News on China's scientific and technological development.

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Tue Aug 2, 2016 7:04am EDT
China's 'mosquito factory' aims to wipe out Zika, other diseases

Every week, scientists in southern China release 3 million bacteria-infected mosquitoes on a 3 km (two-mile) long island in a bid to wipe out diseases such as dengue, yellow fever and Zika.

The scientists inject mosquito eggs with wolbachia bacteria in a laboratory, then release infected male mosquitoes on the island on the outskirts of the city of Guangzhou.

The bacteria, which occurs naturally in about 28 percent of wild mosquitoes, causes infected males to sterilize the females they mate with.

"The aim is trying to suppress the mosquito density below the threshold which can cause disease transmission," said Zhiyong Xi, who is director of the Sun Yat-sen University Centre of Vector Control for Tropical Diseases and pioneered the idea.

"There are hot spots," Xi said. "This technology can be used at the beginning to target the hot spots ... it will dramatically reduce disease transmission."

Mosquito-borne diseases are responsible for more than one million deaths worldwide every year and Zika has become a concern for athletes at this year's Olympic Games, which open in Rio de Janeiro on Friday.

Some athletes, including the top four ranked male golfers, have declined to take part.

An outbreak of the Zika virus in Brazil last year has spread through the Americas and beyond, with China confirming its first case in February.

U.S. health officials have concluded that Zika infections in pregnant women can cause microcephaly, a birth defect marked by small head size that can lead to severe developmental problems in babies.

The World Health Organization has said there is strong scientific consensus that Zika can also cause Guillain-Barre, a rare neurological syndrome that causes temporary paralysis in adults.

Sun Yat-sen's Xi said that several countries had expressed interest in his experiments, especially Brazil and Mexico.

In the laboratory, mosquito eggs are collected from breeding cages containing 5,000 females and 1,600 males and injected with the wolbachia bacteria. Xi's facility has the capacity to breed up to five million mosquitoes a week.

While a female mosquito that acquires wolbachia by mating is sterile, one that is infected by injection will produce wolbachia-infected offspring. Dengue, yellow fever and Zika are also suppressed in wolbachia-injected females, making it harder for the diseases to be transmitted to humans.

Xi set up his 3,500 square meter (38,000 sq ft) "mosquito factory" in 2012 and releases the males into two residential areas on the outskirts of Guangzhou.

Xi said the mosquito population on the island has been reduced by more than 90 percent.

One villager on the island, 66 year-old Liang Jintian, who has lived there for six decades, said the study was so effective he didn't have to sleep with a mosquito net any longer.

"We used to have a lot of mosquitoes in the past. Back then some people were worried that if mosquitoes were released here, we would get even more mosquitoes," he said. "We have a lot less mosquitoes now compared to the past."

(Reporting by Reuters TV; Writing by Clare Baldwin; Editing by Robert Birsel)

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Hendrik_2000 said:

Not too long ago we have heated discussion with ultra who bad mouth Chinese education system as rote learning,force fed,uncreative, can't think out of the box etc, etc

Well we have research now coming out and it show that Chinese student are ahead of their peer when it come to critical thinking. But squandered it once they reached University because they are guaranteed degree. And the emphasize of research on the teaching staff,this one I can believe

Study Finds Chinese Students Excel in Critical Thinking. Until College.
By

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JULY 30, 2016

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Great on point article. Aside from how good or not Chinese higher education is, there is the issue the world over of whether higher education is part of the grind that reduces people to mediocrity. Many people lead successful lives without going to college, dropping out of it, going straight to work or pursuing their pet projects while going to college which lead to their success rather than the college education or degree itself, a famous example being Bill Gates.

Parents, society, employers, and the kids themselves all need to be more open to other paths to success earlier in kids' lives and actually shape kids' lives that way on a case by case basis rather than railroading all of them to only pursue a formal higher education.

In layman terms, this is like removing "the brakes" on the T-cells.

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China Exclusive: Chinese scientists pioneer human genetic editing
Source: Xinhua 2016-08-02 15:48:17



CHENGDU, Aug. 2 (Xinhua) -- Chinese scientists will perform the world's first genetic editing trial on humans this month in an attempt to find a cure for lung cancer.

A group of oncologist at the West China Hospital of Sichuan University, Chengdu, will inject patients with cells that have been modified using the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technique.

CRISPR, short for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, was named "2015 Breakthrough of the Year" by U.S. journal Science. It allows scientists to selectively edit genome parts and replace them with new DNA stretches. Cas9 is an enzyme that can edit DNA, allowing the alteration of genetic patterns by genome modification. CRISPR is a collection of DNA sequences that direct Cas9 where to cut and paste.

Lu You, director of the hospital's thoracic oncology department and the leader of the trial, said his team was formed at the end of last year and the trial received ethical approval from the hospital's review board on July 6.

"We plan to select ten volunteers, all advanced lung cancer patients who have undergone chemotherapy, radiation therapy and other types of treatment. We received a lot of applications and are now busy screening and drawing up our final selection list," he said.

