salt-tolerant tree saplings planted in the Aral Sea bed, which is now a desert.

China’s government says the country has reclaimed about 17,000 square miles of desert. “The area of desertified land in China has decreased by 65 million mu (17,000 square miles, or 11 million acres) since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2012,” it says in a recent report submitted to the National People’s Congress.

This is a striking accomplishment for a densely populated nation that was the world’s most populous country until recently, with 1.4 billion people. (India recently overtook China to become the world’s most populous country, with about 1,450,000,000 people living in India).

Another Asian country, Uzbekistan, is planting a salt-resistant forest in a desert to prevent toxic salt storms, reclaiming the land from its barren state. That desert used to be the Aral Sea, a massive salt lake. But it dried out when the Soviet Union’s communist government diverted waters flowing into it, to irrigate endless cotton fields. The Soviets chose to grow only cotton in much of the region, rather than less thirsty crops that consume less water. An ecological catastrophe resulted.

Forests are expanding in much of the world. China’s forests have grown by about 234,000 square miles over the last 30 years, an area the size of Ukraine. The European Union has added an area the size of Cambodia to its woodlands. Costa Rica has 150% more forest than it did in 1987.

The replacement of horses with automobiles saved New England’s forests, which had mostly disappeared by 1910, but now cover much of the region. Today, Vermont is 78% forested, but in 1910, it was mostly un-forested.

Earlier this year, China’s space probe returned to Earth with rare moon rocks. And an Indian mission to the sun recently collected information about the sun’s outer layers.

This year, Japan became the fifth country to land a spacecraft on the moon, making a more precise landing than any other nation.

China has reportedly created a meltdown-proof nuclear reactor.