News on China's scientific and technological development.

The underwater glider developed by Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (SIA), accomplished experimental application in regions near the Dongsha Islands, the South China Sea recently, verifying the stability and reliability of the underwater glider system, accumulating operation experience under complex ocean current environment and laying solid foundation for its promotion and application in the future.

As a new type of underwater robot, the underwater glider provides an ideal and effective ocean environment observation platform. It combines floating, mooring and underwater robotics technology. Driven by buoyancy force, its operation range can reach several hundred to several thousand kilometers, and can work for several months continuously.

In the experiment, the underwater glider conquered strong current and finished observation tasks of several operation cycles. Indicators and function of the system were normal, demonstrating sound controllability and good flow resistance ability.

After the experiment, the underwater glider sent information of its recovery position to “Shiyan-1” scientific research ship through satellite, and was reclaimed by the vessel without the assistance of work boats.

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BGI, the world's largest genomics organization, announced that a group of scientists and researchers successfully demonstrated genomic data transfer at a sustained rate of almost 10 Gigabits per second (Gbps) over a new link connecting US and China research and education networks. This data rate is equivalent to moving more than 100 million megabytes -- over 5,400 full Blu-ray discs -- in a single day.

The data transfer demonstration was part of a June 22nd event in Beijing celebrating a new 10 Gigabit US – China network connection supported by Internet2, the China Education and Research Network (CERNET), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and Indiana University.

Three centers and their representatives participated in the demonstration – BGI, Dr. Xing Xu, Director of Cloud Computing Product; UC Davis, Dr. Dawei Lin, Director of Bioinformatics Core of Genome Center; and National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), Dr. Don Preuss, Head of Systems Group. Aspera Inc., the creator of the technology that moves the world's data at maximum speed, provided software to support the data transfers.

BGI performed the live demos of ultra high-speed data exchanges between the three world-class genomics institutions. For example, BGI transferred 24 Gigabytes of genomic data from Beijing to UC Davis in less than 30 seconds. A file of the same size sent over the public Internet a few days earlier took more than 26 hours.

"The 10 Gigabit network connection is even faster than transferring data to most local hard drives," said Dr. Lin. "The use of a 10 Gigabit network connection will be groundbreaking, very much like email replacing hand delivered mail for communication. It will enable scientists in the genomics-related fields to communicate and transfer data more rapidly and conveniently, and bring the best minds together to better explore the mysteries of life science."

Dr. Xu said, "This was the first time that large genomic data were transferred between China and the US over a 10 Gigabit network. BGI is excited to demonstrate this achievement and looks forward to the potential opportunity to incorporate this breakthrough into our service capabilities to facilitate more rapid and efficient exchange of big genomic data globally."

Genomics has revolutionized the life sciences. While the cost of DNA sequencing is steadily decreasing, the amount of data generated with next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies is growing at an unprecedented pace. In the age of "Big Genomics Data", how to conveniently share the tremendous volume of data has become a significant research bottleneck. The 10 Gigabit Internet connection may provide a significant new tool for tackling "big data" and increasing scientific collaboration, education and cultural exchange between the two countries.

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The Daya Bay collaboration announced on July 20 that its scientists and engineers will complete the installation of the last two detectors for the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment before September 29. This means that all the eight detectors of this experiment are able to take data together in October.

Till now, six installed detectors have been running for eleven months and have greatly contributed to the first round experiment. Starting from July 28, maintenance and commissioning will last for two months, during which the two new detectors will also be installed.

The news came from the 21st Collaboration Meeting held in Shanghai Jiaotong University from July 15 to 20. The meeting lasted 6 days with 2 days of plenary and 4 days of parallel sessions.

At the meeting, issues concerning software data analysis, Muon detector, automatic and manual scale system, on-site operation and maintenance were discussed. The installation scheme for the last two detectors and the summer maintenance plans were discussed and fixed.

This Collaboration meeting attracted over 136 scientists and engineers from both domestic and international collaborating institutions.

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The country's first hybrid buses with solar panels were manufactured in the city of Qiqihar in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province on Wednesday. The buses were produced in a new industrial park belonging to Heilongjiang Qiqiar Longhua New Energy Automobile Co., Ltd.

Solar energy can prolong the life of the lithium batteries used to power the bus by 35 percent, with the buses consuming 0.6 to 0.7 kilowatt-hours of electricity per kilometer, according to company technicians. The solar photovoltaic-powered electric buses can accommodate a maximum 100 passengers.

The industrial park represents Heilongjiang's largest new energy project, built in 2010 with an investment of 2.1 billion yuan (329 million U.S. dollars).

The park is expected to aggregate automobile enterprises in the province so as to become an emerging new energy automobile production base in China

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China's largest oceanographic research center is under construction in Qingdao, East China's Shandong province, which marks the country's latest effort to become a leading force in maritime research.

