, is a cling wrap‒like plastic that lets infrared radiation through. But unlike cling wrap, the material isn’t clear: It blocks visible light.

Tiny pores speckled throughout the fabric act as obstacles to visible light, Boriskina says. When blue light, for example, hits the pores, it scatters. So do other colors. The light “bounces around in different directions and scrambles together,” she says. To human eyes, the resulting color is white.

The pores scatter visible light because they’re both in the same size range: The diameters of the pores span 50 to 1,000 nanometers, and the wavelengths of visible light range from 400 to 700 nanometers. Infrared light emitted by the body has a much larger wavelength, 7,000 to 14,000 nanometers, so the plastic’s tiny pores can’t block it. To infrared light, the pores are barely bumps in the road, not barriers.
The pores are kind of like small rocks at a beach, Boriskina says. They’ll interfere with the motion of small waves, but big waves will wash right over.

Cui and colleagues tested nanoPE by laying it on a hot plate warmed up to human skin temperature — 33.5° Celsius. NanoPE raised the “skin” temperature by just 0.8 degrees(to 34.3° C). “But when you put on cotton, my God, it rose to 37,” Cui says. “It’s hot!”

The researchers also tried to make nanoPE more wearable than plastic wrap. They coated it with a water-wicking chemical, punched holes in it to make it breathable, and layered it with cotton mesh. Now, the team is working on weaving the fabric to make it feel more like traditional textiles.

“Within five years, I hope someone will start wearing it,” Cui says. “And within 10 years, I hope most people will be wearing it.”

Researchers have digitally unwrapped and read an ancient Hebrew scroll that’s so charred it can’t be touched without falling apart. It turns out the document contains the oldest known Biblical text outside of the roughly 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls, the investigators say.

Archaeologists discovered the scroll’s remnants in a synagogue’s holy ark during a 1970 excavation in Israel of En-Gedi, a Jewish community destroyed by fire around 600.

In a series of digital steps, slices from a 3-D scan of the En-Gedi scroll were analyzed to bring letters and words into relief on a pieced-together, virtual page. Those images revealed passages from the book of Leviticus written in ink on the scroll’s disintegrating sheets. Radiocarbon results date the scroll to approximately 300, making it the earliest copy of an Old Testament book ever found in a holy ark, scientists report September 21 in Science Advances.

This computerized recovery and conservation process can now be used to retrieve other ancient documents “from the brink of oblivion,” the researchers say.