News on China's scientific and technological development.
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China has become a major innovation hub and target market for brain-computer interface technology, said a recent report. Advances in fields such as imaging, microelectronics, AI, and neuroscience have contributed to the progress in understanding of brain function...
Drilling a spy hole to the US.
Xinhua | Updated: 2023-05-30 14:14
This aerial photo taken on May 30, 2023 shows the drilling project of a borehole over 10,000 meters deep for scientific exploration in Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. [Photo/Xinhua]
URUMQI -- The drilling of China's first borehole over 10,000 meters deep for scientific exploration began on Tuesday in the Tarim Basin, Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.
The operation started at 11:46 am on Tuesday. It represents a landmark in China's deep-Earth exploration, providing an unprecedented opportunity to study areas of the planet deep beneath the surface.
With a design depth of 11,100 meters, the borehole is located in the hinterland of the Taklimakan Desert, the largest desert in China.
During the drilling process, the equipment, including drill bits and drill pipes weighing more than 2,000 tonnes, will go deep into the Earth, penetrating more than 10 continental strata, including the Cretaceous system.
Wang Chunsheng, a technical expert who joined the operation, said that drilling a borehole over 10,000 meters deep is a bold attempt to explore the unknown territory of the Earth and expand the boundaries of human understanding.
"The construction difficulty of the drilling project can be compared to a big truck driving on two thin steel cables," said Sun Jinsheng, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering.
The Tarim Basin is one of the most difficult areas to explore due to its harsh ground environment and complicated underground conditions.
China starts drilling superdeep borehole in landmark deep-Earth exploration
Xinhua | Updated: 2023-05-30 14:14
This aerial photo taken on May 30, 2023 shows the drilling project of a borehole over 10,000 meters deep for scientific exploration in Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. [Photo/Xinhua]
URUMQI -- The drilling of China's first borehole over 10,000 meters deep for scientific exploration began on Tuesday in the Tarim Basin, Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.
The operation started at 11:46 am on Tuesday. It represents a landmark in China's deep-Earth exploration, providing an unprecedented opportunity to study areas of the planet deep beneath the surface.
With a design depth of 11,100 meters, the borehole is located in the hinterland of the Taklimakan Desert, the largest desert in China.
During the drilling process, the equipment, including drill bits and drill pipes weighing more than 2,000 tonnes, will go deep into the Earth, penetrating more than 10 continental strata, including the Cretaceous system.
Wang Chunsheng, a technical expert who joined the operation, said that drilling a borehole over 10,000 meters deep is a bold attempt to explore the unknown territory of the Earth and expand the boundaries of human understanding.
"The construction difficulty of the drilling project can be compared to a big truck driving on two thin steel cables," said Sun Jinsheng, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering.
The Tarim Basin is one of the most difficult areas to explore due to its harsh ground environment and complicated underground conditions.
big breakthrough. Chinese scientists have done it again.
Chinese researchers have developed a new gene-editing tool they say is ultra precise, safe and has potential to treat or even cure some genetic diseases.
Unlike the well-known gene-editing tool – which acts as “molecular scissors” that can cut the two strands of DNA in the genome and relies on the cell’s self-healing mechanism to repair – the new tool, known as “base editors”, fixes specific sites in the genome without cutting the double helix.
The first base editors were proposed in 2016 by a team led by David Liu at Harvard University. The Chinese team used a different approach that they say can achieve the same results, which could enable China to challenge US leadership in this field.
Their study was published on May 16 in the peer-reviewed journal National Science Review that comes under the auspices of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
“It means we have established a system of our own, which is essential for clinical and commercial application,” said Yang Hui, corresponding author of the study and a researcher with the Centre for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The study is also important for the development of disease models in basic research and in the field of gene therapy, according to the authors.
CRISPR-Cas9, a natural defence mechanism used by bacteria to ward off viral attacks, is one of the most important scientific discoveries of this century. Two scientists – Emmanuelle Charpentier, director of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Berlin, and Jennifer Doudna, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley – won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing the gene-editing tool.
However, CRISPR-Cas9 has its shortcomings. Because it relies on the cell’s self-healing mechanism to rejoin the broken strains, it may result in off-target effects, such as chromosomal rearrangements or large DNA deletions, which may cause safety concerns.