Qingdao National Oceanographic Science and Technology Laboratory is expected to grow into a leading oceanographic research institution within 10 years, competing with the top-notch ones such as the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the United States, and the National Oceanographic Center of Britain.

Located in Qingdao Blue Silicon Valley Core Area, it covers an area of 42.67 hectares. Financed by the Ministry of Science and Technology, and the Shandong and Qingdao governments, it is a joint program launched by five universities and scientific research institutions in Qingdao, including the Ocean University of China.

Pan Kehou, director of the preparatory office for the National Oceanographic Science and Technology Laboratory, said the project will focus on six major research areas, such as marine environmental science and technology, and marine resource exploitation and protection.

"It will establish a total of 15 functional laboratories related to ocean and global climate change, marine biotechnology, marine pharmaceutical and biological products, marine mineral resources, coastal and offshore engineering and marine environmental protection," Pan told China Daily.

"Five major platforms for different scientific fields such as deep-sea research, large-instrument testing equipment, sample databases and eight engineering technological research centers for the comprehensive use of seawater, marine meters and instruments and anti-corrosive and anti-fouling are also planned," he added.

With an investment of 100 million yuan ($15.67 million), the laboratory will be developed in three phases.

The first phase including a building complex and a high-performance calculating and simulation platform have been finished and will come into use soon. The second phase will start in August this year. It consists of three public technological platforms and four engineering technological research centers.

The third phase, starting at the end of this year, will cover marine biotechnology, a public technical service platform, three engineering technological research centers, a marine and scientific museum, as well as facilities for working and academic exchanges and accommodation.

"The laboratory will attract outstanding scientists all over the world and serve as a platform for scientific and technological exchanges and training. We hope it will be one of the world's leading marine research institutions within 10 years," Pan said.

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Metal sulfide nanomaterials have been a hot topic in the fields of solar energy conversion, optical electronic devices, catalysis, etc. They will play a more important role in the utilization of solar energy and optical electronic integrated circuits (OEIC) if their structure is properly designed and their thin films can be controllably synthesized and assembled.

The research group headed by professor JIA Junhong at the State Key Laboratory of Solid Lubrication, Lanzhou Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (LICP), has controllably synthesized series of nanocrystalline metal sulfide (CuxS, CdS, In2S3 and Bi2S3) thin films on single-crystal silicon and FTO glass using chemical bath deposition (CBD) in combination with self-assembly technique.

Furthermore, they have prepared complete and ordered patterned thin films applying self-assembly and violet lithography, and investigated the influence of pattern characteristics on the optical and photoelectric properties of thin films and also revealed the formation and growth mechanism of sulfide thin films.

The results show that the thin films prepared through self-assembly can be used as an effective template to control the crystal orientation, crystal shape recognition, surface morphology of metal sulfide nanomaterials. The thin films possess stable photocurrent and sensitive photoelectric response properties.

The optical and photoelectric properties of thin films can be controlled by tuning the pattern size. These patterned functionalized thin films are expected to be applied in micro optical devices, sensors, solar energy cells, etc.

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A Chinese icebreaker completed the Arctic Northeast seaway late Thursday, marking the first such voyage by a Chinese vessel and opening an Arctic route connecting the Pacific and the Atlantic for future Chinese science expeditions.

In completing the voyage, the icebreaker Xuelong or Snow Dragon channeled through five marginal seas of the Arctic Ocean: the Chukchi Sea, the East Siberian Sea, the Laptev Sea, the Kaka Sea and the Barents Sea.

According to Yang Huigen, head of China's fifth Arctic expedition team, the unprecedented voyage enabled the team to conduct Arctic research on the Atlantic sector of the Arctic and also opened up a transportation ocean route linking Asia and Europe.

The expedition team is planning to undergo further research on the Norwegian Sea and the Greenland Sea, including releasing China's first observation buoy in the region to record the interaction process between the ocean and the atmosphere.

The Xuelong, an A-2 class icebreaker capable of breaking ice 1.2 meters thick, is estimated to cover 17,000 nautical miles (27,000 km) in 90 days before it returns to Shanghai on Sept. 29.

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Chinese physicists unveil a router that uses a quantum control signal to determine the path of a quantum data signal

Physicists have exploited the quantum nature of photons to transmit information for some time now. And in doing so they've discovered just how powerful quantum communication can be compared to the classical kind.

Instead of sending the 0s and 1s of digital code, quantum communicators can send information in a superposition of states that represent both 0s and 1s at the same time. What's more, separate quantum objects such as a pair of photons can be entangled, which means they share the same existence even if they are widely separated. That leads to a form of quantum information that has no classical counterpart.

