News on China's scientific and technological development.

Equation

Lieutenant General
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I wonder why people tend to be snobbish at a 3D printed house. If it's just as strong as wood, why not? Save a lot trees.

Dang...you beat me to it (as of posting this article)!:p
Because the Chinese thought of it and got it out into a production product for the market before they do. I for one are very exciting about this new 3D home architecture. This would definitely lower the cost of construction and providing more affordable living.
 

mzyw

Junior Member
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ABOARD XIANGYANGHONG - China's deep sea manned submersible Jiaolong on Friday carried out the first dive on a mission to study active hydrothermal vent in the southwestern Indian Ocean.
Jiaolong for the first time also took the second batch of pilot trainees in the diving, which was intended to enable the trainees to learn some skills of submersible operation in active hydrothermal vent and collect samples of hydrothermal fluid, sulfide, rocks, sediment and water, said Yu Hongjun, chief commander of the mission.
"Besides, they (the pilots) will try to place some biological observation devices in hydrothermal vent," Yu said.
In this dive, Jiaolong will be operated by pilot Fu Wentao and he will teach pilot trainee Qi Haibin in practice.
Scientists are able to see active hydrothermal vent and polymetallic sulfide in seabed and know the exact site and environment of samples when diving with Jiaolong, Tao Chunhui, chief scientist of the mission, said.
The information is important for China's future research in the polymetallic sulfide exploration contract area, Tao said.
The hydrothermal sulfide is a kind of seabed deposit containing copper, zinc and precious metals such as gold and silver. Those metals formed sulfides after chemical reactions and came to rest in the seabed in "chimney vents."
The diving area is within China's exploration contract area that was inked by the International Seabed Authority and China Ocean Mineral Resources Research and Development Association (COMRA) in 2011 and was 10,000 square kilometers in size.
Jiaolong was expected to dive 20 times to research polymetallic sulfides, biological diversity, hydrothermal microbes and genetic resources in the southwestern Indian Ocean in a 120-day expedition.
Named after a mythical dragon, Jiaolong reached its deepest depth of 7,062 meters in the Pacific's Mariana Trench in June 2012 and started its five-year trial period in 2013.
 

mzyw

Junior Member
Some old news:

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China is preparing to build its fifth research station in Antarctica, the Ministry of Land and Resources said on its official website.
China's icebreaking research vessel Xuelong arrived at the waters near Victoria Land of Antarctica on Dec 26.
Thirteen members of China's 31st Antarctic scientific expedition and 10 tons of supplies have been transported by the helicopter KA32 to Inexpressible Island for scientific investigation.
The team is carrying out surveys and mapping in preparation for China's fifth research station, according to the National Administration of Surveying, Mapping and Geoinformation.

weather control
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National-level weather modification laboratories will be built in areas around Beijing, according to a plan released by the National Development and Reform Commission, China's top economic body, and the China Meteorological Administration.
The National Development Plan on Weather Modification 2014-2020 says research on aerosol, cloud, fog, precipitation and weather alteration would be conducted, Beijing News reports.
These national-level laboratories would also provide technological support in creating artificial rain to help battle China's smog problem.
By 2020, the country would have developed sophisticated weather modification systems capable of increasing artificial rainfall and snowfall, with added water of more than 60 billion cubic meters annually.
The plan states that smog poses a huge threat to human health, transportation as well as the urban environment and greatly influences production activities, alongside the daily lives of common people.
However, one expert said that artificial rainfall is hard to achieve during bouts of heavy smog because weather conditions are relatively stable during that time.
It is also unknown how much rain would be needed to dispel smog as previous research focused on artificial rain to relieve drought conditions or increase water resources, it was added.

regenerative medicine:
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BEIJING - Chinese scientists and doctors began a landmark clinical trial in which they use a collagen complex and stem cells to repair damaged human spinal cord.
Six patients have signed up for the trial and the first surgery was completed on Friday, said a statement from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) on Saturday.
The research was led by Dai Jianwu, a research fellow with the Institute of Genetics and Development Biology of CAS.
Friday's surgery went smoothly and the patient is in a good condition, Dai said.
According to Dai, the patient was implanted with mesenchymal stem cells and a collagen complex made up of collagen scaffold fibers, also described as collagen tubes, with collagen binding brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a protein to support and encourage the growth of neurons.
The collagen complex acts as a bridge for nerves to reconnect and mesenchymal stem cells help tissue recovery, Dai said.
"Previous tests on rats and dogs showed positive results," he said.
In this stage, scientists aim to test the safety of surgery and perfect its design, he said.
In the next stage, about 20 to 30 more patients will be involved, he added.
The trial is the first in China and probably the first across the world.
"We hope the research can shed light on this clinical challenge," Dai said

internet security;
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A cyber security review, targeting IT products and services, will be released within the year, the Cyberspace Administration of China said on Wednesday.
The assessment, initiated last year, will check IT products and services prior to them entering the Chinese market, aiming to ensure national security.
It means companies supplying such products and services, regardless of whether they are Chinese or overseas made, will be barred if they fail the vetting.
[email protected]