The editing therapy treatment periods will last from eight weeks to three months. The whole trial could last over a year, he said.

Doctors will extract T cells, a type of immune cell, from the patient's blood and then knock out the gene that encodes the PD-1 protein, which normally limits the cell's capacity to launch an immune response. The edited cells will be multiplied in the lab before being reintroduced to the patients. This process will hopefully kick start the T cells to launch an attack on the tumor cells.

"It is like building a cancer-fighting army outside the patient body," Lu said.

However, the T cells might also attack normal tissue, Lu said, this first phase of the trial aims to determine whether the approach is safe.

"The top priority is safety. We will closely monitor the patients," he said. "The clinical trial is just the beginning, there are a lot of uncertainties, which will require further research."

Lu believed that CRISPR-Cas9 technology has the potential to revolutionize the treatment of blood diseases, tumors and other genetic diseases.

The mortality rate of lung cancer patients is high.

"This is why we chose cancer patients for the initial trial. Should the approach prove safe, we will consider expanding our research," Lu said.

Working prototype of the straddling bus.



I love reading the negative comments on articles talking about this. I have the same questions but I don't have the pure hatred displayed by some commenters. Why do they care? If it fails, it isn't their failure. It's because they just don't want to see it work. I mentioned somewhere in this forum about how Americans overuse the saying, "This is why the terrorists hate us!" And this straddling bus especially if successful is why they hate China. Just like Obama thought he could stop China from making supercomputers believing the Chinese didn't have it in them to do it on their own. Same mentality. And of course it's misplaced to believe terrorists hate Americans because of what Americans have compared to what they don't have. That's what Americans want to believe. And which is why I can conclude that's why they're afraid of China. When one doesn't know another to understand how the other thinks, one looks up themselves to figure it out.

Quickie said:

In layman terms, this is like removing "the brakes" on the T-cells.

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China Exclusive: Chinese scientists pioneer human genetic editing
Source: Xinhua 2016-08-02 15:48:17

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Here is the original article about using CRISPR-Cas9 to delete PD-1 in T-cells.



As mentioned in the article, this strategy is potentially dangerous. Over-Activating T-cells is very dangerous as white blood cells kill both tumor cells and normal cells. Too many hyper-activated T-cells lead to hyper-inflammation, which is one of the leading causes of oncogenic mutations and tumor development. In fact, most serious diseases, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, dementia, etc. are linked to elevated inflammation. So it may not be a good thing to have so many T-cells without "brakes"...

Additionally, most tumor cells develop mechanisms to hide themselves from white blood cells. So it's likely that these hyper-active T-cells won't even see tumor cells. And they will attack normal cells like crazy... Not sure if this strategy would work... We will see...

Here's one from inside the bus:



Looks fairly spacious, any idea on when its suppose to come into commercial service?

Apparently there's been a significant increase in Chinese institutions whose WFCs have increased dramatically between 2012 and 2015. I'll just post the caveats about the Chinese institutes, but there's institutes from a number of countries.



Catch them if you can
Published online
27 July 2016
In institutions everywhere from super-cities to remote desert locations, researchers are setting the world of discovery on fire and pushing their institutions up the Nature Index rankings.
The performance of research strongholds like the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of Oxford have improved dramatically in the past few years.

As the research world's equivalent of Apple or Google, these well-established organizations have big budgets, some of the best brains and top-notch equipment.

So, what about the new kids on the block? As a database that tracks articles published in top-tier science journals, the Nature Index is well placed to identify the world's research rising stars.

The top 100 most improved institutions in the index between 2012 and 2015 are ranked by their contribution to 68 high-quality journals, a metric known as weighted fractional count (WFC). Here we profile 25 institutions. Some made the grade by improving most in their country, and others were highlighted for their meteoric rise up the index's global rankings.

China has so many institutions in the latter category, we could have produced a whole magazine about them.

Top 100 most improved

Countries are sized by the number of institutions in the top 100 institutions with the highest increase in their absolute contribution to the index, a metric known as weighted fractional count (WFC), between 2012 and 2015.

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China

2012 WFC: 56.04
2015 WFC: 108.47

Founded in 1900 during the Qing dynasty, Soochow University is named after its birthplace of Suzhou on China's east coast — 30 minutes from Shanghai via bullet train. The institution has strengthened key areas of research over the past decade, a strategy that has culminated in the doubling of its Nature Index score since 2012. “The university decided to use its limited resources to strengthen a few selected departments,” says Soochow materials science professor, Lee Shuit-Tong.

Research centres that focus on central government research priorities, such as nanotechnology, biomedicine and energy research, have boosted the university's published papers overall, while fuelling researchers' drive to produce higher quality research, says Lee.

“It was not until 2008 that the development of Soochow University drastically sped up,” says Lee, the founder of the institute of functional nano and soft materials (FUNSOM), which opened in 2008 with US$22 million from the university. FUNSOM contributes more than 40% of the university's peer-reviewed articles published in high-impact journals, with only 2% of the total staff. Lee and a colleague were recognized by Thomson Reuters in its 'Highly Cited Researchers' list of 2015. Their team is exploring how cellular imaging can be used in cancer therapy and in the development of green-energy devices. SO

Contd...