Quantum information is the enabling factor behind a number of emerging technologies that many physicists expect to have a huge impact on society in future: powerful quantum computers, (almost) perfectly secure quantum cryptography and the quantum internet that will distribute these capabilities round the planet.

But there's a problem with this vision of the quantum future. At the moment, physicists can only send photons carrying quantum information over the length of a single optical fibre.

Guiding the photons into another fibre is a process called routing, which uses a control signal to determine the destination and route of a data signal. A classical router simply reads the data in the control signal and routes the data signal accordingly.

But in the quantum world, reading a control signal also destroys it. So it's only been possible to route quantum data signals using classical control signals. And although that's handy, it doesn't allow the routing process to exploit the full power of quantum information.

Today, Xiuying Chang and a few buddies at Tsinghau University in China announce that they have built and tested the first quantum router to use a quantum control signal to determine the route of a quantum data signal. "We...realize the first proof-of-principle demonstration of a genuine quantum router," they say.

In this new device, the information is encoded in the polarisation of photons, either horizontal or vertical. The Chinese group begin by creating a single photon that is in a superposition of both horizontal and vertical polarisation states.

They then convert this single photon into a pair of lower energy photons that are entangled, a process called parametric down conversion. Both of these photons are also in a superposition of polarisation states.

The router works by using the polarisation of one of these photons as the control signal to determine the route of the other, the data signal. The device is simple, little more than a collection of half mirrors for guiding photons and waveplates for rotating their polarisation.

First, let's follow the route of the data photon which is determined by a set of half mirrors that send it one way or the other, depending on its polarisation. The trick is to set up the router so that the polarisation of the control photon influences this route.

The Chinese group do this by rotating the polarisation of the control photon using half and quarter wave plates as the data photon reaches the half mirrors. The quantum phenomenon of entanglement then ensures that the data photon is routed accordingly. In effect, the router works like a logic gate.

Of course, the routing success is a probabilistic like all other quantum phenomena. Chang and co finish their experiment by verifying logic-gate like characteristics of the router and ensuring that both photons are still entangled after passing through it.

That's an interesting step forward but the new router has significant limitations. The most significant of these is that it can handle only one quantum bit or qubit at a time. And because the process of parametric down conversion cannot handle more qubits, it cannot be scaled to more qubits.

That's a significant drawback. It means that this is a proof-of-principle device but not one that will ever form the basis of a future quantum internet.

In a sense, it's a little like the first quantum computers which relied on nuclear magnetic resonance to manipulate the spins of the molecules in a tub of acetone. These performed trivial calculations using a handful of qubits but couldn't be scaled up to do anything interesting.

That's not to say that we'll never have scalable quantum routers. Various groups are working on different approaches that have the potential to scale. Progress is steady but slow. A quantum internet is coming. The problem is that nobody knows when.

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Recently, a fire drill was performed by researchers at Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (SIA), simulating fire scenes in high-rise buildings and around the city. During the exercise, the rotorcraft flying robot system for fire scene monitoring and emergency treatment developed by SIA realized precise positioning of ignition source and fire scene monitoring in complex environment.

The system demonstrates high maneuverability and sound operability, and can meet the demands of fire monitoring and emergency treatment of fire accidents in and around cities.

Based on in-depth survey of several serious fire accidents in China, researchers of SIA cooperated with Shanghai Fire Research Institute and Shenyang Fire Research Institute of Ministry of Public Security in developing the robot. Oriented to fire scenes in special environments, the robot possesses strong environmental adaptability, can carry infra-red sensor and visible light sensor, and is capable of sending back fire scene situation in real time, providing important analysis and decision making information for fire officers.

Through the external sensors of radar, laser and sonar it carried, and based on its own pose information and fire scene situation, the rotorcraft flying robot achieved precise positioning of ignition source under smoky environment in the infra-red images it sent back, calculating the longitude, latitude and altitude of the ignition source.

Meanwhile, the whole picture of the drill scene was delivered to exercise conductors through visible light and infra-red images, without any shielding angle.

Research on automatic identification and evasion technology of the rotorcraft flying robot were also included in the project, aiming at toxic gas and heat current in the fire scene, the system’s feasibility of fire extinguishment to the initial ignition source was also discussed.

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Is this China's answer to BigDog?

Not quite. This is FROG, or Four-legged Robot for Optimal Gait, a quadruped developed by Dr. Wei Wang's team at the Institute of Automation, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Beijing.

FROG is a research platform that Dr. Wang and his PhD students use to develop and test quadruped gait control, gait transition, and other locomotion algorithms. Unlike Boston Dynamics' BigDog, which can walk at a fast pace alongside humans, FROG is a slower-moving machine, a prototype for what Dr. Wang hopes will be the endoskeleton of a robotic triceratops.

"I hope it can find entertainment applications in dinosaur museums or expos," he tells me...

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