History on Chinese scientists:
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Editor's Note: On Jan 9, the central government presented the State scientific and technological awards. Nuclear physicist Yu Min won the top award. Seven foreign scientists and one overseas organization won the International Science and Technology Cooperation Award. Awards were also granted to 318 scientific and technological research projects. A China Daily reporter interviewed some of the award winners.
Half a century ago, NASA found new PhD graduate Norman N. Li and invited him to consult on Project Apollo for his breakthrough research on membrane technologies.
The Chinese-American scientist won great fame in his field because of the consultancy with NASA while he was in his early 30s.
"I was quite proud of it and wrote to my father in Taiwan," Li said, with a crystal-clear memory of the details.
Li's father, Li Liewen, a patriotic writer and scholar of literature, had encouraged his son to learn science.
Norman Li, 84, who was born in Shanghai and lived as an adolescent in Taiwan, continued his studies in the United States after gaining his bachelor's degree.
He and his wife, Jane C. Li, reside in Chicago. His daughter is the director of the clinical trial center at Harvard University, and his son leads a microelectronics company in the US.
"I remembered someone once told me that to succeed in the West as a Chinese-American, you have to be superior to others," Li said.
Highly successful in his field, his outstanding chemical engineering for Project Apollo was only part of excellence in membrane research.
Li has devoted himself into the membrane and separation technologies and made great contributions in this field.
In 2000, he was awarded the Perkin Medal by the Society of Chemical Industry, the highest chemical engineering award available to scientists in the US. He is the only Chinese-American to have been so honored since the award began in 1906.
Li was elected the US National Academy of Engineering in 1990.
Despite his great success in the US, Li felt obligated to return to China to contribute to science in his motherland.
To honor his contribution to China's scientific development, Li was given the International Science and Technology Cooperation Award on Jan 9 by the Chinese government, its highest award to foreign scientists and organizations.
"I read books when I was a kid and learned how China was bullied because it was weak then. ... My father, as a patriot, also inspired me to love my roots," Li said.
" I have been in close cooperation and had extensive professional exchanges with China for over 30 years, and will certainly continue doing so in my lifetime in the hope to continue to make my contribution to China's scientific and sustainable technology development."
Li first returned to the Chinese mainland in 1982, when he began close cooperation with China in resource utilization, energy and environmental industries.
He chairs the advisory board of the National Institute of Clean and Low Carbon Energy, under the Shenhua Group Corp Ltd, China's biggest coal company.
Li and his wife, a statistics and management expert, introduced an advanced quality management system, Six-Sigma, to NICE, which leads more than 40 research projects, 300 patent applications and other significant innovation in relevant areas.
President Xi Jinping has emphasized that "the direction of technological development in China is innovation, innovation and innovation," Li said, adding that China has made unprecedented progress in science and technological development, and has made remarkable achievements in recent years through the strong support of the Chinese government.
"Six-Sigma is a scientific methodology to encourage and in fact increase innovation," Li said.
He is now helping China to prepare for the Eighth Sino-US Conference on Chemical Engineering in 2015 in Shanghai.
"My current plan is to continue cooperation (with China) in the high-tech fields such as water resource, clean energy, environmental protection, and membrane technology," he said.
 

no_name

Colonel
Some old news:

History on Chinese scientists:
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Yu Min is the father of Chinese thermonuclear warhead design. While other countries' first hydrogen weapon is generally quite large and used more to demonstrate concept, China's first thermonuclear device is small enough to be dropped from the Q-5 attack aircraft. It is believed that the Chinese later contributed to help the French miniaturize their thermonuclear weapon, as part of a technology exchange between the two nations.
 

broadsword

Brigadier
China Plans World's Largest Supercollider

Jan 27, 2015
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The inside of a Large Hadron Collider. (Photo: CCTV)
Chinese scientists are racing to complete plans to build a giant particle-smashing collider that would be large enough to encircle the island of Manhattan in New York.

China's proposed supercollider will be twice the size of the Large Hadron Collider or CERN in Switzerland that helped discover the Higgs Boson or the God Particle in 2012.

It will also serve as a symbol of the country's rise as a global superpower by putting it at the forefront of scientific research that has implications on everything ranging from advancements in computer science to new drug discovery.

Prof. Wang Yifang is the Director of the Institute of High Energy Physics, under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

"This large circuit collider has two phases; the first phase (called the Circular Electron Positron Collider) is an electron Positron Collider, and the second phase is a Proton Collider. By having this machine we can have a total of one million higgs particles. By analyzing all these Higgs particles we can understand its detailed properties. With all these projects we will be in a leading position in particle physics."

The discovery of the Higgs Boson two years ago was seen as one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs in human history, fundamentally changing the way we understand our universe, how it originated and its future.

But China's particle accelerator promises to go a step further in unlocking the mysteries of the universe.

It will be able to recreate, inside the accelerator, the hyper-energy conditions that existed following the Big Bang, when the building blocks of the universe were formed. This will help Physicists explore the origins of matter, energy, and explore the phenomena of time and space.

Prof. Wang Yifang says this might help physicists discover a new range of particles beyond those already known to mankind, and charted in the Standard Model of Particle Physics.