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China

2012 WFC: 35.55
2015 WFC: 83.90

East China Normal University (ECNU) evolved from a teacher training university to a multi-disciplinary institute and is fast gaining a reputation for its world-class research. Between 2012 and 2015, the university's contribution to articles in the index has more than doubled, lifting it more than 200 places in the Global 500 ranking to 142nd position in 2015.

The university prides itself on its international collaborations, and its most recent partnerships have led to fruitful research. In 2011, ECNU and New York University joined forces to establish China's first Sino-American university — New York University Shanghai (NYU Shanghai). A 2015 study by researchers at NYU Shanghai's Institute of Brain and Cognitive Science found physical evidence that the brain arranges words in a hierarchy using a form of 'internal grammar'. The findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, suggest the human mind can intuitively configure a string of words such as 'ancient history is drinking tea' into a structure that has meaning, such as 'drinking tea is ancient history'. SO

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China

2012 WFC: 49.22
2015 WFC: 92.47

Hunan University is one of China's oldest and can trace its roots back to the year 976 CE. The campus sits on the Xiang River in Changsha, the capital city of the province of Hunan.

The university has almost doubled its contribution to the index between 2012 and 2015, a rise attributed to its recruitment of top-level researchers, according to Weihong Tan, a professor of chemistry and biomedical engineering. In 2013, Hunan established the Institute of Chemical Biology and Nanomedicine under the direction of leading US scientists, Chad Mirkin from Northwestern University and David Walt from Tufts University.

Tan's team are focusing on research in biomedicine, which he hopes will lead to new industries for the province. SO

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China

2012 WFC: 44.88
2015 WFC: 83.22

Sichuan University's position in the Nature Index has soared in recent years, climbing from 278th place in the Global 500 institutions ranking in 2012 to 145th in 2015. New facilities, well-funded salary start-up packages and accessible research grants have attracted eager young researchers to the university in Chengdu in southwest China. Fifty international researchers have been recruited in the past two years to the university's National Key Laboratory of Biotherapy, which opened in 2005. The multidisciplinary research centre enables discovery and development of innovative drug candidates.

“Basic research, preclinical development, translational and clinical medicine are seamlessly integrated,” says Wei Yuquan, who is director of the laboratory as well as the university's vice president.

He says: “We want to bring disciplines together to try to solve the major problems in medicine, science and technology.” SO

China's domination

The upward trajectory of many of China’s less well-known research universities is reflected in the WFC growth of four Chinese universities in the top 100.

Chemistry champs

Chemistry output was a significant driver of the performance for several research institutions in the top 100 most improved institutions in the index.

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China

2012 WFC: 30.27
2015 WFC: 50.78

In the past four years, Xi'an Jiaotong University, in the ancient former capital city of Xi'an in central China, increased its high-quality natural science in all subject areas, but most dramatically in chemistry and the physical sciences.

The university is home to the State Key Laboratory for Mechanical Behavior of Materials. State key laboratories are centrally-funded institutions that are designed to funnel resources to government priority areas. Materials science and its industrial applications are considered key to China's economic development.

The team at Xi'an Jiaotong are exploring ways in which materials behave at the nano scale. They recently developed a nanospring that can efficiently store and release mechanical energy, a component that could be useful in more complex nanomechanical systems.

Four years ago, Xi'an Jiaotong established a multidisciplinary research institute called the Frontier Institute of Science and Technology (FIST) which now has 11 centres focusing on life sciences, medicine and mathematics, and has recruited 40 international scientists. Among them are Timothy Bliss and Graham Collingridge from the UK, who in March 2016 were awarded the European 'brain prize' for their work on memory mechanisms. SO

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China

2012 WFC: 19.30
2015 WFC: 39.73

In the capital of the far northern province of Heilongjiang, the Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT) is synonymous with research supporting the country's space science programme. China's goals include establishing a space station, sending astronauts to Mars, and industrializing rocket technology to more efficiently transport vessels into space.

Over the past decade, Harbin's researchers have worked on China's Shenzhou spacecraft programme, including its first manned spacecraft, Shenzhou 5, and more recently, a satellite for emergency data monitoring and imaging, Kuaizhou-1, which was launched in 2013.

The university, established in 1920, is a member of China's elite C9 alliance — nine institutes in China that receive 10% of the country's research and development funding, and are relied on by the central government to produce world-class results.

HIT has experienced rapid growth in the index, doubling its contribution to top journals in four years and moving up 208 places in the Global 500 to reach 304th position in 2015. SO

Well, shouldn't that "bus" be more of a train? It seems to run on some sort of rail.

newguy02 said:

Here's one from inside the bus:

Looks fairly spacious, any idea on when its suppose to come into commercial service?

Click to expand...

Oh, goodness! It's so free and nice! It's like a bus station that's actually a bus! Wonder what it looks like with 500 Chinese people inside LOLOL