News on China's scientific and technological development.

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Chinese scientists develop fire-resistant, fire-detecting wallpaper
Xinhua| 2018-05-10 20:53:56

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China has created the world's first medical instrument that can induce, culture and screen stem cells automatically, benefiting the development of regenerative medicine.

The instrument, developed by the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, with independent intellectual property rights, makes the large-scale culture of stem cells possible.

Scientists around the world are looking for "keys" that enable humans to regrow tissue or organs lost due to illness or injury, like a gecko can regrow a tail.

Stem cells can self-renew or multiply while maintaining the potential to develop into other types of cells. They can become cells of the blood, heart, bones, skin, muscle, brain or other body parts. They are valuable research tools and might in future be used to treat a wide range of ailments.

Previously, inducing, culturing and screening stem cells could only be achieved manually, which lacked uniform standards and was inefficient, costly and unsafe, restricting the wide application of stem cells in regenerative medicine.

"Distinguishing stem cell from other cells is like picking out a needle in a haystack. It's an arduous work to do manually. The efficiency of the newly invented equipment is equivalent to that of 24 technicians," said Pan Guangjin, vice president of the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health.

Chinese scientists spent four years developing the instrument. Previously almost all of the country's high-end life-science instruments were imported from the United State and Europe.

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North China's Tianjin Municipality has announced plans to set up funds worth 100 billion yuan (15.7 billion U.S. dollars) to support the artificial intelligence industry, and a 10-billion-yuan fund to promote intelligent manufacturing.

"The funds are established to foster and expand the intelligent technology industry in the city," said Sun Wenkui, vice mayor of Tianjin.

Sun said the 10-billion-yuan fund would be used to support industries such as the industrial Internet, robotics, integrated circuits, information services and military-civilian integration.

The funds of 100 billion yuan will be invested in emerging industries such as intelligent robots, hardware and software, including 30 billion yuan in sub-fund for intelligent device and intelligent upgrade of traditional industries.

Sun said a maximum of 30 million yuan of financial support would be provided to each scientific research institution at national or provincial levels that settles in Tianjin.

Local authorities will pay special attention to intellectual property protection and strict law enforcement in the area, Sun added.

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Machines that can impeccably synthesize the human voice, assist judges in sentencing, and tell customers whether a dress is a good fit, have been displayed at the second World Intelligence Congress in Tianjin.

Riding the global waves of artificial intelligence (AI), China aims to improve the productivity and inject new momentum into its economy by encouraging more players to tap the fledging industry.

By June 2017, about one-fourth of the world's 2,542 AI companies were in China, where around 15,700 AI patents were filed, ranking second after the United States, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.

"China should seize opportunities to boost innovation in deep learning, smart algorithms and chips, and modernize industries with AI technologies," Lin Nianxiu, deputy head of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), told a room of entrepreneurs, researchers and policy-makers at the congress, which was held from May 16 to 18.

NDRC is China's top economic planning agency.

In July last year, the State Council issued a plan for new generation AI, pledging to make the industry a major new growth engine and improve people's life by 2020 and make the country the world's center and leader for AI innovation by 2030.

China's AI industry output last year was 18 billion yuan (about 2.85 billion U.S. dollars) and value of related industries reached 220 billion yuan, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

"The development of intelligent technologies is not only the endogenous driving force for China's economic upgrade, but contributes to the prosperity of the world as well," according to a survey of 408 intelligent companies by the Chinese Institute of New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Strategies (CINGAIDS).

PHENOMENAL PROGRESS

China's high-tech big names are investing heavily in AI innovation, with Baidu in automated driving, Alibaba in AI cities, Tencent in medicine and health, and iFlytek in intelligent voices, according to the survey.

Still, China lags behind developed countries in AI theory, algorithm, materials, core components, and even talent.

Most existing Chinese AI companies were founded between 2010 and 2016 amid intense policy incentives, the survey said.

To catch up with the global AI leaders, 18 provinces, regions and municipalities in China have introduced new policies to promote AI-related industries, while 27 provincial-level regions have announced plans to build AI industrial parks.

Wan Gang, chairman of the China Association for Science and Technology and former Minister of Science and Technology, said Chinese companies are quite competitive in image recognition, voice translation and behavioral analysis, with remarkable achievements in intelligent robotics, automated shops, machine translation, shared and driverless vehicles.

AI technologies are now widely applied in China in the fields of city planning, smart transportation, social governance, health, agriculture and national security.

China has created local AI champions such as Tencent, Baidu, Sensetime, Face++ and Cambricon, said Ludovic Bodin, a French entrepreneur who plans to set up a one-billion-dollar fund to finance AI joint ventures between France and China.

He also seeks to directly invest in firms either in France or China, particularly in areas of health care, transportation and environment.

"Artificial intelligence was a big priority when French President Emmanuel Macron visited China in January. China has critical competitive advantage in AI. Its largest datasets, policy push and education reform are key advantages. While France harbors top-ranked talent in AI, and aims to boost the sector and lead European development in AI," Bodin said.

The ambitions are shared by Chian's domestic players, as Liu Qiangdong, founder of e-commerce giant JD.com, announced at the congress that the company would renovate 800 logistics centers in China with AI technologies in the next five years.