Scientists have discovered a method to precisely correct the misspelling of one individual DNA letter, or “base”, by using base-editing technology. There are four bases in DNA – adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T) – and they are supposed to be matched in specific pairs: A with T, and C with G.
By using CRISPR scissors but disabling the ability to cut DNA, Liu’s team attached a protein that could perform chemical reactions on the DNA base, enabling it to convert C to T, or A to G, for example.
Base editors could correct four of the most common types of misspellings that occur in DNA, accounting for about 30 per cent of all known disease-causing DNA errors, Liu told The Conversation in April.
Yang said: “CRISPR-Cas9 is like a pair of scissors that can cut the DNA, which may result in the deletion or insertion of base pairs, while base editing is like a pencil and eraser that can erase one base and change it into another.”
But in previous studies, deamination – the removal of an amino group from a molecule – was the first step in base editing, he said.
“Previously, scientists used chemical reactions to deaminate adenine or cytosine. When the body discovers the bases are mutated, it has a series of mechanisms to repair them to convert from one base into another one,” he said.
“People’s perception is that deamination is the first step of base editing, but we break the inherent concept by finding another enzyme – the glycosylase – that can also perform base editing.”
More importantly, Yang said the previous method could not directly correct guanine, but the new base-editing approach made the guanine editing possible.
“Now we have an independent intellectual property system for base editing and we can apply it for free to do any base-editing modifications,” Yang said.
He added that base editing had already become a major tool to treat genetic diseases.
“More than half of all human genetic mutations are caused by a single-base mutation, so base editing can precisely fix these mutations,” he said.
Clinical trials of base editing are being conducted to treat some genetic diseases, including sickle-cell disease, the blood disorder beta-thalassaemia and cardiovascular diseases.
Last year, a patient in Britain with T-cell leukaemia was treated with a base-edited cell therapy – the world’s first application of this technology.
“As gene-editing tools continue to advance, more rare diseases will be able to go to clinical trials and be solved by scientists and biomedical companies,” Yang said.
Chinese scientists develop new gene-editing tool that differs in approach to CRISPR-Cas9
- ‘Base editors’ fix specific sites in the genome without cutting the DNA double helix, according to team
- ‘Now we have an independent intellectual property system for base editing and we can apply it for free,’ study author says
Chinese researchers have developed a new gene-editing tool they say is ultra precise, safe and has potential to treat or even cure some genetic diseases.
Unlike the well-known gene-editing tool – which acts as “molecular scissors” that can cut the two strands of DNA in the genome and relies on the cell’s self-healing mechanism to repair – the new tool, known as “base editors”, fixes specific sites in the genome without cutting the double helix.
The first base editors were proposed in 2016 by a team led by David Liu at Harvard University. The Chinese team used a different approach that they say can achieve the same results, which could enable China to challenge US leadership in this field.
Their study was published on May 16 in the peer-reviewed journal National Science Review that comes under the auspices of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
“It means we have established a system of our own, which is essential for clinical and commercial application,” said Yang Hui, corresponding author of the study and a researcher with the Centre for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The study is also important for the development of disease models in basic research and in the field of gene therapy, according to the authors.
CRISPR-Cas9, a natural defence mechanism used by bacteria to ward off viral attacks, is one of the most important scientific discoveries of this century. Two scientists – Emmanuelle Charpentier, director of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Berlin, and Jennifer Doudna, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley – won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing the gene-editing tool.
However, CRISPR-Cas9 has its shortcomings. Because it relies on the cell’s self-healing mechanism to rejoin the broken strains, it may result in off-target effects, such as chromosomal rearrangements or large DNA deletions, which may cause safety concerns.
Scientists have discovered a method to precisely correct the misspelling of one individual DNA letter, or “base”, by using base-editing technology. There are four bases in DNA – adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T) – and they are supposed to be matched in specific pairs: A with T, and C with G.
By using CRISPR scissors but disabling the ability to cut DNA, Liu’s team attached a protein that could perform chemical reactions on the DNA base, enabling it to convert C to T, or A to G, for example.
Base editors could correct four of the most common types of misspellings that occur in DNA, accounting for about 30 per cent of all known disease-causing DNA errors, Liu told The Conversation in April.
