News on China's scientific and technological development.

Equation said:

Hmmm...can that same technology be use on the future H-X or J-X 6th generation fighter or fighter bomber canopy?

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A typical window for a house on Earth has 2 panes of glass, each about 1/16 inch thick. In contrast, the ISS windows each have 4 panes of glass ranging from 1/2 to 1-1/4 inches thick. An exterior aluminum shutter provides extra protection when the windows are not in use.

The glass in these windows is subject to strict quality control, because even minute flaws would increase the chance that a micro-meteoroid could cause a fracture.

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The windows on the Space Shuttle were each composed of three panes. The inner pane was tempered alumino-silicate. Its primary objective was providing strength to maintain the pressurized environment of the spacecraft. The outer panes were fused silica capable of withstanding extreme heating - up to 1200 degrees Celsius for short periods. The middle pane was also fused silica and provided redundancy for both heat and pressure tolerance.

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Quickie said:

About this time is probably the correct time. During the time of the drug discovery and, after that, around the time of the cold war and during the beginning of the opening of the Chinese economy , it was politically incorrect to award someone from a country on the other side of the political divide. So what the awarding committee did was to delay and postpone it for as long as possible until this time.

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AssassinsMace said:

I believe the science end of Nobel prizes are given out by Sweden but since China and Norway are not on good terms, the timing aspects makes it also seem political.

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Can the World’s Smallest Nano-thermometer be Used to Diagnose Cancer Early? Chinese Team Sees Ray of Hope in New Breakthrough

Small semiconducting nanocrystals called ‘quantum dots’ can produce a spectrum of colours depending on their size to read the temperature of individual cells.

Chinese scientists claim to have developed the world’s smallest thermometer, which is capable of measuring the temperature of individual cells and gauging their health.

Some believe the technological breakthrough will later find important applications in cancer therapy.

Each instrument is made of tiny particles only a few nanometers in diameter. The minuscule particles contain light-emitting materials that makes it easy for them to enter a living cell.

As the cell’s temperature rises, the particles produce increasingly stronger light - producing a visual effect akin to glowing fish swimming in a lake at night, but on a dramatically smaller scale.

"This will help our fight against cancer," said Dr Han Rongcheng, a lead scientist of the research project. Han works with the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology in Beijing.

Scientists have long been aware that tumour cells can be killed by very high temperatures, but the clinical use of thermal therapy has been extremely limited due to the collateral damage on healthy cells.

In order to perform such treatments safely, doctors must be incredibly careful so that they apply the right dosage to kill the cancerous cells without harming the healthy ones.

This means they would need to know the precise change in temperature of each targeted cell, as well as those around it.

But such technology has not been at their disposal, which makes the latest breakthrough so full of promise.

"With the help of nano-thermometers, physicians may one day give patients the perfect dose that can wipe out all the bad cells without hurting the healthy tissue," Han said.

A nanothermometer takes a temperature reading inside a cell.

Many tumour cells have unusually high internal temperatures, so the new technology might also help with their early diagnosis, he added.

If you place a thermometer containing mercury inside a patient’s armpit, its colour will not change. But if the device is shrunk to a billionth of the size and viewed through an infrared laser microscope, quantum physics kick in and convert the electric or thermal energy into light.

Moreover, the smaller the particle, the brighter the glare due to the stronger effect of the quantum mechanics at work.

These particles are usually made of semiconductors like selenium. In the 1980s, American physicist Mark Reed coined the term “quantum dots” to describe them.

The advantages of these quantum dots have attracted much research interest and spurred a race to exploit their use in many sectors in recent years, from medical science to television screens.

But Han’s team say they have now moved one step ahead of their competition.

The Chinese team was not the first to check the temperatures of cells using such “quantum dot thermometers”. Similar prototypes have been developed by other teams. But previous experiments and devices have been hindered by serious roadblocks.

The biggest problem was distortion caused by the cell itself. For example, biochemical elements in the cell, such as its pH level or ionic strength, could affect the level of brightness, making the temperature readings unreliable.

In their paper, which was published in the journal Scientific Reports last week, Han and his colleagues said they had solved the problem of environmental distortion for the first time by blanketing the quantum dots in a thin protective membrane.

