More than a case of chemical attraction

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At the magic moment when Paul Taylor squeezed out a little jelly into a plastic bucket full of "mysterious" matter, a flaming blaze erupted, lighting up the white pavilion and a human skeleton model beside him.

A group of excited elementary school students around him burst into a scream, shattering the quiet of a rainy Beijing afternoon.

It was the first appearance for Taylor and his colleague Nate Westover, both from Philadelphia, the United States, at the Beijing Science Festival where they presented their Traveling Science Show, a hands-on science popularization program from the Franklin Institute, the prestigious science communication organization founded in 1824.

"The kids are so passionate about science," Taylor says. Their curiosity is the same as the kids in the US."

The Beijing Science Festival is a week-long annual festival of popular science that began in 2011. This year's event, ending on Sept 17 in Beijing's Olympic Park, turned the area into an international science carnival for a week.

Science educators from 14 countries came to the event, bringing about 300 science projects, to interact with local science amateurs, parents and children.

The science projects included the hottest 3-D printing, cloud computing, hands-on chemical experiments and first-aid education.

Besides the main event, this year's festival had several science forums, including an open seminar held by four Nobel Prize laureates, including George Smoot, an American cosmologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006 for his work on the Cosmic Background Explorer.

As a key part of the event, the third Beijing International Science Film Festival will open on Oct 17. Science education and sci-fi films, including 15 3-D IMAX films, will be shown in the cinema of the China Science and Technology Museum.

About the broadcaster:

Anne Ruisi is an editor at China Daily online with more than 30 years of experience as a newspaper editor and reporter. She has worked at newspapers in the U.S., including The Birmingham News in Alabama and City Newspaper of Rochester, N.Y.