Yang said: “CRISPR-Cas9 is like a pair of scissors that can cut the DNA, which may result in the deletion or insertion of base pairs, while base editing is like a pencil and eraser that can erase one base and change it into another.”
But in previous studies, deamination – the removal of an amino group from a molecule – was the first step in base editing, he said.
“Previously, scientists used chemical reactions to deaminate adenine or cytosine. When the body discovers the bases are mutated, it has a series of mechanisms to repair them to convert from one base into another one,” he said.
“People’s perception is that deamination is the first step of base editing, but we break the inherent concept by finding another enzyme – the glycosylase – that can also perform base editing.”
More importantly, Yang said the previous method could not directly correct guanine, but the new base-editing approach made the guanine editing possible.
“Now we have an independent intellectual property system for base editing and we can apply it for free to do any base-editing modifications,” Yang said.
He added that base editing had already become a major tool to treat genetic diseases.
“More than half of all human genetic mutations are caused by a single-base mutation, so base editing can precisely fix these mutations,” he said.
Clinical trials of base editing are being conducted to treat some genetic diseases, including sickle-cell disease, the blood disorder beta-thalassaemia and cardiovascular diseases.
Last year, a patient in Britain with T-cell leukaemia was treated with a base-edited cell therapy – the world’s first application of this technology.
“As gene-editing tools continue to advance, more rare diseases will be able to go to clinical trials and be solved by scientists and biomedical companies,” Yang said.
I remember reading about this from Chinese media years ago around 2017/2018 when synthesis was successful, looks like mass production now achieved.
in Beijing
Published: 5:01pm, 2 Jun, 2023 Updated: 5:01pm, 2 Jun, 2023
China’s CL-20 research is reportedly closely linked to its nuclear weapons programme. More powerful explosives can reduce the size of nuclear weapons and allow intercontinental ballistic missiles to travel further. Photo: Reuters
A said they have significantly improved the safety of the world’s most powerful explosive by engineering a five-fold boost to its shock resistance capacity.
The breakthrough could speed up the large-scale application of the explosive in battle, making Chinese weapons far superior in terms of destructive power, according to the scientists.
CL-20 is the most deadly non-nuclear explosive in existence. When detonated, it can produce destructive shock waves with blast pressures many times higher than other common explosives like TNT and RDX.
In a recent war game, Chinese defence researchers sank an entire US aircraft carrier fleet in the a with 24 hypersonic missiles. Some military experts believe that these weapons used CL-20 warheads.
The mass production of CL-20 is extremely difficult. China is the only country so far to possess such industrial capability and has used the explosive in some of its newest weapons, according to a US Energetics Technology Centre study commissioned by the Pentagon in 2021.
But the use of CL-20 is still limited due to its sensitivity to shock, according to the Chinese team led by explosive scientist Guo Changping from the Sichuan Military and Civilian Co-Innovation Centre for New Energetic Materials.
Guo and his colleagues developed a new nanotechnology that can help synthesise CL-20 composites with ultra-high stability.
In a falling hammer test, the impact sensitivity or “H50 value” of the new CL-20 explosive was 68cm (26.8 inches), much higher than that of the original material at 13cm.
Falling hammer tests involve dropping a weight onto a sample of explosive material from a specified height and measuring whether it detonated. The height at which half of the samples detonate is known as the H50 value and is used as a measure of impact sensitivity.
“CL-20 has a high mechanical sensitivity, which makes it prone to safety accidents during its development, production, storage, transport and use, due to friction and impact. Its safety performance needs to be improved,” Guo’s team said in a peer-reviewed paper published in the Chinese Journal of Explosives and Propellants in April.
“We are seeking a new method to break through the current technology barriers. It will inspire the design and preparation of high-security, high-energy propellants and explosive formulas of the future,” the scientists added.
China’s CL-20 research is closely linked to its nuclear weapons programme, according to some state media reports in recent years. More powerful explosives can reduce the size of nuclear weapons and allow intercontinental ballistic missiles to travel further.
Professor Yu Yongzhong, an explosive expert who developed detonation devices for China’s nuclear warheads, came up with the idea of using cage-shaped compounds as a new method of researching high-energy explosives.
He proposed changing the “two-dimensional” flat ring structure of explosive materials to a “three-dimensional” cage-like structure, which led to the synthesis of 797#, the world’s first cage structure explosive material in 1979.