"We look to establish an intelligent system covering storage, delivery vehicles, distribution stations and customers. In the future, courier boys will become white-collars who sit in office and monitor machines that do the jobs for them," Liu said.

Meanwhile, iFlytek said its machine translation capabilities by 2019 were expected to match a college graduate majoring in English.

"The latest machine can translate Chinese to 33 other languages. It also works well for different Chinese dialects," said Liu Qingfeng, chairman of iFlytek.

By 2030, AI is expected to generate 16 trillion U.S. dollars for the world economy, said Indrajit Banerjee, director of the knowledge societies division of the Communication and Information Sector in UNESCO.

"Chinese companies are very active in developing AI technology and application. They have achieved phenomenal progress in a very short span of time. Their contribution to AI will be tremendous," he said.

TALENT FOR THE FUTURE

To boost the development of intelligent technologies, experts and entrepreneurs agree that it is critical for countries to nurture more talent.

"China has advantages in the speed of AI development and its wide application, but its weak points are the depth of basic research and originality," Wan said.

"Demand of AI talent is extremely high now, and that happens to be our weak point as well. Talent is a key element in developing the industry," he said.

Gong Ke, executive president of CINGAIDS, said about one-fourth of AI technologies used in China came from abroad. "Software and hardware are developed by firms such as Nvidia and IBM. I hope Chinese companies will also be suppliers in the future," he said.

"The evolution of new technology is unstoppable. Innovation is going faster and faster. If education cannot keep up, we will not have the next generation AI ready for the new skills that are needed. AI started at the top universities and now it has to go down," he said.

In April, AI coursebooks were introduced to the curriculum in 40 high schools in China.

Jack Ma, chairman of Alibaba, also directed attention to AI education.

"Humans will never win if they compete with machines on who recites books fast and gets calculations right. We should focus more on kindergarten and elementary education, and raise our kids to be responsible and visionary beings," he said. "The age of AI will come, and it is important that we get prepared."

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China launched a relay satellite early Monday to set up a communication link between Earth and the planned Chang'e-4 lunar probe that will explore the mysterious far side of Moon, which can not be seen from Earth.

The satellite, named Queqiao (Magpie Bridge), was carried by a Long March-4C rocket that blasted off at 5:28 a.m. from southwest China's Xichang Satellite Launch Center, according to the China National Space Administration (CNSA).

"The launch is a key step for China to realize its goal of being the first country to send a probe to soft-land on and rove the far side of the Moon," said Zhang Lihua, manager of the relay satellite project.

About 25 minutes after liftoff, the satellite separated from the rocket and entered an Earth-Moon transfer orbit with the perigee at 200 km and the apogee at about 400,000 km. The solar panels and the communication antennas were unfolded.

Queqiao is expected to enter a halo orbit around the second Lagrangian (L2) point of the Earth-Moon system, about 455,000 km from the Earth. It will be the world's first communication satellite operating in that orbit.

But the mission must overcome many challenges, including multiple adjustments to its orbit and braking near the Moon and taking advantage of the lunar gravity, Zhang said.

In a Chinese folktale, magpies form a bridge with their wings on the seventh night of the seventh month of the lunar calendar to enable Zhi Nu, the seventh daughter of the Goddess of Heaven, to cross and meet her beloved husband, separated from her by the Milky Way.

Chinese scientists and engineers hope the Queqiao satellite will form a communication bridge between controllers on Earth and the far side of the Moon where the Chang'e-4 lunar probe is expected to touch down later this year.

Monday's launch was the 275th mission of the Long March rocket series.

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Chinese scientists are to conduct a laser-ranging test between the relay satellite of the Chang'e-4 lunar probe and an observatory on the ground, which might help lay the foundation for space-based gravitational wave detection.

The relay satellite Queqiao, or Magpie Bridge, which was launched Monday, will fly to a halo orbit around the second Lagrangian point (L2) of the Earth-Moon system. It will be a communication link between controllers on Earth and the Chang'e-4 lunar probe, which is expected to soft-land on the far side of the Moon at the end of this year.

Chinese scientists will also conduct a laser-ranging test with the satellite at a maximum distance of 460,000 km, a record distance for an experiment of its kind, said Zhang Lihua, manager of the relay satellite project.

China has reportedly accomplished its first successful lunar laser-ranging, with a 1.2-meter telescope at southwest China's Yunnan Observatories on Jan. 22 this year, when scientists measured the distance between the Moon and the Earth, based on the signals of laser pulses reflected by the lunar retro-reflector planted by the U.S. Apollo mission more than 40 years ago.

Scientists calculated the time a laser pulse takes to travel from a ground station to the retro-reflector on the Moon and back again to get a measurement.

Just a few countries, including the United States, France and China, have successfully harnessed the lunar laser-ranging technology.

The Queqiao satellite, carrying a reflector developed by Sun Yat-sen University, is expected to extend laser-ranging to a new record distance.

As the satellite will fly at a constant high speed, it will be extremely hard for the laser beam from the ground to target the reflector on the satellite about 460,000 km away.

Luo Jun, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and president of Sun Yat-sen University, has proposed a space science program to detect gravitational waves. Laser-ranging is a necessary technology for that detection.

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