News on China's scientific and technological development.

Equation said:

What about Wifi to recharge the EV or something like that?

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Think of all those electromagnetic fields generated in the area and going through your body. Who knows what kind of health effect it may have

Replacing an overpass in 43 hours.

TerraN_EmpirE said:

Sure that's all fine and good for a bus that runs a fixed route but what happens when the driver takes a side street or leaves the charging lane? It reverts back to the battery. I mean that's what your Korean bus is doing charging the battery via the same means as a charging station.
The Bus still has a battery after all what happens if you have a brown out? The bus would stop without a battery.
the point of a Plug in personal EV is that it's a car that will not pollute like a regular car. so you have the independence of a personal car yet lack the stink. if you try and run a car on a wire you lose the freedom of the car. Sure you could include such charging corridors on regular commuter roads but not all of them, Oh And remember although The Us, Europe and Major Chinese Cities have reliable power grids Most of the Developing world lacks such.

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The plug-in is intended to be recharged every several hundred kilometres, the bus will have an autonomy off its rout of several kilometres. That has a very marked effect on the weight and price of the battery.
You would introduce this system in a well developed and relatively rich country and in a very populous part of that country, for example Eastern China. You fit all the main roads with these antennae for public as well as private transport. The private car can be driven manually for say ten kilometres at a low speed until it picks up an antennae when the steering wheel is disconnected and the car delivers itself to point within reach for manual steering. Much safer and cheaper than the Google system.
I know that in the Netherlands and many other countries the reliability of the public power net has been going down but it was a choice, a wrong choice, not to invest sufficiently in that system.

B.I.B. said:

To have freedom of movement for any EV vehicle working of an antennae arrangement, one will need a system like the fairground fun electric bumper cars.

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No. Cars should follow roads. A car will be presented at a crossing with a choice of routes and will have to choose that one that brings its passenger where (s)he wants to get to.

It looks like the Intel chip embargo haven't been slowing down China much in its goal of producing an Exascale computer. i.e. about 1000 times faster than Tianhe-1A.

China planning new supercomputer

TIANJIN, Jan. 22 (Xinhua) -- China is planning a supercomputer 1,000 times more powerful than its groundbreaking Tianhe-1A as it faces rising demand for next-generation computing.

Meng Xiangfei, head of the applications department of the National Supercomputer Center, said on Friday that the center will release a prototype in 2017 or 2018 of an "exascale" computer -- one capable of at least a billion billion calculations per second

Exascale computing is considered the next frontier in the development of supercomputers.

Tianhe-1A was recognized as the world's fastest computing system in 2010. Though it has since been superseded by Tianhe-2, Tianhe-1A is being more widely used. Computer scientists are finding it challenging to run contemporary applications at their optimum on faster supercomputers.

With its uses including oil exploration data management, animation and video effects, biomedical data processing and high-end equipment manufacturing, Tianhe-1A's capacity is being stretched, said Meng.

It is carrying out more than 1,400 computing tasks and serving about 1,000 users per day.

The exascale computer will be wholly independently developed by the National Supercomputer Center, according to Meng.

About a seventh of Tianhe-1A's CPU chips are Chinese.

CPU is only one of many important variables in building a supercomputer. China surely will use indigenous CPU for the next supercomputer. In fact this ban will accelerate R & D of high performance CPU developments in China. And Chinese has developed and manufactured some of high performance CPUs already. ShenWei is the first Chinese indigenous CPU used for her supercomputer in TOP 500 in 2011 (rank 14th in 2011 - The Sunway BlueLight)

"The Sunway BlueLight is ranked 103rd[10] as of the November 2015 TOP500 list (ranked highest at 14th when it appeared on the list in November 2011; then 65th in the November 2014) and is still the only ShenWei powered supercomputer on the TOP500 list


Some other interesting Chinese CPU developments

And on the genetic research frontier...

Autism, a complex set of brain disorders of social interaction and communication, has been widely studied in lab animals — but most of the research has been in mice, whose brains are very different from those of people.

Now, for the first time, a team of scientists in China has created monkeys whose DNA has been genetically altered to make them develop an autism-like disorder.

These "transgenic" monkeys could be a good model for studying human brain disorders, since their brain circuitry is much closer to that of our own, the authors reported in a

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published Monday in the journal Nature.

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often involves repetitive behaviors and problems with social interaction. In

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, a rare genetic disorder that causes many of the symptoms of autism, about 90% of patients have a mutation in a gene called MeCP2, which codes for a protein involved in regulating how DNA gets processed to make other proteins. Duplicate copies of this gene produce an autism-like disorder known as MeCP2 duplication syndrome.

