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Beijing's museums are like its calling card and should play a more active role in the capital's plan to become a world city, experts said during a forum on Friday.

Paal Mork, chairman of the marketing and public relations department at the International Council of Museums, said museums face new challenges and new opportunities when the urban environment changes and cities become more multicultural.

Mork made the remarks at Friday's Forum on Museums and Urban Culture Development, which drew delegates from countries including Brazil, Norway, Indonesia and Australia.

Museums should be able to reach out to new audiences when big cities internationalize, Mork said.

Feng Baohua, an expert on urban planning and culture design, explained how a museum improved the image of the city of Bilbao. The city, which had been an inconspicuous community in Spain, became a new hub for contemporary art after it built the Guggenheim Museum in 1997.

Compared with Bilbao, Beijing has many advantages in becoming culturally attractive, he said. He suggested the capital make the most of its resources.

"As an ancient Oriental city that has the world's largest palace complex, its museums should become the most proactive carrier of the city's glorious culture," Feng said.

The city currently has more than 150 registered museums, as well as a number of private museums that haven't been registered, according to Kong Fanzhi, director of the Beijing Municipal Administration of Cultural Heritage.

The museums are dedicated to such subjects as history, art, science and architecture and some are housed in the former homes of well-known people.

Some museums, however, have been finding it difficult to draw visitors, especially the small and medium-sized ones and those run by non-profit societies.

According to Zhu Xintian, deputy director of the Oriental Art Museum of France, small and medium-sized museums can collaborate to co-host events or exhibitions, making them more relevant and better able to attract visitors.

"Which can therefore enlarge the impact of these institutions," he said.

And museums can also work closely with tourism authorities, Xiao Ruixia, from Beijing Art Museums, told METRO.

She said the majority of Beijing's museums are located in ancient temples or historic buildings and have great advantages because the buildings are worth seeing as well as the exhibits they house.

Jan Stuart, director of the Asia department at the British Museum, told METRO that Beijing's museums had greatly improved but could still be even better.

She said she was very impressed with the improvements in China. In the past, some very good exhibitions were poorly presented because the facilities were inadequate. Now, institutions such as the Capital Museum and Shanghai Museum rank among the best in the world in terms of infrastructure and the quality of exhibitions.

Children who spend hours each day watching television or playing computer games have more psychological difficulties than those who don't, according to a study published in the US journal Pediatrics on Monday. The study, conducted by researchers from the University of Bristol, found that too much screen time may cause problems relating to peers, emotional issues, hyperactivity or conduct challenges. A total of 1,013 children aged between 10 and 11 participated in the study, by reporting their average daily hours spent in front of TV or computer screens. Responses ranged from zero to around five hours per day. Contrary to earlier research findings, the negative impact of screen time may not be remedied by increasing a child's physical activity levels, according to the study. Researcher Dr. Angie Page said, "We know that physical activity is good for both physical and mental health in children and there is some evidence that screen viewing is associated with negative behaviors," "But it wasn't clear whether having high physical activity levels would 'compensate' for high levels of screen viewing in children," he added.Source: Agencies

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Autism in children may be caught at earlier age than currently possible by MRI imaging, University of Utah said in a news release on Thursday.

Focusing patients already diagnosed with autism, researchers at the university used MRIs to locate areas of the brain where the left and right hemispheres do not communicate properly, according to the release.

These so-called "hot spots" are central to motor function, attention, facial recognition and social behavior -- types of behaviors that are abnormal in people with autism.

"We know the two hemispheres must work together for many brain functions," study author Dr. Jeffrey S. Anderson, an assistant professor of radiology, said in the news release. "We used MRI to look at the strength of these connections from one side to the other in autism patients."

In the study, the researchers used MRI imaging to search for differences in brain activity patterns in the microstructure of white matter tissue in 80 autism patients between the ages of 10 and 35. This tissue, the authors noted, is known to play a role in communication between various brain regions.

Communication deficits between the two hemispheres of the brain were, in fact, uncovered by MRI scans -- differences that the team said were not found in the brains of people without autism.

The authors also noted that apart from an increased brain size among children diagnosed with autism, there are no apparent structural differences between the brains of autistic patients and patients who are not autistic.

The study was limited to high-functioning males and so did not allow researchers to generalize the findings to females, younger children, or "lower functioning" individuals with autism, the researchers said.

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