"Having the Proton Collider we can further study the properties of Higgs (Boson Particle) and this can only be done at very high energy Proton machine. And after that when you have all these studies of Standard Model particles then you can look for the signatures that deviate from the Predictions of the Standard Model and by that you can discover the new physics (particles) after that."

A preliminary conceptual design for this cutting-edge particle physics laboratory is now almost complete. China is four years ahead of their European competition, CERN who also want to build the only other known super collider in the world. The Unites States gave up plans to do it due to the high investment needed. But even China's project –if all goes according to plan - will only be completed in 2045.

The initial design for China's supercollider shows a perfect circle-shaped city, where the top physicists from across the world, are working alongside new-technology companies and other futuristic businesses in a kind of Scientific Utopia. It may even give China a fair shot at winning its first ever Nobel Prize in science. (CRIENGLISH.com)
 

broadsword

Brigadier
Researchers in China investigate use of coal as source of lithium

27 February 2015
Coal could become a major source of the metal lithium,
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to a review of the geochemistry by scientists from Hebei University of Engineering in China published in the International Journal of Oil, Gas and Coal Technology.

Worldwide annual consumption of lithium grew from 15,100 tonnes in 2003 to 37,000 tonnes by 2012, a 145% increase; demand is expected to rise even further with the move towards sustainable power and electrical storage capacity increases.

Shenjun Qin of Hebei University of Engineering, in Handan, China, and colleagues point out that coal is a highly polluting energy source that is still widely used for electricity generation and other applications. They suggest that the recovery of valuable rare metals from coals or coal-processing byproducts could be a promising way to make the inevitable long-term use of this fossil fuel resource more economic, efficient and cleaner. Indeed, the extraction of lithium from coal would offer an ironic twist to its continued use.

The team explains that lithium has been found dispersed and even anomalously enriched in coal deposits, and is potentially extractable. Two analytical techniques—inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) and inductively coupled plasma as an excitation source (ICP-AES)—are widely used for assaying the chemical elements in coal and coal ash and either of these techniques could be used widely to optimize sources for lithium, or any given metal, for subsequent extraction.

The team has also reviewed two techniques for lithium extraction. The first, a patented technology for extracting both lithium and aluminum metals from coal ash involves sulfur sintering the ash and acid leaching the metal from the solution to obtain lithium carbonate in a yield of 95.6%; actual recovery of the metal is 60%. The second approach, alkali sintering, avoids the need for the sulfur step but has a lower yield at 85.3% and a recovery of 55%.

The investigation into lithium recovery from coal ash is still at a laboratory scale.


Related is the research on flow batteries. How long before Chinese labs pick up the trail?
High-performance flow battery could rival lithium-ions for EVs and grid storage
By
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February 27, 2015

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PNNL's high performance zinc-polyiodide flow battery approaches the performance of some lithium-ion batteries (Image: PNNL)

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(2 images)
A new redox flow battery designed at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) more than doubles the amount of energy that this type of cell can pack in a given volume, approaching the numbers of lithium-ion batteries. If the device reaches mass production, it could find use in fast-charging transportation, portable electronics and grid storage.

A flow battery is formed by two liquids with opposite charge (electrolytes) which turn chemical energy into electricity by exchanging ions through a membrane. The electrolytes are stored in two external tanks and this makes the system easy to scale up, potentially very quick to charge (the electrolytes can simply be replaced) and resistant to extreme temperatures. These perks have already inspired some
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but if these dreams are going to come to fruition, flow batteries will need to get over one big hump: currently, the best flow cell out there only packs less than a third of the energy per unit volume as a lithium-ion battery.

Because of this, flow cells are mainly used where space is not at a premium, such as to store large amounts of energy from renewable sources in open spaces. Still, even in this arena, a more energy-dense flow cell could turn out to be very useful, improving the reliability of the electric grid in a tight urban setting, and perhaps even challenging the upcoming
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announced by Tesla.

PNNL researchers led by Wei Wang have now developed a prototype, high-performance zinc-
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flow battery with a high energy density of 167 Wh/l (watt-hours per liter), a number that could almost double to 322 Wh/l with further optimizations.

This is a significant step up from the state-of-the-art 70 Wh/l zinc-bromide flow batteries and means that, 40 years after being invented, the performance of these cells could finally catch up with that of the now ubiquitous lithium-ion batteries. For comparison, lithium iron phosphate batteries, a type of lithium-ion battery used in portable electronics and some small EVs, put out about 233 Wh per liter.

Aside from being able to store more energy in a smaller space, the zinc-polyiodide battery is also reportedly safer than other flow batteries through the absence of acidic electrolytes, it’s non-flammable, and it can operate at ranges of -4 to 122 °F (-20 to 50 °C), meaning it doesn’t require extensive cooling circuitry that take up extra weight and room (like in Tesla’s Model S battery pack).

Before the battery can see mass production, the researchers will need to address the issue of a zinc build-up that grew from the negative electrode and permeated through the membrane, reducing the battery’s efficiency. Wei and team contained the problem by adding alcohol to the electrolyte, and are now experimenting with scaling up the battery size in order to conduct further testing.

The advance is described in an open-access
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paper.
 
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