In 1994, Yu synthesised the first CL-20 compound in his laboratory and reported the discovery in some Chinese-language journals.
Two years later, a team of US military scientists announced a material with an identical structure, but said that they had discovered it in 1987.
According to John Fischer, lead scientist at the Energetics Technology Centre, the development of CL-20 exceeded every goal laid out for the energetic materials community.
However, despite its 40 per cent increase in power compared to HMX explosives in some applications, CL-20 could not be fielded due to a variety of factors.
The collapse of the Soviet Union had also reduced the urgency for more powerful explosives, and the cost of testing and fielding CL-20 was high. Since there was no requirement for it, the acquisition community had no interest in it.
“We could not get it across the finish line,” Fischer told National Defence magazine last year.
Some experts in the US defence industry say China has already incorporated CL-20 into a number of weapons systems. Such energetic materials can propel warheads longer distances or allow ships and planes to carry more munitions because they can be made smaller and lighter, they warn.
In 2016, Yu’s team at the Beijing Institute of Technology won China’s special award for scientific and technological progress in national defence for their contribution to the mass production of CL-20.
It is China’s highest award in the field of military science and is given to individuals or groups who have made significant contributions to the development of national defence technology.
China has tamed the world’s most powerful explosive, military scientists say
- New synthesising method can give five-fold stability boost to CL-20, the deadliest non-nuclear explosive in existence, Chinese research team says
- According to 2021 US study commissioned by Pentagon, only China has CL-20 mass production capacity and has used it in some of its newest weapons
in Beijing
Published: 5:01pm, 2 Jun, 2023 Updated: 5:01pm, 2 Jun, 2023
China’s CL-20 research is reportedly closely linked to its nuclear weapons programme. More powerful explosives can reduce the size of nuclear weapons and allow intercontinental ballistic missiles to travel further. Photo: Reuters
A said they have significantly improved the safety of the world’s most powerful explosive by engineering a five-fold boost to its shock resistance capacity.
The breakthrough could speed up the large-scale application of the explosive in battle, making Chinese weapons far superior in terms of destructive power, according to the scientists.
CL-20 is the most deadly non-nuclear explosive in existence. When detonated, it can produce destructive shock waves with blast pressures many times higher than other common explosives like TNT and RDX.
In a recent war game, Chinese defence researchers sank an entire US aircraft carrier fleet in the a with 24 hypersonic missiles. Some military experts believe that these weapons used CL-20 warheads.
The mass production of CL-20 is extremely difficult. China is the only country so far to possess such industrial capability and has used the explosive in some of its newest weapons, according to a US Energetics Technology Centre study commissioned by the Pentagon in 2021.
But the use of CL-20 is still limited due to its sensitivity to shock, according to the Chinese team led by explosive scientist Guo Changping from the Sichuan Military and Civilian Co-Innovation Centre for New Energetic Materials.
Guo and his colleagues developed a new nanotechnology that can help synthesise CL-20 composites with ultra-high stability.
In a falling hammer test, the impact sensitivity or “H50 value” of the new CL-20 explosive was 68cm (26.8 inches), much higher than that of the original material at 13cm.
Falling hammer tests involve dropping a weight onto a sample of explosive material from a specified height and measuring whether it detonated. The height at which half of the samples detonate is known as the H50 value and is used as a measure of impact sensitivity.
“CL-20 has a high mechanical sensitivity, which makes it prone to safety accidents during its development, production, storage, transport and use, due to friction and impact. Its safety performance needs to be improved,” Guo’s team said in a peer-reviewed paper published in the Chinese Journal of Explosives and Propellants in April.
“We are seeking a new method to break through the current technology barriers. It will inspire the design and preparation of high-security, high-energy propellants and explosive formulas of the future,” the scientists added.
China’s CL-20 research is closely linked to its nuclear weapons programme, according to some state media reports in recent years. More powerful explosives can reduce the size of nuclear weapons and allow intercontinental ballistic missiles to travel further.
Professor Yu Yongzhong, an explosive expert who developed detonation devices for China’s nuclear warheads, came up with the idea of using cage-shaped compounds as a new method of researching high-energy explosives.