Scientists have previously studied this syndrome

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, and while these animals show many of the developmental and behavioral problems as humans with Rett Syndrome, it's been harder to study autistic behaviors in rodents, since their brains are so much simpler than a human's.

Genetically modified monkeys
In the new study, scientists at China's Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences attempted to mimic this disorder in monkeys, which could be a major step toward understanding and treating it in people.

"Once we know the brain circuits responsible, we can start intervening" in these disorders, for example, using noninvasive brain stimulation or gene therapy (a treatment that involves replacing missing or defective genes), study author Zilong Qiu said in a conference in a conference call with reporters last Thursday.

To create the transgenic monkeys, Qiu and his colleagues injected a virus containing multiple copies of the MeCP2 gene into the undeveloped eggs of macaque monkeys, fertilized the eggs, and implanted the 53 resulting embryos into 18 female surrogate monkeys. Nine of the animals got pregnant and three males and five females were born live. Four were stillborn. All of the babies had the duplicate MeCP2 gene.


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(Yan-Hong Nie)
In a second experiment, they injected 105 embryos into 36 surrogate mothers. Just seven monkeys ended up giving birth to nine babies, but only two survived.
The transgenic monkeys engaged in repetitive motions such as walking in circles, spent less time than normal sitting and interacting with the other monkeys, and showed signs of anxiety — all behaviors that are hallmarks of autistic disorders.

The modified primates didn't appear to be less intelligent compared with the unmodified animals, but they did show some abnormalities, such as a preference for reaching toward one side when presented with a reward.

To see if the transgenic monkeys could pass on the genetic defect to their offspring, the researchers used sperm from one of the transgenic monkeys to fertilize eggs and implant them into 22 surrogate females. All five monkeys that were born (including one stillborn) carried the MeCP2 mutation, and showed the same deficits in social interaction as their transgenic parent.

The study demonstrated that genetically engineered monkeys can be an effective model for studying autism related disorders and other psychiatric illnesses that are difficult to mimic in simpler animals.

The limits of primate models
Huda Zoghbi, a professor at Baylor College of Medicine who was not involved with the study but who has studied the MeCP2 duplication syndrome in mice, told Business Insider we should be cautious about calling these transgenic monkeys a true model for the disorder, however, because the genes they modified didn't exactly mirror the effects of the human version of the disease, such as cognitive problems and seizures.

"We need to develop criteria before generating a non-human primate model so that the model is as optimal as possible and it can be useful for preclinical research," Zoghbi said in an email.

What's more, monkeys don't come cheap.

The study researchers said it was hard to give an exact cost figure, since these experiments require hundreds of monkeys across multiple institutions. But raising one monkey in China costs about $3000, and maintaining a monkey facility costs between $500,000 and $1 million per year, they said

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Blackstone said:

And on the genetic research frontier...

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Awesome work!!

The price tag is a big issue. The $$$ would almost certainly limit the # of animals involved in the study. With less #, it would be difficult to evaluate the statistics.

Another issue involved with using primate models would be time. It takes much longer to develop enough monkeys with the same genetic mutation. With so much longer lifespan, it would take a long time for the transgenic monkeys to become mature enough to have babies. Not sure how long exactly, but definitely longer than mice. Mice have a total life span of 2 years, while monkeys can live 30-40 years. So that would mean longer it would take to finish the study. Not sure if anyone wants to wait 10-15 years to finish a study...

Then there is also the ethical issue associated with using primates.

With that said, someone has to be brave enough to do it! Good for them!

How the West Ignores the Rising Tide of Chinese innovation
DAN BLACHARSKI 01.28.16

In the post-war years of the ’50s and ’60s, the United States was the undisputed leader in terms of manufacturing, production, and innovation, and we saw the lead in innovation expand with the dotcom boom and Silicon Valley’s domination in the global tech sector. But as much as the entrenched powers of the West talk about “American exceptionalism” and believe that their leading position will never end, in fact, today marks a new era in which neither the United States, nor any other country, can lay claim to that “number one” status. That’s not to say that the United States’ innovative power has diminished – rather, it’s just that other countries, most notably China, have risen to the challenge. To remain competitive in the global market, US government policy as well as the strategies of private Western corporations must adapt to the realization that they are no longer the 800-pound gorillas of global innovation.

Specifically, Chinese innovation and China’s own brand of state-guided entrepreneurship is coming of age and now looms as a serious competitor to the West. Once thought of as a haven for low-end manufacturing and a center for cheap knock-offs, “China is making a strategic pivot towards innovation, and it will be game-changing,” according to Waterstone Management Group’s latest white paper, “The Real China Threat: Innovation.”

