News on China's scientific and technological development.

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Maglev development in PRC:

CHANGSHA, Jan. 26 (Xinhua) -- China's major train maker on Saturday tested a new generation of maglev train with a designed speed of 160 km per hour, about 60 percent faster than the current model, in Changsha, capital of central China's Hunan Province.

The new model has a 30-percent increase in traction efficiency and can carry six more tonnes in weight compared with the previous generation, according to Tong Laisheng, head of the maglev research institute of the CRRC Zhuzhou Locomotive Co., Ltd., the developer.

It can carry up to 500 passengers with three carriages, Tong said.

China's first medium-low-speed maglev rail line was put into commercial operation in May 2016 in Changsha.

The new model is expected to lay a technical foundation for introducing medium-speed maglev train systems in the future, Tong said. CRRC Zhuzhou Locomotive is also developing a more advanced maglev model with a top speed of 200 km per hour.
 

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WASHINGTON, Jan. 27 (Xinhua) -- Chinese scientists have developed a metal-free catalyst that can purify pathogen-rich water in half an hour.

The study published in the latest version of journal Chem described the method that could produce drinking water in 30 minutes with a disinfection efficiency over 99.9999 percent under visible light.

To disinfect water with sunlight and with metal is cost-effective but leads to second pollution. The metal-free catalysts, however, tend to have lower efficiency, according to the study.

Researchers from Yangzhou University and the Institute of Process Engineering (IPE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences developed a material based on graphitic carbon nitride.

They used wet-chemical method to introduce certain chemical groups at the edges of graphitic carbon nitride, significantly improving its ability to disinfect.

"Its first-order disinfection rate was five times higher than that of previously reported best metal-free photocatalysts with only one tenth catalyst consumption," said the paper's co-author Wang Chengyin from Yangzhou University.

This catalyst can be fixed on substrates, reducing the potential toxicity caused by dispersed nano-materials in drinkable water, according to the study.
 

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XIAMEN, Jan. 23 (Xinhua) -- Research bases for the standardization of two AI technologies -- voice recognition and natural language processing -- have been inaugurated Wednesday in east China's Xiamen.

The bases were established by the China National Institute of Standardization (CNIS) and Kuaishangtong, an AI company.

The voice recognition standardization research base will focus on the building of the technical standard system of voice recognition to promote the application of the technology in finance, security and intelligent terminals.

The other research base will work on the building of related application standards in the natural language processing field including dialog systems, machine translation, auto-abstract and information extraction.

Both the technologies and their application are the core components of AI, said Xian Kuitong, director of the CNIS institute of high and new technology and information standardization. The establishment of the two bases is significant for the follow-up industrial development of AI.
 

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SHANGHAI, Jan. 24 (Xinhua) -- China has cloned five monkeys from a gene-edited macaque with circadian rhythm disorders, the first time multiple monkeys have been cloned from a gene-edited monkey for biomedical research.

Scientists made the announcement Thursday, with two articles published in National Science Review, a top Chinese journal in English. The cloned monkeys were born in Shanghai at Institute of Neuroscience of Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Researchers said that the advance means that a population of customized gene-edited monkey models with uniform genetic background will be available for biomedical research.

Disorders of circadian rhythm are associated with many human diseases, including sleep disorders, depression, diabetic mellitus, cancer and neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease.

Previously, mice and flies were widely used for the research of such diseases, but these animal models differ greatly from human beings in terms of activity routines, brain structure and metabolic rate.

The cloned monkeys, closer to human in physiology, make better models for research on disease pathogenesis and potential therapeutic treatments.

In order to create an ideal donor monkey, researchers knocked out BMAL1, a core circadian regulatory transcription factor, using gene editing at the embryo stage.

They selected one of the gene-edited monkeys with the most severe disease phenotypes as the donor. The fibroblasts of the donor were then used to clone five monkeys by somatic cell nuclear transfer, the same method used to generate Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua, the first cloned monkeys born in China at the end of 2017.

Different from Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua, generated by using fibroblasts from an aborted fetus, the new clones were made using a gene-edited young adult male monkey.

"It shows that besides using fetus, batch cloning of gene-edited male monkeys with diseases is also feasible," said Qiang Sun of the institute.

Sun said the research program was reviewed and supervised by the institute's ethic committee in accordance with international ethical standards of animal research.

He said that the research signified the maturing of China's somatic cell cloning.

Muming Poo, the director of the institute, said that the research team would focus on cloning monkey models with different brain diseases in the future.

Besides being used to study human brain diseases, the models will be used to test medicine effectiveness, which can help reduce the number of animal models used in experiments and lower the cost of medicine development, he said.
 
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16:24, 29-Jan-2019
China's 5G ready for pre-commercial use
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China has finished the third-stage of technical experiments for 5G research and development, and the devices are ready for pre-commercial use, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) at a press conference on Tuesday.

"According to the test, the current system equipment has basically reached the pre-commercial level," said Wen Ku, deputy director of the Department of Information and Communications Technology Development of MIIT. "Both chip and terminal manufacturers are accelerating the development of related products."

Based on the current progress, good commercial terminals can be expected in the middle of 2019, Wen added.

5G will become the infrastructure for building the new generation of information network, with the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) one of its important applications.

The development of the IoV, in turn, will accumulate experiences for the exploration of cross-industry and cross-field application of 5G, providing a better and broader platform for the latter.

"China's 5G has always been moving ahead, and Chinese enterprises have been working with enterprises around the world to promote the development of 5G," said Wen when asked if the Huawei case would influence the application of 5G in China.