He proposed changing the “two-dimensional” flat ring structure of explosive materials to a “three-dimensional” cage-like structure, which led to the synthesis of 797#, the world’s first cage structure explosive material in 1979.
In 1994, Yu synthesised the first CL-20 compound in his laboratory and reported the discovery in some Chinese-language journals.
Two years later, a team of US military scientists announced a material with an identical structure, but said that they had discovered it in 1987.
According to John Fischer, lead scientist at the Energetics Technology Centre, the development of CL-20 exceeded every goal laid out for the energetic materials community.
However, despite its 40 per cent increase in power compared to HMX explosives in some applications, CL-20 could not be fielded due to a variety of factors.
The collapse of the Soviet Union had also reduced the urgency for more powerful explosives, and the cost of testing and fielding CL-20 was high. Since there was no requirement for it, the acquisition community had no interest in it.
“We could not get it across the finish line,” Fischer told National Defence magazine last year.
Some experts in the US defence industry say China has already incorporated CL-20 into a number of weapons systems. Such energetic materials can propel warheads longer distances or allow ships and planes to carry more munitions because they can be made smaller and lighter, they warn.
In 2016, Yu’s team at the Beijing Institute of Technology won China’s special award for scientific and technological progress in national defence for their contribution to the mass production of CL-20.
It is China’s highest award in the field of military science and is given to individuals or groups who have made significant contributions to the development of national defence technology.
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supercat
Major
Breakthrough in hydrogen production - electrolysis of seawater directly without desalination first:
China investing heavily in computing field. insane
China Telecom, which is quickly emerging as a powerful player in China’s cloud market, has unveiled a plan to set up a huge computing centre in the hi-tech zone of Shanghai to support the city’s artificial intelligence (AI) industry.
The state-owned company, through a subsidiary, plans to deploy a total of 40,000 high-power racks – each rack usually contains dozens of servers – for intelligent computing and supercomputing. The company did not disclose the investment size. China had 6.5 million racks in total as of the end of 2022.
It marks one of the biggest investments by China Telecom in computing centres as China accelerates development of its national computational power capabilities. This comes amid increased rivalry in advanced technologies, such as AI, with the US.
China Telecom, which is quickly emerging as a powerful player in China’s cloud market, has unveiled a plan to set up a huge computing centre in the hi-tech zone of Shanghai to support the city’s artificial intelligence (AI) industry.
The state-owned company, through a subsidiary, plans to deploy a total of 40,000 high-power racks – each rack usually contains dozens of servers – for intelligent computing and supercomputing. The company did not disclose the investment size. China had 6.5 million racks in total as of the end of 2022.
It marks one of the biggest investments by China Telecom in computing centres as China accelerates development of its national computational power capabilities. This comes amid increased rivalry in advanced technologies, such as AI, with the US.
China releases first national standard for blockchain technology to accelerate development
China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has released the country’s first national standard for blockchain technology, aiming to accelerate development of the emerging industry, according to media reports on Thursday.
This offers a basic and universal standard to guide the application and industrial development of the country’s blockchain technology, and it standardizes the functional architecture and core elements of the blockchain system, according to the MIIT.
The newly released standard also provides a reference guide for the industry to unify the understanding of the concept of blockchain, build and improve the blockchain system, and choose and use blockchain services. The standard has been applied in more than a hundred blockchain companies.
The move further accelerates the standardization of China’s blockchain industry and paves the way for its high-quality development, said an official at the MIIT, according to Xinhua.
The official said that the MIIT will continue to study and formulate standards for blockchain and deepen adoption of the standards so as to continuously improve the services level of the blockchain industry.
China has been making efforts to boost the development of blockchain technology, which is deemed crucial for the development of the country’s digital economy.
In February, the Ministry of Science and Technology approved the establishment of the National Blockchain Technology Innovation Center in Beijing, which will focus on areas such as basic theory, software and hardware, according to Beijing Daily. The center was launched in Beijing’s Zhongguancun area, dubbed “China’s silicon valley,” on May 10.
Also, on Sunday at the ZGC Forum, a state-level platform for scientific and technological exchanges and cooperation, the Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Commission issued a white paper on Web 3.0, which covers a wide range of technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence.
Application of blockchain in China has been rising rapidly in recent years, with the market size rising to 8.46 billion yuan in 2022, according to data provider Statista.