Tom Manning, lecturer at University of Chicago Law School and former CEO of Cerberus Asia, CEO of Indachin, Capgemini Asia, and Ernst & Young Consulting Asia, sees three distinct factors contributing to China’s shift to a major innovative superpower.

“First is a coming of age of tech entrepreneurs in China. Increasingly, the talent which has always been present has finally acquired experience. Fifteen years of tech investing, venture capital, and backing of young startups has now bred a culture of innovation. It’s creating a lot of excitement around what can be, and China’s own talent base is gaining much more confidence than ever before,” Manning said.

The second factor is government intent. “The Chinese government has put quite a bit of money and organizational thinking into how to seed and structure development and R&D, to the point of selecting certain industries for backing, and their brand of state capitalism helps in that regard.” China’s combination of state capitalism, along with the newly emerging entrepreneurial capitalism, “will be the most powerful combination we’ve witnessed worldwide for a while. That may come as a surprise to the rest of the world, but when you put those two together, you get some real power,” said Manning.

The third component of China’s rising success in innovation is the transformation of some state-owned enterprises. “The SOEs are no longer the drag on economic growth they once were,” said Manning. These SOEs are focusing on newer business and product models. While many are still antiquated, “there is evidence of a tide forming there, and potentially changing things. And you get some great success stories like Huawei, ZTE, and others like Haier, which has become the largest refrigeration company in the world.”

Certainly, the question of intellectual property has to be part of any discussion of Chinese innovation, and this too, is changing. In any business environment – whether state-guided or free market – there has to be a framework in which an investment is made, and can be monetized over a predictable period of time. We do have that in most of the world, although admittedly it is not perfected yet in China. However, China’s days of unfettered copyright infringement and knockoffs are coming to a close, simply because of a new demand from within. China has enacted an array of promising intellectual property laws over the past decade, and while there are still shortcomings in terms of enforcement and penalties, the true harbinger of change is that “The Chinese companies are inventing now, and they want protection. They respect the idea that they need it as much as multinationals do, and they don’t want to see other Chinese companies rip them off either. So we’re going to see a groundswell over time, from the high tech community and progressive SOEs for better enforcement of intellectual property rules.”

China moves to a higher stage of innovation

The Chinese government is spending money – and lots of it – in seeding incubation labs and innovation, and the strategy is paying off. Chinese companies are producing new products and services, and to that point, a Thomson Reuters study showed that in 2014, there were in excess of 600,000 patent applications published out of China, and that has increased considerably since 2012. Patent applications coming out of China are 50 percent higher than in 2012, and have already exceeded the annual applications coming out of the United States.

The focus on STEM education in China is certainly contributing to their growth and emerging status as technology innovator. A large proportion of Chinese college students – over 30 percent — graduate with STEM degrees, significantly more than US students in terms of percentage. An emphasis on English language education starts in the fourth grade, indicating government policy that places an emphasis on connecting with the world.

And while the Chinese government is putting money and emphasis on education at all levels, the country’s brightest are often being educated in the West. According to research from the Pew Research Center, graduates from US colleges are more likely than ever to be from overseas, and foreign students – a large percentage from China – are earning more than half of all advanced degrees in the STEM fields. According to the study, the foreign student population grew 72 percent from 1999 to 2013, with most of that increase attributed to Chinese students.

What the West must do to stay competitive

The current electoral cycle in the United States seems to be promoting – from both ends of the political spectrum – a dangerous isolationist attitude that is unworkable in an environment in which innovation and invention is growing among America’s Asian competitors. To continue to ignore China’s emerging status as leaders in innovation, and ignore the possibility of cross-cultural cooperation in business and technology, will only stifle growth in the West.

The US government also needs to take a second look at its immigration policy, which tends to create an environment in which China sends its best and brightest young minds to be educated in STEM fields in the US, then once educated, the US sends them back to contribute to China’s economy rather than its own. “The talent that comes across is rich. It’s phenomenal,” said Manning. “We ought to do more than simply allow the talent to remain, or certainly more than force it to go back. We ought to be much more welcoming. The brain power is essential to our own entrepreneurship and continued growth.” Manning notes that students coming from China have largely been pre-screened and pre-qualified. “These are among the top candidates for higher education anywhere in the world. For us to have them in our midst and lose them, or allow them to return simply because we provided them with no incentives or possibly great disincentives, is a short-sighted economic policy. It’s the kind of thing that if we were more coordinated, we just wouldn’t allow to happen.”

Claiming “American exceptionalism” and superiority in innovation, simply because of geographic status, is an approach that cannot continue. Innovation knows no boundaries. Western innovators, industrialists and legislators must acknowledge that fact if they want to continue to grow and prosper economically.