He called on certain countries to provide a "fair, just and predictable" environment for Chinese enterprises' normal operation and cooperation with local enterprises, and "China will continue to uphold an open, collaborative and sharing principle to promote the construction of 5G networks, making the 5G terminal available for users as soon as possible."
 
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China will send 10 satellites to join the
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Navigation Satellite System (BDS) in 2019, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) announced Tuesday

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XI'AN, Jan. 23 (Xinhua) -- A woman who successfully received a womb donated from her mother after a uterus transplant in November 2015 gave birth to a healthy baby boy in northwest China's Shaanxi Province on Sunday.

Weighing 2 kg and measuring 48 cm long, the baby is China's first and the world's 14th baby born from a transplanted womb, doctors with the Xijing Hospital in Xi'an, capital of the province, said Wednesday.

Yang Hua, 26, the new mother, was born without a uterus but has her own ovaries.

When the mother-daughter womb transplant, China's first human womb transplant, was done in 2015, Yang was 22 and her mother was 43.

Doctors at the Xijing Hospital extracted eggs from Yang. With the help of assisted reproductive technology, they froze 14 embryos in August 2015.

The frozen embryo was successfully implanted in Yang's womb on June 13, 2018. Yang became pregnant after two weeks.

To ensure the health of Yang and her baby during the pregnancy, the experts from the obstetrics and gynecology department and the urology department of Xijing Hospital made a series of individual immune anti-rejection medication plans and conducted regular ultrasound, plasma concentration and hormone level monitoring.

"The full-term fetus can bring pressure to the transplanted womb, which increases risks during labor," said Chen Biliang, director of the obstetrics and gynecology department of Xijing Hospital.

Therefore, Chen and his team decided to conduct a cesarean section during the 33th week of Yang's pregnancy.

Uterus transplants are not new. In the 1960s, Britain and the United States began to experiment with uterus transplants on animals.

In 2000, the world's first human womb transplant took place on a 26-year-old woman in Saudi Arabia. The transplanted uterus failed after three months and had to be removed.

In 2011, doctors successfully performed a uterus transplant on a woman in Turkey. Two years later, nine women in Sweden successfully received transplanted wombs donated by relatives.

Chen said uterus transplants still remained a medical challenge.

The uterus, with plenty of tenuous blood vessels, grows in the depths of a woman's pelvic cavity. Therefore, a string of problems including cutting, the structure of the blood vessels during the transplant and strong rejection reactions may occur, according to Chen.

There are about a million women in China suffering from uterine infertility. Due to the limitation of the current assisted reproductive technology and the prohibition of surrogacy in many countries, uterus transplants have provided an effective way for women plagued by uterine infertility to have their own babies, according to Chen.

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CHANGCHUN, Jan. 22 (Xinhua) -- An eight-car metro train, with the world's most advanced automated subway-line technology, for use in Chengdu rolled off the assembly line Tuesday in Changchun, northeast China's Jilin Province.

Two extra cars are added to the train, compared with conventional metro trains, to allow a larger passenger capacity during rush hours, experts with CRRC Changchun Railway Vehicles Company said.

With a maximum speed of 100 km per hour, the wide-body train can carry up to 3,456 passengers on a single trip.

Trains with the fourth grade automation system are capable of operating automatically, including with obstacle detection and remote control.
 
Today at 8:13 AM
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China's Chang'e 4 lander and Yutu 2 rover have both automatically awakened from their sleep mode after surviving the first long lunar night, which equals about 14 days on Earth, withstanding the extremely low temperatures on the far side of the moon

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China's Chang'e-4 probe wakes up after first lunar night
Xinhua| 2019-01-31 16:31:28
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The rover and the lander of the Chang'e-4 probe have been awakened by sunlight after a long "sleep" during the first extremely cold night on the moon, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) announced on Thursday.

The lander woke up at 8:39 p.m. Wednesday, and the rover, Yutu-2 (Jade Rabbit-2), awoke at about 8:00 p.m. Tuesday, surviving their first lunar night after making the first-ever soft landing on the far side of the moon, said CNSA.

China's Chang'e-4 probe, launched on Dec. 8 in 2018, landed on the Von Karman Crater in the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the far side of the moon on Jan. 3.

A lunar day equals 14 days on Earth, and a lunar night is the same length. The Chang'e-4 probe switched to a dormant mode during the lunar night due to the lack of solar power.

Both the lander and the rover ended the dormant mode automatically according to the elevation angle of the sunlight. And the key instruments on the probe have started to work.

Currently, the rover is located about 18 meters northwest of the lander. Communication and data transmission between ground control and the probe via the relay satellite Queqiao (Magpie Bridge) are stable, said CNSA.

As a result of the tidal locking effect, the moon's revolution cycle is the same as its rotation cycle, and it always faces Earth with the same side.

"The far side of the moon has unique features, and has never been explored on site, so Chang'e-4 might bring us breakthrough findings," said Zou Yongliao, director of the lunar and deep space exploration division of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

During the first lunar day, the lander and the rover photographed each other, and a camera installed on the top of the lander took 360-degree panoramic photos on the surrounding of the probe.

"From the panorama, we could see the probe was surrounded by many small craters. It was really thrilling," said Li Chunlai, deputy director of the National Astronomical Observatories of China and commander-in-chief of the ground application system of Chang'e-4.

The lunar rover Yutu-2 will face considerable challenges brought by complicated terrain in its future exploration, said scientists.

The scientific tasks of the Chang'e-4 mission include low-frequency radio astronomical observation, surveying the terrain and landforms, detecting the mineral composition and shallow lunar surface structure, and measuring neutron radiation and neutral atoms.

The Chang'e-4 mission embodies China's hope to combine human wisdom in space exploration, with four payloads developed by the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden and Saudi Arabia.
 
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