"This is like the layer of glass that covers a mercury metre," Han said in a telephone interview with the South China Morning Post.

"The layer separates the light-emitting materials from external elements, while also allowing light to pass through."

The researchers encountered many challenges along the way, one of which was finding the most suitable materials to use in their experiments. It took them over five years to fabricate the nano particles in the way they wanted, they said.

However, some problems still need to be solved before the technology can be used on patients, Han said.

The team is still in the process of calibrating the device’s readings so it can be converted into traditional forms of measurement, a job somewhat akin to converting degrees Celsius into Fahrenheit, they said. (South China Morning Post)

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vesicles said:

There is nothing political about this award. Although the Nobel foundation is located in Sweden, it is not affiliated with the govnt. It is a private organization. So its decision is not influenced by the govnt. Additionally, it's not any one person who decides the awardee. There is a Nobel committee composed of an international consortium of experts. And nomination is done by an even larger group of experts from around the world, very few of which are Swedish. So it is highly unlikely that their decision would be influenced by the Sweden govnt.

Now, I know you guys will bring up the peace and literature prizes. These categories are political in nature. So it's only natural that they are influenced by the political environment. The hard core catagories, like physics, chemistry and physiology/medicine, tend to highly objective, largely because scientists tend to be apolitical to begin with.

Also, this has a lot to do with how the scientific community is structured. Unlikely the business world, where political influence is key for big operations, scientists do not interact with politicians in general. Most of the funding sources come from govnt grants, which are always evaluated in a completely anonymous peer review process by other scientists in the field. The funding decision is made by funding agencies based on the score given by anonymous peer experts. Thus, you usually get a very honest and sometimes even cruel evaluation of your work, no matter who you are. Even if you are already a Nobel laureate, you will still get brutally honest opinions. There is no pressure coming from anyone! let alone the politicians. And there is no need to cave to the politicians or any political influence.

Any interaction involving people will involve politics. So there is absolutely politics involved. However, these types of politics is mostly personal in nature. For instance, I can give some big shot in the field a nice review on a crappy grant application, hoping that he will know that I did him a favor and he will someday return the favor. This is the highest level of politics that would be played out in the scientific community. Certainly no international politics involved.

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The Chinese drug artemisinin has been hailed as one of the greatest advances in fighting

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, the scourge of the tropics, since the discovery of quinine centuries ago.

Artemisinin’s discovery is being talked about as a candidate for a

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in Medicine. Millions of American taxpayer dollars are spent on it for Africa every year.

But few people realize that in one of the paradoxes of history, the drug was discovered thanks to

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, who was acting to help the North Vietnamese in their jungle war against the Americans.

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t2contra said:

It is a relief to know that the patent did not fall into the hands of big drug companies. I saw the documentary of the discovery on either DC or NG more than a decade ago. Everything about the people involved was nondescript: wearing Mao suits, in black and white fuzzy pictures, without modern labs, Chinese manuscripts handwritten the vertical way unlike the snazzy Western printed text. It all looked so unscientific, only empirical. But in the end, it was awe-inspiring in an unforgettable way.

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It all looked so unscientific, only empirical.

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t2contra said:

Drug vs disease is like warfare. The documentary explained that the reason the usual medicine was not working was that the virus could detect the presence of the antibiotic and therefore it activated its own defense.

Arteminisin works like stealth, the virus is remotely decimated before it has a chance to activate its own counter-measures.

I am curious as to how malaria is developing resistance to it in some places of the world.

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......The high overall treatment efficacy seen in patients treated with artesunate indicates that relatively few parasite isolates have crossed the threshold of artemisinin resistance as defined in our study. Artemisinin resistance does not seem to be a widespread epidemiologic phenomenon at this time. The prolonged parasite-clearance times and the two cases meeting our definition of artesunate resistance are nonetheless a concern.

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Quickie said:

About this time is probably the correct time. During the time of the drug discovery and, after that, around the time of the cold war and during the beginning of the opening of the Chinese economy , it was politically incorrect to award someone from a country on the other side of the political divide. So what the awarding committee did was to delay and postpone it for as long as possible until this time.

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plawolf said:

Russia had plenty of Nobel Prize winners, even during the height of the cold war.

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